Martian Vision

Dumb and dumber

2011-08-02T17:27:00.001-07:00

The worst superhero comics that have ever been written appeared in the mid 1960s. They were published by Archie Comics, and featured characters called the Mighty Crusaders, and they were written by the co-creator of the entire superhero genre, Jerry Siegel.

If you don’t believe me, read this.

I know all this because my one time roommate and best buddy in the world The Late Great Jeff Webb conceived of an unhealthy fascination with these wretched periodicals back in the early 80s when he chanced upon a whole bunch of them in a cheap quarter bin at the local comics shop we all frequented at the time. This gave me the opportunity to read many of these Siegel authored stories, which in turn gave me the opportunity to scream in horrified disbelief and run gibbering up and down the hallway of the house we were all living in at the time until one of our other housemates hit me over the head with a half full two liter bottle of Jolt soda, stunning me long enough to allow me to once more regain my composure.

I’m serious about this. Yes, yes, Marvel and DC have published their share of truly idiotic comics, many of which were written by Gerry “Hackmeister Supreme” Conway, and, well, if you’re looking for a jaw droppingly moronic story so brainless it makes the average issue of MARVEL TEAM UP look like it was penned by Faulkner, you need look no further than THE DEATH OF SUPERMAN. But even with all these absolute suckapaloozas factored in, still, the Jerry Siegel authored Mighty Comics stories featuring the various members of the Mighty Crusaders, all together or in their own separate features, are really in an entirely separate quadrant of the Brain Damaged Galaxy.

Don’t believe me? Here are two random examples of sheer story stupidity inscribed in my memory no matter how desperately I try to forget them (and I apologize; I’ve gone up one side and down the other of the Internet looking for scans of these pages, or, really, any pages, of Siegel Mighty Comics dumbness, and apparently, nobody has ever bothered to post any of this stuff anywhere. I’d do it myself, but I never owned these comics, and I have no idea what happened to Jeff’s after he passed away back in 1993):

In one particularly unfortunate Fly-Man story, Siegel starts out by having a strange alien meteor enter Earth’s atmosphere, or become visible in Earth’s sky, or something like that. What does this meteor do? Why, it robs insects of their powers! (Holster those irons, pards; I don’t make the news, I just report it.) To demonstrate this we get several panels showing a bumblebee that is unable to fly, a grasshopper that has lost its ability to make mighty leaps, and an ant that is no longer capable of toting around bread crumbs that are ten or twenty times its own mass. (Stop hitting your head on the wall. You’re just chipping up the paint and the story will remain as idiotic as ever regardless. Trust in the word of One Who Knows.) Naturally, this causes Fly-Man to lose all his insect powers, and… and… okay, I’ll wait for you to stop screaming…

There. Better now? The second example I can immediately think of, of just how wretchedly fetid Siegel’s scripting for Mighty Comics was – there was this story where some villain or other… the Hangman, maybe, or the Wizard, or perhaps even the arch Mighty Comics villain himself, the Spider – had trapped all the Mighty Crusaders inside this nuclear furnace. There was no way for them to escape and they were all going to die in the next few minutes when… something happened, I don’t know, the furnace heat got turned up or the protective lead box they were in finally melted or the furnace itself blew up in an atomic explosion (villains were always trapping heroes in deathtraps that were going to blow up in an atomic explosion in Siegel Mighty Comics strips, as I recall). So the Shield, who is this big strong invulnerable guy in a bulletproof costume, pipes up and says something like “Say, I’ve never mentioned this before, but I happen to have the power to teleport us all to safety. Now, I can only do it once, and I’ll never be able to do it again, so after I do it we must never speak of it.” And he does. And they never do.

And, yes, I did say the Shield was this big strong invulnerable guy wearing a bulletproof costume, and no, I don’t know why an invulnerable character ran around in a bulletproof costume, although I will say that, if a strange alien meteor had entered Earth’s atmosphere that happened to have the effect of robbing all medieval weaponry and martial equipment of its powers, well, the Shield would still be somewhat protected by his bulletproof outfit, presumably, and in the Siegel authored Mighty Comics universe, you obviously couldn’t rule shit like that out, ever, so wearing it was probably a canny precaution on his part.

Until this very day I have always believed that these Siegel authored Mighty Crusaders stories were inarguably and objectively the absolute worst superhero stories that had ever been published in comics form, that, in fact, like SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE, they simply could not under any circumstances ever be equaled much less surpassed for sheer mindboggling brainbending sanity tottering stupidity by anything that ever has or ever could be produced in their own particular fictional subgenre and communications medium, from the dawn of time unto the end of eternity, amen.

I mean, yeah, I knew that DC and Marvel had put out a lot of really stupid comics in the early Silver Age. AVENGERS #2, featuring the Space Phantom, is without a doubt one of the goddam dumbest comics stories ever put on paper, and nearly every Superman Family story ever published under Mort Weisinger’s editorial direction is senseless to the point of mental retardation. But there’s a surreal, almost iconic, and certainly grander than life absurdity to the Weisinger stuff that makes it very enjoyable to me, so Jimmy Olsen becoming a 200 foot tall turtle just didn’t bug me that much, and, well, AVENGERS #2, and pretty much every subsequent Space Phantom story ever done, I just try to close my eyes and stagger blindly past whenever necessary. (The Space Phantom is such a prancing cerebral hemorrhage of a character that he defies the capacities of even the most brilliant comics writers to ever do anything even remotely sensible with; even “Stainless” Steve Englehart, arguably the finest superhero comics writer ever to put fingers to typewriter, merely used the buffoon to erase the knowledge of Captain America’s foolishly revealed secret identity from the minds of every man, woman, and child on Earth – and why? So Cap’s mind would ‘be at peace’ when the Grim Reaper transplanted the Vision’s brain into Captain America’s body… and if that makes any sense to you at all, I suggest you go to the emergency room right now because you almost certainly have a concussion or a very high fever or both.)

But, still, even with all that, and everything ever mis-written by Gerry Conway thrown into the mix, I nonetheless maintained my fervent belief that the Siegel authored Mighty Comics stories were the absolute nadir of superhero comics, and that DC and Marvel, wretched though some of their Silver Age output undeniably was, had never sunk to any depth even remotely as abysmal as those that were routinely plumbed by a no doubt near constantly drunken Siegel in his Mighty Comics gig.

But, well, I was wrong, as I learned today, when going through SHOWCASE PRESENTS THE JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA VOLUME TWO, and reading, for the first time, the mind shreddingly godawful stupidity incarnate that is JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #19 – “The Super Exiles of Earth!”

Follow, if you dare:

We open with a splash page showing the entire Justice League – at this time (from left to right on the page) Aquaman, Wonder Woman, Batman, Martian Manhunter, Superman, Green Arrow, the Flash, and Green Lantern – all looking very sad, as they stand disconsolately around a globe of the Earth with the Atom sitting on top of it, in an equally gloomy posture. “This is all we’ll see of Earth from now on,” Green Lantern solemnly advises us, “since we have been exiled into space forever!”

How did something so dreadful happen? Well, we turn the page and discover that, apparently, Ray Palmer, while staring into a microscope, happens to see – the Atom! This is rather bizarre, because Ray Palmer actually IS the Atom, but that doesn’t seem to matter, because the Atom promptly zips up to his more proper action figuresque height of three inches and pummels the rather startled Mr. Palmer into unconsciousness.

After this, Superman shows up at Clark Kent’s door, proclaims that he, himself, is ‘really a Super-Superman, and to prove my point, here’s my convincer!’, after which, he lobs a chunk of Green Kryptonite at ol’ Clarkie. Clark, as he is wont to do in such circumstances, pisses his pants and falls to the floor near unconscious, wondering as he does “but why wasn’t my twin weakened too?” (Gee, I don’t know, Clark. Maybe he was a Superman robot, or maybe he was a shapeshifting alien from another galaxy, or maybe he was actually Batman in disguise playing a cruel practical joke on you, or maybe he’s an evil Superman from another dimension where Green Kryptonite doesn’t weaken, but actually gives him additional superpowers – any of which are perfectly plausible explanations, given that all of them are things that Superman routinely encountered during the Silver Age. Or maybe he’s something else entirely, but anyway, the one thing we know for certain and there ain’t no maybe about at all, Mr. Kent, is, you’re still a great big doofus, you great big doofus.)

So then Hal Jordan gets beat down by Green Lantern, except this is a Super-Green Lantern who has no weakness for yellow. Barry Allen gets punked by a Super-Flash who is even faster than he is. Wonder Woman gets kicked around by a Super-Wonder Woman who makes her look like a shabby generic. The Martian Manhunter gets humiliated by a Super Martian Manhunter who is not afraid of fire, and Green Arrow gets outdrawn and outshot by a Super Green Arrow who, you know, can actually shoot a bow well, or something, I don’t know. Aquaman gets lured into a maelstrom that he can’t swim out of by a Super Aquaman, who promptly adds insult to injury by easily swimming out of said inescapable maelstrom while heaping scorn on his haplessly trapped twin. And Batman gets punched in the jaw by his own Super Bat-Twin, proving that this Super Bat-Twin is ‘far superior’, because, you know, prior to this, nobody in the history of humanity had ever managed to sock Batman one in the snoot. Yep. Suuuuuuuure.

And then, with the real JLA all hammered into unconsciousness or trapped in whirlpools or just too friggin’ embarrassed to show their capes or cowls in public, this Super JLA goes on a crime rampage, beating up little old ladies and robbing museums and raping squirrels from one end of the U.S.A. to the other. (Okay, actually, as with any early Silver Age villains at the DC Universe, all this evil JLA does is commit crimes against property. In the DC Universe at this time, villains hardly ever assaulted helpless bystanders, murders were rarely or never committed outside Batman’s comics, and rape certainly didn’t exist, because, well, sex didn’t exist.)

In response to this bizarre outlaw rampage by the apparently round the bend JLA, coppers move to arrest the real JLA members (because, you know, if Superman, the Flash, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, Batman, the Martian Manhunter, and Aquaman went bonkers and started stealing shit from coast to coast, you just know the authorities would send flatfoots with nightsticks out to bring ‘em in, yes, indeedy). The real JLA surrenders without incident, and Jean Loring gets the job representing them in court, because she’s the only person in the entire DC Universe who has a law degree and has passed the bar, so she gets all the superhero business. (For something like thirty years, Matt Murdock, with occasional help from his partner Foggy Nelson, occupied a similarly opportunistic position in the Marvel Universe.)

Now, the judge has to be a Republican, because it never seems to occur to him to wonder, if the JLA has gone bananas and is robbing everybody in sight, why in the world did they just let us slap handcuffs on them and come meekly to court? Couldn’t they, you know, reduce the entire assembled police forces of the globe to powder in half a second, if they wanted to, and wouldn’t they, if they’d really gone rotten, as we presume they must have, since we’re arresting them? But, nooooooo, examining the internal fallacies of one’s deeply held preconceptions not being a conservative strong suit, this judge happily accepts Jean Loring’s suggestion that the JLA be exiled from Earth forever, because, as he notes, “What jail could hold them – if they decide to escape?” So he orders the exile, with the JLA members ‘forbidden to return unless and until their innocence is proved to the satisfaction of the court’.

Which… now, wait, let me look at that cover… is this actually an issue of the Justice League of the U.S.S.R.? The JLA has to prove their innocence? Isn’t this in complete violation of the bedrock principle of American jurisprudence? Well, never mind, we’re movin’ on again. Superman builds this great big spaceship and they all get aboard and go rocketing off to the end of the universe.

Leaving behind the evil JLA, who all promptly gloat “Now we can rob and steal without interference from our counterparts!” (And beat up orphans! And put ground up dolphin in all the canned tuna! And boy is that bitch Jean Loring getting a cornholing tonight! And that dickweed Lex Luthor better not show his face anywhere in Metropolis or man oh man is HE getting a surprise…!)

Meanwhile, off in a jail cell, some dork-and-a-half is gloating “So far my plan’s working like a charm!”

Wait a minute. This is somebody’s plan? Somebody who’s in jail? What the FUCK?

Oh, but it’s that numbnuts Dr. Destiny. Let’s let him explain it –

“With the help of a confederate, I managed to get a letter mailed to the JLA’s post office box. When they opened it in their headquarters, the action of the air on the chemically treated ink produced an invisible gas that caused them to dream that night!”

It’s… I… but… okay, wait a minute… you’re in JAIL, dude… how are you getting chemically treated ink that produces invisible gas that causes anyone to do anything, much less, dream, which is, you know, a retarded thing to create chemically treated ink that produces invisible gas to do?

“As the gas forced the JLA to dream about themselves as super-superheroes, my Materiopticon – which I was able to build in the prison workshop where I was sent for good behavior – transformed those dream images into living beings!”

Okay, couple of points here.

First, as Bill Maher might say, NEW RULE – evil assholes who have created mind boggling magical or technological devices at any point in the past with which they have attempted to rule the world never, never, never get sent to the prison workshop. NEVER. If they behave themselves they can have ice cream and maybe get to watch some reality TV once in a while, but they DO NOT GET SENT TO THE PRISON WORKSHOP UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES WHATSOEVER. Got it?

Second, okay, so you’ve got chemically treated ink that makes people dream of whatever it is you want them to dream of and you’ve got some fucked over device that makes these dreams into actual living breathing solid three dimensional reality.

So, like, why not make yourself dream of, I dunno, Raquel Welch and Grace Kelly and a young Liz Taylor in the buff, all of whom have super powers, and who, after boffing your brains out for hours on end, will then kick a gaping hole in the wall of your prison cell and fly you off to your secret Destiny Cave, after which, they will resume boffing your brains out for as long as you want them to? And than make those particular dreams real? Why bother with the goddam Super-JLA at all?

But I’m interrupting. Sorry. Let’s get back to Dr. Destiny’s narration: “Naturally, since I am wicked – I caused those dream materializations also to become wicked! In the beginning they were not wicked enough so they did not succeed in destroying the Justice League – merely knocked them out or trapped them! I had intended for those dream powered Justice League members to get rid of the real ones! But perhaps exile from earth will do just as well. Wait – knowing the Justice League, I’ll bet they have a trick up their sleeve!”

It… I… well, so, they weren’t wicked enough, to… um… whose sleeve is the trick up, now? Because Wonder Woman doesn’t even have sleeves, and… you know, I’m still thinking, if you’re going to make dream materializations wicked, naked, horny mind controlled Liz Taylor, Grace Kelly, and Raquel Welch with super powers are waaaaay more fun than dumb ass super- superheroes. I’m just sayin’, is all.

Oh, wait, he’s still ranting: “I wouldn’t put it past them to return to Earth and attack the Dream JLA! But it’ll do them no good! My super Super League – who will grow more wicked every day – will destroy them! And the beauty of the entire scheme is that no one can possibly suspect that I am the mastermind behind all this!”

Mastermind. Right. Hm. Let me go over this – he’s got a thingie that makes dreams real, and some chemicals that make people dream about whatever he wants, and a confederate willing to mail things off to anyone he wants, and still, here he is, sitting in his jail cell, reading the newspaper, while the materialized dreams he’s created run amok stealing everything that isn’t nailed down all over the planet.

Yep. Sure. He’s a mastermind all right.

Now, okay, I know what you’re thinking. Yeah, yeah, this is pretty stupid shit, but, still, it ain’t no alien meteor that robs insects of their powers stupid. It ain’t, like, a mesomorph in a bulletproof suit suddenly announcing he has the ability to mass teleport his entire team to safety… once… and never again. It’s not THAT stupid.

But, wait… there’s more –

So, off at the ass end of the universe, the JLA suddenly decides they can return to Earth and clear themselves without violating the judge’s order by doing it -- in their secret identities! Okay, with thinking like that, where one obeys the letter by utterly annihilating the spirit of the law, it would seem the entire JLA is Republican, too, but what the hell. So they all change into their secret IDs (except for poor Aquaman, who doesn’t have one, and will have to stay on the ship, but who cares, he’s a big dork anyway), which is a big deal, because prior to this, the only JLA members who knew each other’s secret IDs were Superman and Batman. So they’re all like “oh, wow, you’re this nobody I never heard of, isn’t that cool” (Barry Allen takes the cake here when he tells Diana Prince “Obviously, you’re Wonder Woman!” heh… what was your first hint, there, Barry, the gigantic hooters?)

Anyway, Green Lantern whips up an invisible space ship and all the secret IDs return to Earth, where they divide up into teams and attack various different groupings of their super super doppelgangers. And, naturally, they all get their asses kicked AGAIN (“Get her? That was your whole plan? Get her?”) after which the Dream JLA explains that they are only dream manifestations and are about to finish off our heroes (“our wickedness has grown by leaps and bounds! This will be a pleasure!”) when Ray Palmer points out that the Dream JLA is, you know, only a dream of the real JLA, and if they kill the real JLA, they themselves will cease to exist. Which the Dream JLA has to admit is a bummer, and more than that, will put a crimp in their plans to dump a whole load of fizzies into the swim meet and deliver the medical school cadavers to the alumni dinner. So they relent and Super Green Lantern whips up this emerald box that they put the real JLA in and then bury it a mile beneath the ground. (Because, you know, it’s not like three quarters of the JLA won’t die of thirst or oxygen deprivation within hours or days if they do that, or anything.)

So the real JLA all combine their willpower on GL’s ring and get the energy bubble to rise back to the surface again, and then Wonder Woman muses on a past case where her muscles and nerves wouldn’t obey her mental commands, and then Ray Palmer speaks up:

“I have an idea! Diana, you’ve studied medicine on Paradise Island, and I’m a scientist. Now, listen closely… I could shrink myself so small as to be invisible while John Jones blows me toward our Secret Sanctuary where are other selves have gone! Becoming microscopic in size, I could enter our dream selves’ brains undetected and unfelt – and perform delicate “operations”!”

It… I… erm… nyargl… bleagh… hyrrrrngggg… okay, my brain just tried to sneak out the back of my head with a suitcase in one hand and a bus ticket to Tijuana in the other, but I’ve wrestled it to the ground and am sitting on its chest, so let us continue:

Following the above utterly deranged speech, there is an Editor’s Note: “What Ray Palmer has suggested is entirely possible! Modern medical techniques can perform amazing brain “surgery” by applying electrical stimulation to many parts of the brain!

“Wait,” my brain whimpers from the floor where I have it firmly pinned, “even assuming the Atom can get into the ‘brains’ of a bunch of materialized dreams and start performing ‘operations’, what the fuck does ‘applying electrical stimulation to many parts of the brain’ have to do with anything? He’s not Electro! Or the Eel! Or Lightning Lad! What the fuck! What the fuck! What the fuck!!!!”

Shut up. It gets worse. (Noooooooooooooo…) Yes, it does. Because, on the next page, all the real JLAers, still in their civilian guises, are running into the Secret Sanctuary. Did Ray operate? Or was he captured again? They’ll know in a minute, when their super-selves spot them…!

So then we get this panel where, well, let’s quote The Man himself:

“The dream beings try to rise and fight but Ray Palmer has succeeded only too well…”

Because Wonder Woman is doing ballet and Batman is flailing around on the conference table and Green Lantern is on his back kicking his chair into the air and the Martian Manhunter is standing on his head and, you know, pretty much everyone in the Dream JLA are completely spazzing out. Mission accomplished, Ray, you brain surgeon to the superhero set, you!

So the JLA turns their Super Super Dream Selves in to the authorities, clearing their names, and then they get Aquaman back off the intergalactic spaceship, and examine this famous letter that Dr. Destiny sent to them with the chemically treated dream ink, which lets them figure out who sent it (I guess Dr. Destiny’s confederate was considerate enough to put Dr. Destiny’s return address on it, or something) so the JLA shows up at prison and takes his Materiopticon away and puts him in solitary where he’ll never be able to make another one, ever again.

But there’s still one more bit of monumental stupidity we have to make our way through before we’re finished with this –

In the last two panels, Superman advises “Since a worldwide knowledge of our civilian identities may expose those dear to us to danger – I’d better do something about it! I’ll go now and get some AMNESIUM from my Fortress of Solitude and with it make us and the whole world forget everything it learned about our secret identities on this case!”

To which the rest of the JLA responds: “SO SAY WE ALL!”

Although none of them will ever remember doing so.

And God, I wish I couldn’t, either.

Now, if truth be told, I’m not sure that even all of that brain staggering stupidity really adds up to something as stupid as the kind of ultra-stupid shit Jerry Siegel routinely tried to run by his audience while writing for Mighty Comics, but certainly, it’s in the same ballpark. And I cannot tell you how sad it makes me, to know that Gardner Fox actually wrote stuff in the Silver Age JLA that was stupid enough to palpably compete with the rampant stupidity evinced by every single character in nearly every single panel of every single script ever turned in to Mighty Comics by Jerry Siegel. I mean, heretofore, I had considered Jerry Siegel’s Mighty Comics work to be something like the cinematic ouvre of Ed Wood, never to equaled much less surpassed by any other entry into its genre or medium, but, now, I find that not only is there another comics story out there very nearly its equal in sheer blinding brainlessness, but, for the love of sweet baby Jebus, it was written by Gardner Fox and – and—it’s a Silver Age JLA story!!!!

I mean, seriously. Say it ain’t so, Joe.

Any Joe will do.

Christmas

2010-12-04T17:00:00.000-08:00

DISCLAIMER

2006-08-10T09:06:00.000-07:00

Nearly all of the following articles were written years and years and years ago. That's why all the contemporary references in them are horribly outdated. Assuming there's any value to them anyway... which is a large assumption, but, clearly, given the work I'm putting into reposting them, one I'm willing to make... then that shouldn't matter, and contemporary readers should still be able to find enjoyment in their perusal. Okay?

SLAYER'S HANDBOOK, 2nd EDITION (part I)

2006-07-30T10:42:00.000-07:00

The Metaphysics of Buffy-Earth (Expanded)
Part 1. Data

By "John Jones, the Manhunter from Marathon, IL"

IRL: http://www.angelfire.com/ny3/docnebula/index.html

"The four points of the compass be knowledge, wisdom, truth, and the unknown."
YAMA DHARMA, God of Death and Destruction

FOREWORD

My original intention was to keep things simple.

I'd expected that I could, with little fuss or muss, simply go through the first version of this article, written around seven months ago, posted on the Internet by my good friend and fine human being Steve Tice around that time, and apparently read by nearly three or four people since then, and, when the spirit moved me, write annotated Updates and Expansions to what I'd put here previously, based on the fact that in the past seven months, I've seen not only the 44 new episodes of BUFFY and ANGEL presented as the fifth and second seasons of each show, respectively, but on the fact that I've also seen some 21 earlier episodes of BUFFY, in rerun and on videotape, all of which has shed more light for me on the general shape and structure of the Metaphysics on Buffy-Earth. (Boy, is that sentence out of control.)

However, in going through this thing again, I find I'm really astonished at just how badly organized the first edition of this article was. Things ramble on and on, discussion topics merge and blend into other discussion topics and then, suddenly, veer back onto previous topics with no warning... it's all just rather random and unclear and difficult to follow. Plus, a lot of my previous hypothesizing about just what it is that might be going on on Buffy-Earth, in regards to the true natures and origins of demonkind, and vampires in specific, are just embarrassing now, in light of things I've seen since.

So, apparently, simply adding on to and expanding the previous text isn't going to cut it.

Therefore, I really can't make any promises about what I'm going to do with all the blithering text below... whether I'll keep all of it, or dump all of it and start over, or, most likely, keep some and dump some and modify some extensively. I do know that I plan to try to get this damn thing organized, at least somewhat, but whether I'll have any real success at that I don't know. Given that BUFFY itself, and its spinoff, ANGEL, hardly seem to be particularly well organized, it won't be easy trying to set up a coherent and linear accounting of what we know, what we think we know, and what I therefore hypothesize, about the show.

But I'll try.

The First Edition of SLAYER'S HANDBOOK: Metaphysics On Buffy-Earth, was written and web-published back around Halloween, 2000. Although it's barely been seven months since then, those seven months have seen an entire new season of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER and its spin off, ANGEL, come and go. More importantly, those eight months have seen Yr. Humble Author get access to a few more, earlier, episodes of BUFFY... nowhere near as many as I'd like, mind, but I have, at least, bought and perceptually devoured the three six packs of episodes made commercially available on video last year (one simply called "Buffy The Vampire Slayer", containing the first Buffy episode and five other selected eps from the first season, the second called "Buffy and Angel, Eternal Lovers", or some such blither, featuring , basically, six second season eps opening with the one where Buffy finally gives it up to Angel and in response, Angel gives up his soul, seguing through Evil Angel Murdering Jenny Calendar, and ending up with Buffy booting Angel, with his newly restored soul, through a mystic limbo into Hell, in order to sae the universe; and a third called "The Slayer Chronicles" and featuring, well, for the most part, six eps leading up to the climactic Ascension of the Mayor on Graduation Day that ended the third season, all of which more or less featured the fascinating Faith... although it's rather annoying to note that a pack calling itself "The Slayer Chronicles" eschewed Faith's actual debut, so I'm still, as Dr. Peter Venckman might say, fuzzy on the whole good-bad thing, at least, as it applies to where the hell Faith came from and how it is we have two separate Slayers running around at the same time... or did... and will have again, after Buffy gets resurrected once more on UPN at the start of next season).

(And since this, I've found out that there was another Slayer in the mix somewhere as well, a busty, good looking black chick - if only she'd ditch those ugly corn rows - named Kendra, whom I have only seen for about twenty minutes in "Becoming" before she gets killed by Drusilla. Not much of a Slayer, from what I can see; if Buffy had been there, she'd have kicked Drusilla and her three minions all over the place.)

I've also picked up a bootleg copy of the original pilot for the Buffy TV series, featuring an entirely different actress playing Willow (some of my fellow fans rather unkindly refer to her as 'fat Willow', but honestly, while she's not the slender gamin darling so lovingly created week after week by the astonishingly sexy Alyson Hannigan, nonetheless, this particular actress, whose name I don't know, did a terrific job with the part and is, in my opinion, pretty darn cute herself, albeit in an admittedly stockier way), said bootleg tape also containing "The Wish".

So, all told, I'm a bit better informed on the whole BUFFY thing now than I was then, what with having seen a good 43 more episodes of BUFFY by now than I had then... and that's not even counting the ANGEL season that's just come and gone, as well, which would bring the tally up to a good 59 additional episodes reflecting on the peculiar supernatural metaphysics of that particular alternate reality inhabited by one particular version of the Slayer called Buffy Summers. (I have to distinguish this way, because there are certainly other alternate realities with their own versions of a Slayer named Buffy Summers; in one of them that we BUFFY fans know for a fact exists, Buffy looks rather like Kristy Swanson, dates a guy named Pike, and did not burn down her original high school gym... and most likely never showed up in Sunnydale at all... which means it's probably a rather depressing dimension to live in, by now.)

Being better informed, I've decided I may as well go back, take a good hard second look at this thing which was written, for the most part, early on in Buffy's fifth season, and see if, in light of some further exposure to the established history of the series, there are any particular sections that cry out to be adapted and updated.

Of course, there's no guarantee that my most recent musings and pontifications will be any more valid... whatever that means in this context (I guess it means "Joss Whedon agrees with them") than they ever were before, since there are still FAR TOO MANY episodes I haven't seen (would someone PLEASE syndicate BUFFY and put the first three seasons on a network I can pick up without cable? PLEASE?)... and even if (God willing, someday, when) I've seen them all, my conclusions still won't be 'official', and could be undermined and undone with any subsequent episode of ANGEL or BUFFY that contradicts them.

Nonetheless, as noted below, I have the kind of mind that just has to try to figure out how things work. So, without further ado, let's see just I have to add to what has gone before, below:

* * * * * * * * * * * *

I. Introduction

Millions of people every week watch and enjoy the WB show BUFFY THE
VAMPIRE SLAYER, and its somewhat darker, more guy-oriented spin
off, ANGEL. Presumably, they are the lucky ones, who never trouble
themselves to wonder just how the heck it is that vampires turn
into dust when staked, burst into flames in direct sunlight, and
yet, still manage to carry on active sex lives with real live human
beings and/or humanoid robots, just as if they weren't actually necromantically animated walking corpses like they're supposed to be, dammit.

No, these happy little Slayer fans don't speculate as to where Buffy gets her super strength from, or what demons actually are, or why the presence, or lack
thereof, of something called a 'soul' seems to make such a tremendous difference in how certain so called demonic entities behave.

We'll come back to this later, but I may as well note now that this rather bizarre inconsistency on the part of Whedon and other BUFFY creators regarding vampiric metabolism has continued unabated to this day, and in fact, as I've seen many more BUFFY episodes with Angel in them, ANGEL episodes themselves, and BUFFY episodes with Spike in them, this whole vampire/human sexual interaction thing has simply become more and more baffling.

Angel, and those around him, continue to insist that he doesn't breathe, for example, and yet, someone who doesn't breathe shouldn't be able to speak, and certainly shouldn't be able to smoke a cigarette... and the whole 'I don't breathe' thing simply underscores the fact that vampires are DEAD, dammit, and therefore, have no normally functional metabolisms, which certainly includes the reproductive systems involved in normal sexual function. How Angel and Spike manage to have sex with human and/or robot Buffies... honestly, it simply makes no sense. And, well, as I say, we'll get back to this, below... but I'm here to tell you, some 50+ hours of BUFFY and ANGEL later... it still makes no damn sense.

In the past, this grinding itch to figure things out has led me to
produce a previous article on the movie/TV franchise HIGHLANDER, in
which I provided what struck me as a consistent and reasonably
sensible internally coherent explanation for most of the weird
special effects, antisocial behavior, and generally rambunctious
shenanigans that go on in that particular fictional reality. Now,
it seems, that same obscure impulse to de-obfuscate, to explicate,
to pin something to a corkboard and force it to frickin make SENSE,
by God, is leading me into the labyrinth that is BUFFY. So be it.

Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.

I should note before I go further, though, that unlike HIGHLANDER,
which could perhaps best be described as a thousand immortal
whackos with swords in search of a storyline, the BUFFY franchise
may well not actually need me to provide any such over-arching and
comprehensive analysis and explanation of just how its underlying
metaphysics actually works.

HIGHLANDER, while exciting, intriguing, and occasionally even competently written, always struck me as having little actual art to it. Its creators weren't trying to make a statement or communicate any deeply held truths
through the medium of the movies or the show; they were, in fact,
simply trying to entertain, and by entertaining, make a buck. As
such, it always seemed to me that the various installments in the
franchise were written more with an eye towards box office receipts
than making any sort of consistent sense. That the producers
pretty much made it all up as they went along seems obvious,
especially when one considers such awful, and quickly disallowed,
chapters in the ongoing saga as HIGHLANDER 2: THE QUICKENING, which
both audience and production crew seems to have tacitly agreed to
simply ignore (and deservedly so, too).

BUFFY, on the other hand, seems to be in the hands of folks who are somewhat more serious about their creative vehicle. Oh, not that I'd expect solemnity from any show named BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, and in fact, the irrepressible sense of whimsical goofiness that permeates the franchise is one of its chief charms. (We have seen the horrors of a modern day vampire soap opera with no sense of humor whatsoever, in the form of KINDRED: THE EMBRACED. And we need not tarry there.) However, Joss Whedon, who seems to be the creative brains behind the program, also seems to actually have something of a handle on exactly what is really going on in Buffy's world, where it all started, why it continues, and most crucially, how it all works... or so I surmise from recent cryptic references dropped in various episodes that hint at new revelations to come regarding the very origin and nature of that weird entity called 'the Slayer'.

On the other hand, I may be giving too much credit simply because I enjoy BUFFY so much. The creative crew on BUFFY and ANGEL may be simply making things up as they go along and have no real, consistent idea of an underlying, consistent metaphysics or even history for the characters and world they inhabit. In fact, as time goes on and more and more flashback episodes are generated providing depth and detail on various character histories that seem to be somewhat in conflict with what those characters, and other characters, had told us previously, or even what we've seen in previous flashback episodes, it seems to become more and more naggingly obvious that either no one high up at BUFFY has the time to keep all the plot details straight and make everything fit into a coherent cosmogony... or no one cares.

(One specific, irritating case in point: flashback episodes have now established that Drusilla was originally the daughter of some sort of Irish or English clergyman before she was fanged by Angel, however, at the same time, we've also seen the human, pre-fanged Dru walk into a church and make confession in a box where Angel had just killed the priest. As a general rule, clergymen who can marry and have children are Protestant; churches with confession boxes are Catholic... and in the 18th Century in Ireland or England, if you were born into one sub-branch of Christianity, you didn't casually wander into a church of the other sub-branch. However, given that Dru's origins seem to be English rather than Irish, it seems probable that her father was a prelate of the Church of England, and I believe they can marry and have children... although I'm not sure. I'm also not sure if the Anglican church has confession. So this may not be a contradiction at all.)

Not that I'm really blaming Mr. Whedon. A television series is, above all other things, an ongoing and open ended enterprise, involving - unless one is David E. Kelley or Aaron Sorkin, apparently - creative input from a lot of different sources. As such, it's simply naïve to expect any one person to manage to keep good coherent track of everything that gets done over the course of 44 episodes a year, especially when one is dealing with strange creatures whose behavior and characteristics do not necessarily conform with the normal laws of reality as we know them.

Consistency is going to suffer, and I suspect it has.

Furthermore, I also suspect that the desire I feel to have everything be consistent and make some sort of understandable sense is not one reflected in Joss Whedon's own psychology, or that of most of his writers. And, well, it's their show, and if they want to treat the BUFFY universe as a piece of arbitrary fiction where the physical and metaphysical laws can be changed and altered from one episode to the next to suit specific plot needs, or even just to allow someone to make an idiotic joke regardless of how much that 'joke' damages any attempt at comprehending just how things actually work on Buffy-Earth... well... they can. Certainly an argument could be made that no one should expect serious, intelligent consistency from a show called BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, and if I can't comprehend that the internal continuity of this show need bear no more resemblance to anything anyone could seriously think of as 'reality' than, say, the internal 'continuity' of I LOVE LUCY or FRIENDS or THE SIMPSONS, then the problem is mine, not theirs.

Nonetheless, all I can say to this is what I've said endlessly in other articles about that other form of open ended serial adventure fiction I love, superhero comic books... to my mind, sensible and consistent continuity is no more nor less than the covenant between a creator and his/their audience that they will allow us to continue to believe in the fictional characters and worlds that we love, by doing their utmost to make those worlds seem 'real' to us. Those who produce crap like FRIENDS comprehend no such covenant and happily create 'flashback' episodes filled with inconsistencies and conflicts with other 'flashback' episodes, and populate a supposedly realistic world with idiocies like sentient monkeys... but I expect little from FRIENDS, have never believed any of those characters could possibly be 'real' (or, if they were, that they'd ever hang out together for longer than five minutes) and thus, am not disappointed.

However, BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, its world, and its characters, seem to me to have been created and to be consistently written to a much higher standard, and as such, when inconsistencies and even gaping stupidities crop up simply for the sake of plot convenience... it does disappoint me. BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER may be a whimsical show, and often a satire, and once in a while even a parody, but treating it, even occasionally, in as brainless a fashion as the 75th episode of I LOVE LUCY where Lucy still can't be part of the show at Ricky's club... well... it annoys me.

Much, I suspect, as articles like this, which try to take the whole thing seriously, probably annoy many of the series creators and ongoing producers.

If my growing suspicions of general cluelessness and apathy on the part of the creative staff towards a central and underlying metaphysics are wrong (and I hope they are) then an explanation for all these whacked out and mysterious goings on may well be in the offing, this season or maybe next... and this whole article may be a waste of time. However, as of right now, no such explanation for the various spectacular special effects, physical capacities, and bizarre behaviors of the Buffy gang has been offered, so I will now attempt to fill that void.

II. What We Know, Maybe

A. In General

What I've discovered is most useful in these things is to set out
what we actually know, or at least, think we know, but do not
actually understand, in some reasonably coherent form. Then we can
start picking, analyzing, dissecting, and hypothesizing as we
search for some sort of previously unseen pattern or coherency
underlying it all.

In general, what we seem to know about Buffy-Earth is:

* There are vampires there, and they have, for at least hundreds and maybe thousands of years, preyed on humanity. Because of this, into each generation a Slayer is born...a human girl endowed with the speed, strength, supernatural perceptions, access to memories and thus, the experience of, past lives, and advanced training, to protect humanity from the vampires. There is also some vague organization of Watchers who keep track of the Slayers, mentor them, record their campaigns, and generally try to support them as they battle the vampiric plague. All that was what we were told in the movie, and as the movie was little more than a comedy, intended to parody more standard horror films, the fact that much of this is utterly ridiculous didn't matter. You weren't expected to take it seriously; if you were, no one would have cast Pee Wee Herman as a vampire.

All of this has been expanded on and modified extensively by the TV show. Buffy Earth-TV is not only afflicted with vampires who prey on humanity, but with the entire gauntlet of historical, literary, and mythological supernatural creatures, all of them apparently fitting into some sort of overarching 'demonic' cosmogony. TV-Buffy is not merely a vampire slayer (although that's still more or less her specific task) but is, in actuality, mankind's bulwark and protector against all inimical supernatural forces. Vampires, in fact, as we're quite often told, are merely a peculiar and eccentric type of demon... a necessary contrivance, to make the rather focused job of Vampire Slayer into a more open ended foe to all evil supernatural entities (a melodramatic convenience, as a show in which Buffy did nothing but fight vampires week after week after week would be fairly limited in scope).

We know, or are told often, that the primary difference between humans and demons (other than that they're really ugly and we aren't) is that humans have souls and demons don't. We know that the vast majority of demons are 'evil' by human standards, and Must Be Stopped. We know that there is an occult, highly organized group called The Watchers that seems to represent humanity's protection from and resistance to demonic aggression, and that the Slayers are more or less the born Champions of humanity in general and the Watchers in specific.

We know that magic exists, and we also know, alas, that 'demon' is a word that seems to get misused and abused quite a lot... or, at the very least, that it covers creatures who are born into demonic races, creatures who inhabit and somewhat transform dead human bodies after killing them, and creatures who voluntarily give up their humanity to become 'demons'. We know that history can be changed (and, thankfully, changed back), that other dimensions, and alternate timelines, exist, that super-science is not only possible but is well within the fairly casual creative capacities of many highly intelligent but otherwise normal humans.

To the best of my knowledge, the possibilities of time travel have not yet been explored in the TV show, although the comic book has seen at least one story in which a past Slayer traveled into the present day to foil a demon who had been sent to kill Buffy.

B. VAMPIRES
(1) Vulnerabilities

One of the first, and most interesting, items to consider in all
this is exactly what vampires on Buffy-Earth actually are. In
order to do this, it's probably worthwhile to set down what they
aren't, which is to say, the ways they differ from more standard,
literary vampires, as depicted in other specific stories.

First, vampires on Buffy-Earth tend to be rather wimpier, for the
most part, than vampires in other fictional milieus. In Steve
King's SALEM'S LOT, for example, Ben Mears winds up killing two
vampires (his dead girlfriend Susan Norton and boss bloodsucker
Barlow) and he has to work a lot harder to do it than any blond
cheerleader or member of the Scooby Gang ever had to on the Planet
o' the Slayers. In the King book, Mears had to just frickin POUND
a goddam big chunk o' sharpened firewood through the chest cavities
of both vamps with a frickin Craftsman hammer, for god's sake, and
he was there doing it for a couple of minutes each time... whack,
whack, WHACK, chest heaving, arms burning with fatigue, blood spattering
everywhere, Barlow whipping and writhing in the coffin underneath
him crying and sniveling like a bloodsucking little sissy-boy... it
was definitely an effort. You're pretty sure that afterwards, when
he and Mark get to the motel in the next town over and finally
relax, Ben suddenly discovers that his shoulders muscles seriously
ache from all that pounding.

Contrast this with fangsters on Buffy-Earth, who turn into tiny
little piles of kitty litter if someone, anyone, even a little
wussy-girl like Willow, jams a pointy popsicle stick into their
thoraxes. Frankly, it makes me wonder why Spike and Angel, at the
very least (both of whom seem smarter than the average ghoul,
anyway) don't wear Kevlar vests, like, constantly. I mean, to bed.
I damned well would, if I knew that the average ten year old could
send me screaming off to hell by jabbing me between my manly
nipples with a freshly sharpened number two pencil.

This point, if anything, is even more emphasized by the some 60 or so additional eps of BUFFY and ANGEL I've seen since first writing this. Vampires can, generally, not only be dispatched by the merest wooden twig, if firmly struck with that twig in the center of the chest, but most vampires are so stupid that they'll attack a stake-armed human being with their arms spread wide to either side, letting even a ditz like Cordelia get in a sound and lethal poke. The only vampires who consistently aren't this stupid are those the show's producers want to keep around for a while, like Angel, Darla, Drusilla, and Spike. Watching the comedy team of Anya, Xander, and Willow nearly get killed by two vampires, yet still manage to stake both of them with little actual difficulty after a few seconds of scuffle, simply underscores the fact that on Buffy-Earth, there's no real need for a Slayer to be born every generation. The Council should just broadcast the fact that vampires exist worldwide. Then everyone could carry a sharpened popsicle stick around with them, and within a fortnight at most, every vampire stupid enough to attack anyone not paralyzed from the neck down, comatose, or in traction, would be rendered into dust by even the feeblest and most spastic resistance of their intended victims.

Obviously, this is simply something that has gotten out of hand. Non-Slayers, with normal human strength, shouldn't be able to take out a vampire with one quick arm movement while holding a sharpened piece of kindling. Normal, non super powered humans should have to pound damn big chunks of wood through the vampire's chest with a hammer, something that would be unlikely to happen if the vampire were actually capable of saying "Hey, stop that" or, you know, movement. Honestly and sincerely; if Willow, Xander, or Anya can stand up to a fully mobile vampire, at night, and kill it without much effort or risk, there's really no need for Slayers. Hell, even Riley should be overmatched in hand to hand with the average vampire, or there's simply no point to having a supernaturally powered champion whose specific purpose is protecting humanity from the ravages of the Undead. If Wesley can take a vampire with his bare hands, we don't need Buffy or Faith.

In my humble opinion, Whedon and crew need to do some work on making vampires scary and threatening again. The Scooby Gang should be terrified to go into a graveyard after dark without Buffy, hell, if I lived in Sunnydale and knew what any member of the Scooby Gang knows, I'd move... but if I had to keep living there, I'd never set foot outside my house after dark. However, as things currently have been established to be, vampires are no more dangerous than big, mean dogs... considerably less so, if you carry a cross and a stake with you.

In addition to being terrifyingly vulnerable to chest splinters, Buffy-vamps also share many of the usual vampiric weaknesses: sunlight, crosses, and an inability to enter a private dwelling unless invited by a legitimate resident. Sunlight causes vampires to smoke and burst into flames, crosses apparently affect them much the same way an extremely hot piece of metal would affect a normal human, causing them to recoil from too close proximity and burning or branding them if brought into contact with them. Holy water seems to effect them like acid, although exactly what water has to do in order to become 'holy' I myself have no idea... is it only the Catholic version that works, or can anyone do a sincere blessing over a cup of Perrier and have it turn into vampire repellent? In addition, decapitation, like a poke in the heart with a piece of wood, immediately turns vamps into dust, and they can also be burned to death by conventional flames. These last are not typical mythical vampire weaknesses, although Stephen King apparently also made his bloodsuckers susceptible to fire in SALEM'S LOT.

(2) Biology

Buffy-vampires also have sex lives. Now, this isn't exactly new to
vampire lore, I grant you . The legend of the nosferatu has always
been a sexually charged one, what with the penetration and the
drinking of the bodily fluids and all that nifty stuff, yet when literary and mythological
vampires have been depicted as having 'sex', it's usually been
implied, or even overtly stated, that what they were doing was not
'sex' the way we humans think of it.

I mean, come on now, they're dead. Presumably, the only way most male vampires get wood is when someone punches it through their clavicle, especially since a
normal human male erection is a function of blood flow, which it
seems reasonable to assume the average 'male' vampire has little or
none of .

Logically, 'female' vampires could have almost normal sexual function, assuming they carried around a little KY to help with what would have to be fairly severe lubrication issues... yet one has to wonder how even the horniest and most desperate male (that would be me, actually) could ignore the fact that this
bitch's body is as cold as a sno-cone and her breath, such as it is, and given what she normally consumes as food, has to be about four times nastier than your chain smoking second cousin's after he or she has just killed half a keg of Old Milwaukee. Plus kissing someone who's salivary glands haven't actually worked in years, decades, or centuries would have to be a special taste and textural
treat I don't even want to try to imagine, but can best sum up with the phrase 'oh EW'.

In short, you'd think that any human who experienced anything more than the most fleeting, casual body contact with a vampire would pretty quickly realize there was something badly wrong with this picture. It seems equally obvious
that even if a living mortal knew their potential lover was a vampire, and didn't actually mind (a level of trust that frankly boggles my mind, especially when one considers the combination of razor sharp fangs and vampiric arousal, with, say, fellatio), the pleasures of even just snuggling or making out with a centuries cold corpus would be minimal, without even trying to get past
second base.

In much vampire literature, there are ways of getting around this. Mythological vampires are often attributed with the ability to cast glamours on themselves to deceive their chosen victims, making said humanoid buffet table see, feel, and otherwise perceive whatever the ghoul in question wants them to. There are even specifically sexual forms of vampires, succubi and incubi, that are said to
drink human reproductive fluids rather than actual blood, the actual details of which I don't care to dwell on myself, at least, from the incubatory point of view. Yeeeeuch.

However, such explanations simply aren't available to us on Buffy-Earth. Of all the vampires we've seen on Buffy-Earth, only Drusilla and Dracula have demonstrated any psychic abilities... and in Dru's case, she had them when she was human, so clearly, they're not part of the vampire heritage. In fact, vampires on Buffy-Earth, like most demons, seem to eschew any and all mental powers in favor of super strength, enhanced agility, and martial arts prowess.

Given that, it seems safe to assume that any sex a human being might be having with a vampire on Buffy-Earth is real, actual sex, or at least, a reasonable facsimile thereof. At the very least, we have not seen any of the various mortal women that Angel has locked lips with over the last few seasons pull away with disgust gasping 'hemoglobin breath, ick!', nor has Angel ever tried to rebuff unwanted advances, even from women who knew he was a vampire, by
explaining "Um, you know, I'm dead".

And it's also been made pretty clear that the reason Angel actually abstains from sex is not because he can't do it; in fact, we're pretty sure he did do it, at least once, with Buffy, even if the actual act had to be committed under cover and off camera. Angel can have sex, real sex, sex with a real, live, human woman... which makes him a pretty strange walking corpse, in my opinion.

Of course, in various flashback eps this season, we have had it very well established that Angel and Darla had an incredibly active love life. However, in theory, vampires having 'sex' with other vampires is something that doesn't trouble me, since the nature of TV will pretty much always keep us from seeing actual details, and therefore, we're free to conjecture that whatever they do, it doesn't involve the same physical and metabolic details as when people do it. But when vampires and humans have sex, well, presumably, they're doing it the old fashioned way... or you'd think at some point one of the humans would comment on it, at least.

Given that apparently vampires do have normal sex with humans, it seems safe to assume that they have normal sex with each other, as well. It simply makes no sense, given their anatomical limitations. However, we'll get to all this later.

Other evidence for vampire sexuality is somewhat less overt, but still, it's there. Spike and Harmony pretty clearly carry on something erotic and physical whenever they're together, awake, and not hitting each other with the furniture, and I can recall an episode early in the fourth season where Harmony was doing something to the old Spikester that looked a whole lot like your standard fraternity little sister initiation suck-off to me.

Add it all up and it looks like, on Buffy-Earth, vampiric sexual function is pretty indistinguishable from human. Which would tend to argue that, other than the oversensitivity to chest splinters and the explosively photosensitive skin, Buffy vamps are, in most functional terms, as human as you or I.

And, occasionally, there are simply things that we would be inclined, at first, to flatly dismiss as mistakes, such as Angel recently walking into a darkened room full of milling, bleating goats, and turning on the lights. He doesn't have to turn on the lights, he's a vampire and he can see in the dark... and yet, when you think about it, he always has lights on, even in his private quarters, even when he's alone.

Still, perhaps this isn't simply a mistake, perhaps it reflects a preference on Angel's part. Whatever a vampire 'sees' in total darkness, it can't be what a normal human 'sees' with their eyes, and most likely, there is no color involved. Angel may simply like color, and therefore, when he walks into a darkened room where there is a light switch handy, he turns on the lights. When he's alone in his own quarters, he keeps a light turned on, or he lights candles. He doesn't have to, he just prefers to.

Another interesting point about vampires has come out in a recent episode of ANGEL. Unaware (as were we all, it was the episode's big plot twist) that Angel's former vampire paramour and sire, Darla, had been resurrected by evil law firm Wolfram & Hart as a mortal, and thus, thinking (as we all did) that she was a vampire, Angel confronted her in a hotel. He refuted her claim that he'd
made a mistake and she was someone else by saying "I know your scent, Darla". This tells us pretty irrefutably that vampires smell like living human beings, since, if they didn't, you'd imagine Angel would have been a little puzzled as to why his Undead ex smelled all warm and sweaty.

Now, human scent arises from a combination of many factors, not least of which being, perspiration, but also, the exuding of pheremones, and, to a great extent, the constant deterioration and break down of skin and hair cells into tiny, almost microscopic flakes that impinge only on our olfactory sensory apparatus.

Classical vampires, being walking corpses, don't have functional sweat glands, nor, really, should they have anything much to sweat. It's doubtful they produce chemical pheremones, and last but not least, as they are immortal, and biologically inactive, their skin and hair should neither grow nor decay. Therefore, a vampire should have little or no scent, not even the usual prosaically Victorian moldering stench of the grave, since they shouldn't rot,
either. They actually shouldn't smell like anything, although, as noted, those literary vampires with the ability to throw glamours on themselves should be able to make their victims perceive whatever they choose.

It's just now occurring to me that as the human body is some varying percentage - but it's always around 80% -- water, vampires, who really shouldn't retain any water in their systems as they are, you know, dead, should all be stick thin, dusty dry, walking mummies. Maybe they'd puff up and look 'normal' for a while after draining someone's blood, but they should flatten out again, like a leaky tire losing air, fairly quickly. Given that this clearly doesn't happen, it's must more evidence for the theory that vampires not only don't have a normal human metabolism, but that they don't have anything that even works remotely according to normal physical laws.

(3) Spirituality

However, we do know of one very specific difference between vampires and the rest of humanity, if only because the dialogue emphasizes it over and over again: vampires don't have souls.

Given that Angel was pretty much an evil prick when he was running around without his soul, and suddenly got all weepy and guilted out when a gypsy curse jammed one back into his Undead torso, it would seem that whatever else a 'soul' might be or do, one of its primary functions is to provide a being with a conscience.

This doesn't seem to happen all at once, though. In a recent flashback episode, we've seen Angel in the 1950s, and he wasn't the weepy, compassionate, Rod McKuen-esque crusader for justice and protector of the innocent he is now. In fact, he was pretty damn surly. He may have had a soul, and his conscience may have been slowly regenerating, but it was still capable of being set aside fairly easily when he lost his temper.

And, of course, in 'Becoming', we saw Angel get his soul on two separate occasions, and on both, it was as if an entirely separate personality had re-emerged from a long hibernation... one that, at least initially, had no recollection of the acts performed by Angelus during the soul's absence. Gradually, apparently, the memories seeped back, and just as gradually, human guilt and psychic torment over the evil of these acts built up... but it doesn't seem to be instantaneous. In fact, when Angel's soul was returned to him at the end of 'Becoming' and Buffy was forced to kill him in order to close the portal to hell that Angelus had, a minute or so previously, opened, Angel doubtless had no idea why Buffy had just stabbed him with a blessed sword.

(4) Vampiric Skills

In addition to all this, there is another aspect of vampiredom on Buffy-Earth that sets bloodsuckers there apart from bloodsuckers in other literary realms... virtually all the Buffy vampires seem to be reasonably adept at martial arts. Now, look, I'm not stupid. I realize that the reason most older vampires Buffy encounters actually do that kung fu fighting thing is because it looks spiffy
on camera, and kids like it. Hell, I like it, too. Nonetheless, we can't just ignore it because there is a pragmatic visual reason for it; the fact remains, on Buffy-Earth, nearly all the older vampires and demons and such have apparently made an effort to gain some degree of mastery in the martial arts.

Dracula seems to have largely been an exception to this. However, given his mental powers, and the fact that he's the only vampire we've ever seen who can regenerate at will after being staked and turned to dust, I suspect 'Dracula' wasn't a vampire at all, just a demon... probably a very powerful one... who gets off on celebrity impersonation. Or one sent by Higher or Lower Powers to corrupt Buffy rather than kill her, and thus, who deliberately chose a persona she'd find extremely impressive in order to influence her better. Of course, he'd have done better to pick, say, Rob Thomas, or maybe Ben Affleck, but you can't expect demons to be up on their pop stars.

There could be many reasons for this martial prowess, with the simplest being that, since demons apparently spend most of their time fighting each other and humans, it's only sensible that the older a demon or vampire gets, the more general fighting acumen they will pick up, which would naturally include unarmed combat abilities.

To my mind, however, this notion doesn't quite hold water, for two reasons:

First, one simply doesn't 'pick up' various martial arts katas and forms, one has to be trained. Spider-Man, after ten years or so engaged in hand to hand combat with various other Marvel Universe superhumans, has doubtless picked up a lot of moves that are very effective in combat and with them, in combination with his natural superhuman powers, become a formidable fighter; nonetheless, if he goes up against Shang Chi, Master of Kung Fu, he's not going to be trading side-hand mantis strikes with the Son of Fu Manchu, he's just going to punch the guy's lights out.

Second, there's something strange, in and of itself, in all this unarmed kung fu haaiii yaaiiing between demons, Slayers, and Undead, in that, if I were a vampire and I was worried about the Slayer showing up and jamming a piton through my breastbone, I would damn well forego the Bruce Lee nonsense and simply haul out a Glock-9 and blow the bitch away.

Given that vampires on Buffy-Earth, at least to my knowledge, have never been known to carry firearms, one assumes there is some pressing reason for this, and for the near universal presence of advanced martial arts skills in the sharp toothed little bastards, as well.

I have to date seen two examples of vampires packing iron: In the early episode where Angel first killed Darla, she blasted Angel initially across the room Shadow-style with a .45 automatic in each hand, commenting that bullets might not kill vampires, but they hurt like hell. Second, when Buffy finally pissed Spike off to the point of driving him into a murderous rage, he set off to kill her with a loaded shotgun... only to stop when he found her crying over her mother's failing health on her back steps. All of which simply underscores the fact that firearms seem basically foreign to a vampire's fundamental experience and their use seems to go against a vampire's 'natural' inclinations, and they only resort to them in extremes of anger or frustration.

(4) Vampiric Supernatural Powers

It's here, perhaps, that Whedon's vampires suffer the most in comparison to other literary bloodsuckers.

Where even Stephen King's nosferatu can somehow slip between the smallest cracks to enter a room and exert an undue mental influence at a distance whereby they can apparently compel even the reluctant and unwilling to invite them inside, the vampires on Buffy-Earth seem to have little going for them except unnatural levels of super strength and, apparently, increased levels of martial arts ability. Of course, they can't really be hurt by most normal forms of damage, but where King's vampires are, apparently, untouched by most 'normal' physical attacks (a shotgun blast, at one point, seems to pass through one vampire in SALEM'S LOT as if the creature weren't even there), Whedon's apparently feel nearly normal physical pain when shot, stabbed, bludgeoned, or kicked smartly in the head, stomach and/or jahoobies by incensed Slayers.

Although the vampires shown in the original movie are capable of defying gravity, we've never, to my knowledge, seen vampires do so in the TV show. This may simply be because, if other vampires could do it, then Angel could do it, and Whedon & Co. don't want Angel to be able to fly. In fact, the limitation of vampiric super powers to, basically, strength, toughness, speed, and martial arts prowess may all stem from not wanting to give Angel too many powers... although I'm sure that the primary purpose was to make it credible for a young girl with relatively minor levels of superstrength, as well as well developed acrobatic and martial arts skills, to successfully combat them.

Oh, and I almost forgot a minor but perhaps pertinent point... vampires seem to share with demons and lycanthropes some shapeshifting ability, if only in their limited capacity to shift their facial features back and forth from Evil Vampire Look to Kodak Moment Happy Face.

While they're not specifically 'powers', we may as well note here a few other supernatural aspects of vampirism on Buffy-Earth, since they come under consideration later, in the section where I try to actually explain things.

First, vampires turn to dust when they get staked, generally immediately, but occasionally, with minor delays ranging from half a second up to a good six seconds or so (the deft, menacing, and impressively malevolent Mr. Trick had time to gasp out "Oh, no... this is no good... this is no good at ALL..." after Faith jammed a stake into his back while he was busy trying to chow down on a hurt and weakened Buffy). This is pretty weird, and we've seen fairly often since that this trait does not seem to be shared by most, if any, other demon-forms.

Second, and rather annoyingly, vampires don't cast a reflection in mirrors. This is stressed, over and over again, to a point where we can't ignore it, say that it's a mistake, that it's something that only applies to certain vampires, or only occurs with certain types of mirror. Angel has mentioned this so often, and recently went into such paroxysms of joy upon traveling to a demon dominated dimension where he could see his reflection, that we have to face up to the fact that this isn't merely a case of silver not reflecting a vampiric image, which I could vaguely sort of bullshit my way around. No, apparently, vampires cast no reflection in any reflective surface, be it polished metal, a still pool of water, plastic, or what have you. They. Just. Don't.

Compounding this weirdness is the fact that vampires DO cast shadows, and they DO show up on videotape.

One of the most interesting of vampiric limitations on Buffy-Earth is the fact that vampires can't enter a dwelling without being invited. Over the course of the TV show, this has gone from being a general and vague limitation (the Three, when they pursued Angel and Buffy to her house, were shoving their clawlike hands uninvited around the edges of the front door as Buffy and Angel tried to slam it closed on them) to being something along the lines of the supernatural equivalent of an invisible force field (Spike has, on at least one occasion, reached out and knocked on the barrier around Buffy's house). In fact, the limitation is so palpable and solid that vampires can, apparently, lean on the no-invitation barrier as if it were a wall (as demonstrated simply for the sake of physical comedy in an episode of ANGEL this season, when such a barrier collapsed while Angel was actually leaning on it, sending him sprawling).

So, to sum up... on Buffy-Earth, we have vampires who are similar to other literary vampires in that they drink blood, have superhuman strength, and suffer from a wide range of the traditional literary vampiric vulnerabilities and limitations. On the other hand, they differ from other literary vampires in that they have almost none of the traditional vampires' supernatural powers other than those listed above, they appear to have at least some normal metabolic function even though they're technically 'dead', and, well, supposedly, they're supposed to be some sort of 'demon', and fit into some over-arching demonic history and supernatural zoology.

We know they sleep and dream, since we've seen both Spike and Angel do so, although I should note that this is not necessarily compelling evidence, since Angel has a soul (whatever that is) and Spike has a chip in his head that in some ways seems to simulate the presence of a soul.

They don't reflect in mirrors, but do, apparently, show up on videotape, and they also cast shadows.

They're all reasonably adept at unarmed martial arts disciplines, and they're all extraordinarily susceptible to not just dying, but actually turning into little heaps of dust, if they take even a shallow jab in the middle of the chest from any pointy object made of wood.

Last but not least, they all seem to absolutely revel in malevolence and depravity, mostly, we're told quite often by Giles and Wesley and other scholarly sorts, because they don't have souls.

C. DEMONS

We know way too much about demons, and, ironically, way too little.

First, back in the very first episode, we were told by Giles that demons had occupied Earth before mankind, but had gradually and mysteriously 'lost their hold' on this world, and wound up banished to the outer dimensions. Apparently, demons are always trying to regain a foothold on Earth. Also, vampires are just a specific type of demon, one that has no bodies of its own, and therefore, kills humans in order to take over their bodies for its own use.

Sometime in the second season, we discovered that a demon could be turned into a human by having its powers stripped away, although it may be worth noting here that 'Anyanka' was originally referred to as a 'patron spirit', not a demon. Subsequently, however, everyone has taken to referring to her as an 'ex demon' and we found out this season that apparently, she didn't simply turn into a human, but she actually started out as one, and became a demon. This fits in with a fourth season episode in which Willow was extended an invitation to become a demon herself, because of her potential psychic abilities.

At the end of the third season, Anya informed the gang and the viewers that they'd never actually seen a demon; all the demons that they had encountered up until now had been 'tainted'. The point of the Mayor's Ascension was to become a TRUE demon, or, if you will, a Demon with a capital D, which were, well, rather large, and not at all humanoid, and, just generally, ickie.

First season episodes of ANGEL taught us that there were large populations of demons living quietly in secret in various human cities, apparently more or less peacefully and non violently; we were also told that Angel's original medium, the astonishingly annoying Doyle, was, in fact, one quarter demon.

Most demons seem to be rather sturdier than humans, and can only be killed by extensive bodily damage, often only by being chopped to pieces. Some are all but indestructible and have to be killed in very specific ways, like The Gentlemen, who have the magical ability to steal the voices of everyone in a certain area, and who can only be killed by the scream of a princess. (I'm assuming the Gentlemen are demons, since everything supernatural and bad in the Buffy universe is a 'demon', although Giles indicated that they were, in fact, 'storybook monsters'.)

We've seen demons show up from space, demons from other dimensions, demons with strange demonic abilities, demons who, apparently, couldn't beat up a half lame and elderly dwarf. We've seen demons who can shapeshift at will from demonic features to a more human appearance, demons that aren't even vaguely humanoid, demons who, apparently, keep their hearts in their asses, demons who reproduce by planting eye-like spores in human heads that eventually erupt into full grown exact copies of the engendering demon, and even demons who want to marry human women. We've seen fat demons, skinny demons, demons that climb on rocks. There are apparently as many different kinds of demon as there are different kinds of bacteria, insect, or mold colony in the universe... and apparently, most of them are inclined to violence and none of them are overly fond of humans... to say the least.

We know there are entire alternate dimensions populated entirely by demons, or where demons are a majority and dominate a human minority.

'Demon' is, to say the least, a rather overused word in the BUFFY lexicon.

The question still remains: what are demons? Is there any one defining aspect to the many creatures labeled as 'demonic' on Buffy-Earth that we can use to set them off from other beings, like, well, humans?

Many demons, especially the nastier, more malevolent and powerful ones, come from other dimensions, and are usually brought to Earth in response to summonses by their followers, or mages seeking favors from them, or foolishly activated mystical artifacts, or various and sundry other plot devices. However, there are many other demons who are apparently native to Earth, born into large, if secretive, demon communities or 'ghettoes' that dwell unobtrusively among the humans here.

And, most interesting of all, Angel's previous (highly annoying) medium, Doyle, was eventually revealed (right before he heroically sacrificed himself in what had to be his only likeable moment) to be a demon/human hybrid... which would seem to indicate a level of genetic consanguinity between at least some races of demons and humans far closer than that between, say, horses and donkeys, which can only produce infertile offspring. (Doyle, I think, was a quarter-breed, indicating that one of his parents was a fertile demon/human half-breed.)

This last seems to imply one of two hypotheses - either (a) demons and humans actually share a significant amount of racial DNA (more so than a human and a Rhesus monkey, or a horse and a donkey, the first of which pairs cannot interbreed, and the second of which produces only sterile offspring), or, (b) Joss Whedon is even more astonishingly ignorant of basic genetics than Gene Roddenberry, in an era where such basic knowledge has been far more widely disseminated. Since I don't believe Whedon is either stupid or ignorant, I'm betting on (a).

(Admittedly, we can't rule out ( c ), demons and humans can interbreed and produce fertile offspring because of magic, probably inherent in nearly any demon that can so interbreed. But that's the boring solution, although ultimately, it may be the one we have to fall back on.)

'Demons'... real Demons, pure Demons, with a capital D... seem to be an entirely alien species. The creatures the Scooby Gang thinks of as being 'demons' are apparently mixtures of human and demon DNA. Perhaps the original, pure Demons created the human-tinged sub-demon races for purposes of their own, or perhaps some loonie human shaman back in prehistory stole some Demon DNA and crossed it with human DNA just to see what would happen. Whatever the case, biologically and genetically, 'demons' would seem to be little more than particularly ugly, and often supernaturally endowed, humans, for all practical purposes... except, for some reason, they don't have souls.

If demons and humans are, physically, genetically, and biologically, for the most part identical, and vampires are demons which happen to inhabit reanimated human bodies, this would seem to indicate that the primary dichotomy between demon and human is not physical, but rather, for lack of a better word, spiritual.

More specifically, with what we know now, 'demons' are actually a mixture of human and inhuman DNA. Still, the primary difference, as far as behavior goes, would seem to come from the non-physical differences between human and demon... namely, again, humans have souls, and demons don't. Although the inhuman DNA probably allows demons to do things that pure humans couldn't, like shapeshift.

Exactly what is a 'demon', as opposed to a 'Demon', as opposed to a 'human', as opposed to a vampire, or a lycanthrope?

To date, we have only speculation, and speculation is not to be listed under 'What We Know', but will most likely be gotten to under 'Analysis & Speculation', a bit later.

D. GODS

Actual theology on Buffy-Earth is vague. Apparently, something called the "Higher Powers" exist, whom, at the very least, Angel is generally considered to be working for (more or less) and whom he receives guidance from (which he sometimes listens to, sometimes doesn't) through the agency of his assigned mediums (at first, the ever annoying Doyle, and later, when Doyle was given the boot, Cordelia inherited his visionary gift).

I myself am unsure at what point the "Higher Powers" were first mentioned in the Buffy cosmogony. What the Higher Powers are is vague at best, but they seem to generally be Good (if that term has any meaning). If they have an opposite number, it seems to be a vague group of elder demon sorts whom to date have only been referred to by Wolfram & Hart as the 'senior partners'.

Whether these 'senior partners' have anything to do with the recently discovered "Hellgods", of which the recently defeated Glory was one, is entirely unclear, as, exactly, what a 'Hellgod' is... except that when incarnate in roughly human form, as Glory was, they are immensely strong, utterly invulnerable to nearly all harm, capable of moving at incredible speed, possessed of astonishing perceptions, unfettered by any normal sense of morality or ethics, really good looking, and generally, very annoying. Apparently, they also need to eat some sort of psychic energy generated by humans from time to time, too.

Glory had earthly minions, worshippers, and followers who were mostly demons, but she also seemed to form a psychic link with all the humans whose brains she had drained of their 'cohesive energies'. The Higher Powers have, or had, at least two minions, called Oracles, and for all I know may have more.

Various demons, like humans, have their own strange religions, none of which, to date, have been shown as being any more valid than any other.

There are various religious writings and prophecies, many of which these days seem to concern themselves with Buffy and Angel, which are fairly often consulted by both the forces of good and evil. Exactly where these prophetic writings came from is, generally, vague.

E. MAGIC

Magic seems to be a mish-mash on Buffy-Earth, a catch all that includes psychic manifestations (as when Willow and Tara join hands to psychokinetically shift a soda machine across the room), various forms of spell (nearly all of which seem to require reading out of books and audible chanting, and some of which require material components, as well), invocations, summonses, enchanted objects, potions, necromancy, living supernatural creatures, and I don't know what all.

As with nearly any supernaturally based popular fiction, 'magic' is a catch all phrase used to explain pretty much anything that doesn't fit into natural physical law as we understand it. (I say 'pretty much anything' because we've also seen super-science used to explain things like mechanisms that freeze time and female androids so lifelike that not only do they have functional artificial self awareness, but they can also be sexually intimate with both human and vampire males.)

Apparently, nearly anyone can work 'magic' if they have the right information and the correct material components... Giles worked a fairly powerful enchantment straight from a book in "The Witch", claiming that was his first casting ever, and at the end of the fourth season, Giles, Xander and Willow all joined together with Buffy in working a very powerful psychic bonding spell. Perhaps the weirdest example of an utter novice casting an amazingly powerful spell came when Jonathan altered reality on a fundamental level to transform himself from nerdy nobody to a universally beloved superstar, media god, and general all around superhero.

However, there do also seem to be those who have a natural talent for magic, like Willow, Tara, Amy's evil mother the Super Cheerleader, and various other magical 'specialists'... wizards like Ethan Rain, etc.

Magic, apparently, has few if any limits to its power, as Buffy's little sister Dawn recently and apparently successfully did a spell to resurrect their dead mother Joyce... and as far as that goes, Dawn's very existence is living testimony to the vast powers of magic, as she herself did not exist prior to the start of the fifth season, when some monks molded an ancient, mystic energy talisman called the Key into the shape of a younger sister for Buffy, to guarantee that Buffy would protect it from Glory... and in so doing, reshaped reality so that everyone 'remembers' Dawn as having always existed, although, apparently, these memories are false, and in fact, Dawn's current form as a human teenage girl is only a bit over six months old at the time of this writing.

I should note here that one of the few actual limits on magic, as noted in the last season during the recurring illness of Buffy's mother Joyce, is that it's no good for healing. This seems a strange departure from the thaumaturgical traditions of most historical magical mythology and supernatural fictions, where healing magics are usually one of the most common applications of any sorcery. However, it's a wise and farsighted one, since I know from my own experiences as a roleplaying referee that once healing magic becomes common in a particular fictional reality, fear of injury and even death tends to quickly vanish.

With magic apparently being incapable of helping anyone heal from natural injury or disease on Buffy-Earth, Slayers and their helpers still have to worry about the consequences of being smacked around by demons... which is, all in all, a good thing. If Willow could simply wave a magic wand whenever a troll throws someone through a window and make it all better, there would be little realistic sense of violence having actual consequences in the show.

What 'magic' actually is, other than a constantly recurring plot device, remains unclear.

F. LYCANTHROPY

Otherwise known as the curse that turns certain people into really stupid looking fuzzy padded wolf-like entities under a full moon. Having not yet seen the episode in which Oz's werewolf nature is revealed, I don't know if lycanthropy in the BUFFY universe is a genetic condition passed along from parent to child (as in some werewolf legends) or is spread by contagion (as in others). However, apparently, under a full moon, something happens that causes certain people to transform into bestial creatures that ravage around murderously until the moon goes down, at which point, they turn back into their more normal human form and awaken, with little or no memories of what transpired while they were wolfed up.

In fact, it's almost as if the full moon acts as a gateway or activator that allows some extradimensional, normally disembodied, entity to possess certain people who are afflicted with some kind of natural condition that makes them receptive to such possession and transformation.

To an extent, lycanthropes seem to be 'demons' along the same lines as vampires... which is to say, they are humans who have their bodies taken over by an inhuman force, and transformed in such ways as to gain superhuman powers. They also seem to lose their 'souls' during the transformation, at least to the extent that the soul provides any sort of moral guidance or higher ethical judgement capacity.

I myself don't know much more about lycanthropy on BUFFY-Earth. Apparently, werewolves can be caused pain and even knocked unconscious by conventional assaults (Slayers punches and kicks, the Initiatives' electrical blasters). Whether it takes silver to kill them, or decapitation would do it as well, or a stake to the heart, I have no idea. Interestingly, while the standard trigger for lycanthropy is the full moon, the episode where Oz returned briefly to Sunnydale (only to leave again hastily after being captured and tortured by the Initiative for a little while) established that the full moon isn't necessary for the transformation, as Oz turned into a werewolf simply from the stress of finding out that his ex girlfriend Willow was now carrying on a romantic relationship with Tara. (Finding out that you were apparently so lousy in bed you drove your beloved ex into the arms of a woman would have to be stressful.) Therefore, it would seem that someone afflicted with lycanthropy could conceivably learn to make the change whenever they desired... although whether they could also learn to maintain some sort of intelligent control over themselves while in their stupid-looking, dog-suited, werewolf forms remains at this point speculative.

G. THE UNIVERSE

As briefly mentioned prior to this under 'In General', we know by now that Buffy and her merry crew dwell in a universe that is actually a multiverse, which is to say, that is comprised of sheafs of different dimensions or realities, including various 'alternate timelines' in which the events that take place in the normal, TV reality of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER occurred differently, thus creating apparently an entirely different worldline.

We know (or have been told) that demons inhabited the Earth before humans did.

We know that the physical laws of reality as we understand them are not consistent or entirely binding and can be/often are circumvented by magic and the supernatural.

We know that history can be altered, and, thankfully, it can also be altered back, which at least implies that time travel is possible (although, honestly, given how time travel is normally abused in nearly every TV show and movie that uses it, I hope BUFFY and ANGEL both stay away from it as a story theme for the foreseeable future). We also know, as proved by Jonathan, that reality can similarly be altered by magical invocations, although his spell seemed to be more along the lines of the spell which created Dawn, and the attendant false memories of her past, than the wish granted by Anyanka to Cordelia, which actually altered history.

We know that death is not as final in the Buffy universe as it is in ours, as both Buffy and Angel have, in the past, 'died' and been resurrected, as, more recently, has Darla and, to a limited extent, Buffy's mother Joyce. (We can also take for granted that Buffy will fairly soon be resurrected once again in some way, since her 'death' at the end of the fifth season seems little more than a cheap and vindictive way for the WB to try to keep some of Buffy's stupider fans from realizing that she is actually simply moving over to UPN for the next two years.)

We know that souls exist, that reincarnation is apparently a valid phenomenon in at least some cases, and that there are, apparently, many different kinds of afterlife and several different Hells.

H. THE ORGANIZATIONS

Any attempt by me to list the various specific organizations apparently unique to Buffy-Earth in this Handbook is doomed to failure, at least, as far as the notion of such a list being complete and exhaustive, because I just haven't seen all the episodes, and doubtless, I won't be able to remember all the ones from the episodes I have seen. Still, I'll do what I can here.

THE WATCHERS - As far as I can figure it out, these guys are apparently a secret society of human occultists devoted in general to the accruing of supernatural power to humanity through the mastery of occult knowledge, the protection of humanity from aggression by demonic and other supernatural forces, and the general defense of the Earth, as humanity's residence and home, from incursions by demons. They specifically seem to have a hard on for vampires, and they seem to have appointed themselves as the managers of, bosses to, chroniclers of, and support apparatus for the current Slayer. Whether the Watchers had anything to do with the actual creation of the Slayer is still unknown (at least, to me).

The Watchers all, at least so far, appear to be British and, for the most part, have all to date seemed fairly ineffective at anything except doing research. At worst arrogant, pompous, violent, amoral, lawless, stupid, bullying, fascist, and incompetent, and at best reasonably useful in terms of digging out useful, obscure occult information pertinent to a specific supernatural situation or manifestation, the Watchers are, for the most part, colossal pains in the ass. Giles is obviously the best of the lot, and is generally and quite clearly a competent and formidable fighter, scholar, mentor, teacher, and even, to some limited extent, amateur mage... and for all that, his usual contribution to any battle is getting knocked unconscious in the first ten seconds. The rest of the Watchers are either comedy relief, obstacles, or active enemies, depending on the context within which they show up during any given episode.

Whether the Watchers consider themselves to be agents of the Higher Powers, as Angel for the most part thinks of himself, I don't know (although, now that I think of it, it seems doubtful, since the Higher Powers clearly regard both the Slayer and the Vampire With A Soul as their own personal earthly paladins, while the Watchers think of Angel as something vaguely annoying and unpleasant they'd happily drive a stake through if opportunity would only present itself). As a general rule, the Watchers seem to be Good Guys, which may be one of Joss Whedon's more subtle statements on the dangers of trying to apply too many black and white standards to an entirely grey world.

THE INITIATIVE - a top secret military project created by the American government to address the 'demon problem'. These guys were pretty much the backdrop for Buffy's fourth season and were never remarkably competent at anything except creating Adam, a sort of Frankenstein monster built of mingled human and demon body parts who wound up being the major bad guy for the fourth season. The Initiative represents the interesting concept that the American government knows about the presence of the supernatural on Buffy-Earth and is trying to do something about it, both in terms of studying it and actively combating it. The Initiative was dissolved after Adam attacked and nearly destroyed it at the end of the fourth season, although Buffy, Willow, Xander and Giles did manage to destroy Adam. Riley was originally one of the Initiative's super soldiers who went renegade when he saw them torturing and otherwise mistreating Oz, one of Buffy's friends who happens to be a lycanthrope. The Initiative may be yet another of Whedon's subtle parables on exactly how difficult it is to actually define Good and Evil in a non-objective universe.

WOLFRAM & HART - take every 'evil lawyer' joke you've ever heard and distill them down to a black, bubbling, and bilious essence and you have this particular L.A. law firm. Recurring enemies to Angel, Wolfram & Hart seem to be composed mainly of humans on the lower levels (although they employ demons of all sorts to do various different illegal and violent jobs), but are apparently run from 'on high' (or Down Below) by mysterious Senior Partners who are either very powerful demons or some other form of evil, nefarious supernatural entity that seems to revel in evil and chaos for its own sake. Wolfram & Hart, inasmuch as they seem to have any specific agenda besides continually pissing off Angel, apparently live to corrupt as many humans as possible, encouraging and supporting wickedness and depredations large and small, among vicious individual criminals and rapacious corporations. Recent episodes of Angel have implied a connection between Wolfram & Hart and a vicious demonic priesthood that treats human beings as cattle.

THE TRIBUNAL - a plot device that showed up in the first episode of Angel's second season; apparently, they administer interdimensional duels to settle various important matters between demonic and other supernatural forces. Angel's defeat of an unnamed champion won the protection of the Tribunal for a pregnant woman and her unborn child, from the supernatural forces that were trying to kill both of them.

THE GENTLEMEN - 'storybook monsters' who had the power (through mystic devices) of stealing all the voices of everyone within a certain area, which was darned convenient for them, because their only vulnerability was that they'd be killed by the sound of a princess' scream. They all blew up real good when Buffy managed to break the box holding everyone's voice inside it and shortly thereafter shriek like a great big sissygirl. I myself want to note that the Gentlemen, for reasons never explicated, had one of the most subtly creepy groups of minions I've ever seen, an unnamed bunch of hyperactive, hunchbacked dwarves in unfastened straightjackets who endeared themselves to me forever by giving Riley a darned good thumping. In fact, the Gentlemen themselves may be the BUFFY franchise's most successful effort at creating a truly chilling monster... most likely because so much of their background and motivation was left as a complete mystery. Well, they also LOOKED really creepy.

THE KNIGHTHOOD OF BYZANTIUM - a bunch of lunatic refugees from your local Renaissance Fair who run around in the modern day wearing chainmail, riding horses, wielding swords and maces and lances and crossbows, and who seriously expect to make some kind of reasonable showing in the endless battle against the evil of the Hellgod Glory while encumbered by and accoutred in all this obsolete, archaic, and ineffectual crap. Actually, the Knighthood seemed more determined to find and destroy the Key, which of course, makes a great deal more sense given the horses and armor and medieval weaponry and such. (Right.) Without a doubt one of the weakest, dumbest, and most thoroughly surreal plot elements ever introduced into BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER; apparently, their only real purpose was to show up towards the end of the season and explain to Buffy and her friends what the Key was and why they were trying to destroy it... or so I assume, since immediately after their Grandmaster explained all that, Glory showed up and ripped them all limb from limb with her bare hands.

Exactly how the Knighthood managed to find Buffy and friends when the Scooby Gang was desperately and at random fleeing Glory in a stolen recreational vehicle, and how the Knighthood got themselves, their tons of obsolete martial gear, and all their damn horses, to that particular desert back road just in time to ambush our heroes, is something we may never know. As with the Initiative, though, the best thing about the Knighthood of Byzantium is that they're all dead.

THE SCOOBY GANG - stupid name for Buffy and her friends, a group whose membership fluctuates, but whose core members remain, to date, Buffy, Giles, Xander, and Willow, which also currently includes Willow's current girlfriend and powerful witch Tara, former vengeance demon Anya, former enemy Spike, and Buffy's brand new kid sister and former Key Dawn. Past Scooby Gang members include Angel, the Vampire With A Soul, Cordelia (currently acting as Angel's medium), Wesley (currently acting more or less as Angel's Watcher, not that Angel really has one, or that Wesley still is one, but he fills the role of the guy who does all the occult research), Oz (lycanthrope, former boyfriend to Willow, and generally the coolest of all the Scoobies past and present, if only for his dry ironic wit) and Riley, great big strong dumb shallow former Initiative soldier and ex boyfriend of Buffy's, who is hopefully by now thoroughly dead somewhere down in South America. Honorary Scooby membership should probably go to nerdy Jonathan (who briefly managed to cast a spell transforming himself into a universally adored superstar and near media deity) and, I suppose, to Faith, although she'd probably beat me up for saying so. I suppose it's very anti-pop culture of me, but I'd almost actually prefer Willow's facetiously suggested group name of "the Slayerettes".

ANGEL INVESTIGATIONS - Angel's merry crew. Includes himself, Wesley, Cordelia, and Gunn. Doyle, Angel's first medium, is now (thankfully) dead.

Various vampire groups - Vampires seem to have a tendency to join goofy societies and gangs. This seems very weird to me, but nonetheless, it happens a lot on BUFFY and ANGEL. If they're not stalking around in samurai outfits worshipping a huge fat demon, they're signing up with some weird pyramid scheme/ self-help cult or running errands for the Master or I don't know what all. As a general rule, however long these groups may have been around for, they only seem to ever run into Buffy or Angel once, said encounter which these organizations do not seem to survive.

DINGOES ATE MY BABIES - Oz's one time garage band. Once described by Sunnydale High's snotty newspaper editor as 'playing their instruments as if they had plump Polish sausages taped to their fingers' (to which Oz responded, "that's fair").

I. THE CHARACTERS - The basis of all good, interesting, and entertaining fiction is now, always has been, and always will be, characterization. Our immortal tales in any medium, be it television, film, radio, comic books, or prose fiction, are always most notable and memorable for the characters that inhabit them. The Death Star blowing up wouldn't have mattered if Lucas hadn't made us care about Luke Skywalker and his group of friends; Victor Lazlo getting the letters of transit and escaping Casablanca, with or without his wife along, wouldn't have meant a damn thing to us if we didn't care about all the characters involved; nobody would ever have watched THE MUPPET SHOW if the little styrofoam creatures hadn't seemed like real and interesting people; and if the cast and characters of HILL STREET BLUES had been as consistently boring and two dimensional as those in TOMB RAIDER, that show wouldn't have run for seven seasons and been hailed universally as the greatest serial police drama of all time.

When it comes to characterization, BUFFY has it covered. Oh, sure, the internal continuity may occasionally suffer from some inconsistencies, but every regular character in BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER is a fully fleshed out, three dimensional, and interesting person in their own right, wonderfully written and brilliantly portrayed by an ensemble of the most talented writers and actors in the business.

Because I'm just a darned geek and you're going to have to deal with it, the following entries on each character are set up to an extent in actual RPG Player's Handbook type fashion. My fellow nerds in the audience should enjoy this, or at least, be able to tolerate it; if you don't and/or can't, and yet, somehow, claim to be a BUFFY fan (otherwise, why would you be reading this?) then... get over yourself.

The framework I'm going to use to discuss and define the various characters below is as follows:

AGE: The actual age, where known, of the character. I'll often approximate.
PHYSICALITY: In general description, not numbers. I'll use words like 'below average', 'average', 'above average', 'athletic', 'very athletic', 'Olympic level athlete', 'superhuman', etc.

APPEARANCE: This will be denoted in 'Hunk' or 'Babe' levels, with additional description as necessary. Generally on a scale of 1 to 10, with 5 being average looking, 1 being exceptionally monstrous and gross (like the Gentlemen), and 10 being damned near godlike in mortal form. A 6 to 7 is cute to very cute, so nobody reading this should get all upset if their favorite sexual fantasy on either BUFFY or ANGEL only gets a 7. If I don't judge your favorite guy the way you do, chalk it up to me being mostly straight. Beyond 7, we're getting into media star territory.

MENTALITY: No numbers, will deal with intellect, knowledge, and the capacity to use both effectively.

GENDER: Obvious

ORIENTATION: Sexual orientation, which is important in BUFFY and ANGEL so be quiet

SEXUAL HISTORY: As a general rule, I'll just use 'experienced' and 'inexperienced', with occasional modifiers when necessary

RACE: Generally, what a character is, biologically and ethnically. I'll tend to mostly use this to define whether a character is human or demon, and if so, whether they deviate substantially from those racial norms.

AFFILIATION: Any groups they belong to

MORAL ALIGNMENT: Their general moral behavior. Will generally range from 'goodie goodie' (people like Buffy and Willow, who will Never Do Wrong) to Good (Xander, Oz; more normal folk with well developed morals but who aren't nuts about it) through Neutral to Evil to extremes of Evil as noted.

CHARACTER TYPE: In as much as I can make it up. Often used for laughs.

COMBAT VALUE: Ranging from 0 - 20, with '0' being the combat value of a comatose paraplegic, and 20 being the combat value of Glory or something like the Mayor's giant snake form. 10 is around the normal human limit; beyond that, we get into supernatural creatures and other superhuman beings.
NOTES: Extensive commentary on things I find to be of interest about the characters. Will usually include any employment, extraneous skills or abilities, family connections, etc.

BUFFY SUMMERS -
AGE: Young Adult. While dead at present, Buffy was 16 when she first showed up at Sunnydale High (we assume, she had her 17th birthday party in the second season) and therefore, should have just turned 20.
PHYSICALITY: As a Slayer, Buffy has superhuman physical abilities, including strength, coordination, agility, health, endurance, resilience, and recovery from damage. She has snapped police handcuff chains that were securing her wrists behind her back, and most recently demonstrated strength substantially superior to that of Spike, a very strong vampire, when she easily manipulated a mystic troll hammer in combat that Spike could barely lift a few inches off the floor.
APPEARANCE: Babe level 10 or so (hey, it's her show.)
MENTALITY: Buffy is quick witted, resourceful, much more intelligent than she gives herself credit for, and she has an indomitable and relentless will and enormous mental resilience. As a Slayer she has a limited clairvoyant capacity that she cannot consciously control, and at least the potential for enhanced senses to help her detect the presence of Undead.
GENDER: Female ORIENTATION: Straight SEXUAL HISTORY: Experienced
RACE: Mystically Altered (Super) Human / Caucasian (WASP)
AFFILIATION: Serves the Higher Powers, works for the Watcher's Council, Slayer.
MORAL ALIGNMENT: Goodie goodie
CHARACTER TYPE: Fighter.
COMBAT VALUE: 15 - the equal of any single or small group of human or normal, competent, or expert vampire warriors. Has beaten in combat every other character roughly in her power level, like Angel, Spike, or Faith.
NOTES:
Number one with a bullet, Buffy is the current Slayer. (Well, as of this writing, she's currently and presently dead, but it seems safe to assume that she is, in fact, just resting, and will get better once her show starts up again this fall on UPN.) Buffy started out shallow and subliterate and, god knows, is still not exactly someone you'd ever expect to hear discourse eruditely on the stylistic differences between Henry James and Thomas Pynchon. (Not that I could do so myself, or would want to hear her or anyone else do so.) Nonetheless, watching Buffy's evolution from wannabe cheerleader who fought accepting her destiny as Slayer into an introspective, charismatic, and truly noble hero who is finally starting to realize her full potential as mankind's supernaturally empowered protector against evil has been one of the most fascinating aspects of the series.

Like all active Slayers, Buffy possesses various superhuman capacities, including enhanced strength, agility, speed, durability, and regeneration from injuries. The parameters of Buffy's powers seem capable of expansion to a degree not yet known, as she continues to train and gain experience in her role as humanity's protector from supernatural evil.

Buffy possesses extensive, and steadily increasing, levels of martial skills, both unarmed and in various forms of basic pre-Industrial weaponry, with an emphasis on that which is most effective against vampires (crossbows, wooden impalement weapons, and edged weapons which can decapitate). She has also picked up over the years quite a bit of supernatural lore without really seeming to be aware of it, although she still is frequently forced to resort to Giles' greater knowledge and his extensive occult library. She is also a highly skilled acrobat.

Buffy's innate nobility and heroic nature have more and more come to the fore in the past five years of her campaigns against unnatural evil, as her intrinsic ferocious loyalty to friends and family has subtly begun to evolve into a general devotion to the welfare of all innocent humans everywhere. Although Buffy constantly complained about and actively resisted her destiny as Slayer early in her career, and still occasionally evinces a wistful desire to be 'just a girl', she has more and more come to accept the duties and responsibilities of her office and as she has, has become increasingly capable with and confident of her skills and abilities as a Slayer.

One particular Slayer power apparently lost between original movie and TV series is the ability of Slayers to detect the presence of vampires through sudden stomach cramps. Perhaps Whedon felt this was too vaguely unsettling for a TV audience, but the jettisoning of this particular aspect of the Slayer's superhuman capacities is regrettable if only because without it, there seems no particular reason why the Slayer must always be female. In the first episode of the TV show, Giles stated explicitly that as a Slayer, Buffy should be able to tell when vampires are present in her proximity simply through her own superhuman perceptions... a sort of 'vampire sense', if you will... but clearly, this is a capacity Buffy didn't develop in the first season (otherwise, she would never have been surprised by the eventual revelation of Angel's true nature). If she has evolved this particular perceptual power since, we've seen no indication of it, but it's been quite some time since Buffy actually faced a serious vampire threat or enemy. (Not counting Dracula, whom I think most likely wasn't actually a vampire, regardless of what he claimed.) So, she may very well have learned simply to sense vampires and just never had cause to mention it as yet.

Buffy has demonstrated the typical Slayer ability of clairvoyant dreams on several occasions.

Buffy's romantic/sexual history prior to Sunnydale is murky. Movie-Buffy, as portrayed by Kristy Swanson, seemed pretty clearly to be sexually active with her football player boyfriend, and by the end of the film seemed to be romantically involved with the ruffianish Pike, but how much of that applies to TV-Buffy remains unclear. TV-Buffy, in the first episode, took out of her closet and briefly wore the same leather jacket Pike gave Movie-Buffie at the end of the original film, but what that specifically means I have no idea. Whatever the case, since moving to Sunnydale, TV-Buffy has been romantically/sexually involved with Angel and Riley, been the subject of an intense unrequited crush by Xander, and gone out on casual dates with a few other random guys like Owen. It should be noted that Buffy told her mother Joyce that Angel had been 'the first time', and many may, if they wish, take that as definitive. For myself, I merely note that everyone lies about sex, and you can multiply the likelihood of a 16 year old girl lying to her mother about when her first time was by any factor you care to.

Buffy's mother, Joyce, is dead (well, to be fair, so is Buffy, currently). Buffy's surviving family now consists of her estranged father (whom we have only seen briefly once, as far as I know, in a flashback that never really happened, although we also heard his voice yelling at Buffy's mom in another flashback in 'Becoming') and her younger sister Dawn, who isn't really her younger sister, but never mind that right now. If Buffy has aunts, uncles, cousins, or living grandparents, I've never heard of them.

It's worth noting that since Buffy's parents were apparently still together at the point where she first became a Vampire Slayer (as noted, again, in a flashback in "Becoming"), and her mother was clearly alone by the time they arrived in Sunnydale, Buffy may blame herself for them breaking up. (Perhaps this has been explicated in an episode I haven't yet seen.) It's also worth noting that if, indeed, Buffy's dad disappeared from the scene shortly after the first outbreak of mass vampirism that caused Buffy to be activated as a Vampire Slayer, and hasn't been seen since, but is supposedly "in Spain with his secretary", he might be scheduled to show up again sometime soon... as a vampire. It's the wannabe comic book scripter in me that loves melodrama that suspects this.

Buffy was a full time student at Sunnydale College. How she's buying groceries at this point I have no idea. (Well, I do; she's dead. How she was doing it prior to her death, but after her mother's death, remains a mystery. I suppose Joyce had life insurance, or maybe Buffy sued the ass off the hospital that let her mother go home too soon. Or maybe Giles and Buffy both have a big secret stash of gold and gems they've taken off the bodies and out of the lairs of various deceased monsters over the years. Hey, it's what fantasy roleplaying characters live off.)

Sarah Michelle Gellar has done such a superlative job portraying the nuanced and complex character of Buffy that she's managed to overcome the insane prejudice against fantasy shows that those who pass out awards have held for all eternity, and while BUFFY hasn't won anything prestigious yet, Sarah herself keeps getting nominated. This is doubtless simply because as the star, she gets the most camera time and interesting scenes; BUFFY as a show is blessed by one of the most consistently talented repertoires on television.

RUPERT GILES -
AGE: Mid-Age Adult. Giles is a healthy forty-ish.
PHYSICALITY: Above average/athletic.
APPEARANCE: Hunk level 7 (I suppose) in a mature, competent Older Man kind of way.
MENTALITY: Well and widely educated, formidably intelligent, well disciplined.
GENDER: Male ORIENTATION: Straight SEXUAL HISTORY: Experienced
RACE: Human / Caucasian (WASP)
AFFILIATION: Watcher
MORAL ALIGNMENT: Good to Neutral (able to do bad stuff to accomplish good ends)
CHARACTER TYPE: Scholar/fighter/mage/stuck up Brit
COMBAT VALUE: 6 to 8, depending on whether he's had time to equip himself, and how pissed off he is. Good against normal humans and up to competent vampires, needs rescuing or at least back up when up against a serious villain.
NOTES:
I didn't intend to list characters in the order of their appearance (and if I did, I'm stiffing Sunnydale High's first principal, but who cares), but in point of fact, I just think Giles is second only to the Slayer herself in importance in the ongoing saga. Even in the first three seasons, where apparently Giles tended to get knocked unconscious by the bad guys at least once per episode, he was still an utterly cool character: intelligent, erudite, enormously knowledgeable, coolly competent in virtually any crisis, and the absolute bulwark for Buffy and her friends without which all of them would be entirely lost. Over the last five seasons Giles has emerged as not only quite a good fighter (when he doesn't immediately get punched into oblivion) and master magical merchant, but also as an astonishingly good guitarist and vocalist (although, as he ruefully admitted to an infrequent love interest who came and went in the fourth season, he was not really a founding member of Pink Floyd). Clearly Buffy's father figure and the crusty patriarchal center of the whole Scooby Gang, the relentlessly British, eternally pompous, and ever admirable Giles is one of the mainstays of the show.

In addition to his command of occult lore and mastery of the art of fast and thorough research, Giles apparently was at one time (during his 'Ripper' period) a vampire fighter of remarkable ferocity. Giles' formidability and competence in combat has been shown only rarely, but when given the opportunity, he seems to be quite adequate in battle. Giles also, as mentioned, has a high level of skill at singing and playing the guitar, in addition to laudable musical taste.

Giles has no known living relatives I'm aware of, and has been romantically linked in the past to the late, in cuh RED ibly hot Jenny Calendar, as well as a good looking British black 'orgasm friend' whose name I can't remember, and who dropped Rupert like a hot rocket after discovering that all that pretentious crap he'd been spewing for years about the supernatural forces of evil was actually true, when she nearly got killed by the Gentlemen during a stateside visit. (What Giles was doing allowing a girlfriend to visit him on the Hellmouth I have no idea; I wouldn't encourage anyone I cared about to vacation there.) He also slept with Buffy's mother Joyce repeatedly (on one occasion) when they were under the influence of a magic spell. Few would deny that he seriously needs to have his ashes hauled again by now.

Giles used to be employed as Sunnydale High School librarian, a job which presumably ended when the school blew up real good, and has recently been reinstated as a Watcher, with retroactive salary. He also owns and operates the Magic Shop, although where he got the money to buy it, as the school was blown up and he was fired from the Watchers at that point, I have no idea. (It must be nice to be a TV character. They have huge apartments and rarely seem to have or need any discernible source of income.) (On the other hand, they occasionally come home and find the dead bodies of their romantic interests artistically arranged in their beds by Angel, so never mind.)

Anthony Stewart Head gives us a remarkable characterization every episode, and the only reason I don't wax more rhapsodic about his amazing performances as Giles is that every other member of the BUFFY ensemble is just as good.

XANDER HARRIS
AGE: Young Adult, same general age as Buffy.
PHYSICALITY: Above average/athletic.
APPEARANCE: Hunk level 6 (I suppose).
MENTALITY: Average/above average intelligence, little discipline, reliable and resourceful.
GENDER: Male ORIENTATION: Straight SEXUAL HISTORY: Experienced
RACE: Human / Caucasian
AFFILIATION: Scoobie Gang.
MORAL ALIGNMENT: Good.
CHARACTER TYPE: Thief/fighter.
COMBAT VALUE: 6 to 7. Initially a buffoon, but quickly picked up enough combat experience to be effective in many situations. Can handle most human opponents or a somewhat competent vamp. Trolls and expert vampire warriors are out of his league. Swings a mean wrecking ball.
NOTES:
- from his start as being pretty much Buffy's comical bumbling sidekick, Xander has evolved into a three dimensional character in his own right, due to a combination of BUFFY's generally superior scripts and Nicholas Brendan's always deft acting. While Xander hardly ever gets to do anything that displays actual competence on screen (at least, in the action scenes, where anyone being competent but Buffy would kind of detract from Buffy's purpose in existence), his insurmountable courage and unquestionable loyalty, as well as his geekish sensibilities and constant comic book references, endeared him to me early and often. Xander has grown slowly but surely over the five years we've been watching him, from being at the center of a rather trite and predictable unrequited love triangle in the first season (Xander had a crush on Buffy which Buffy was utterly unaware of and apathetic about, Willow had a seriously desperate crush on Xander that Xander himself was blithely unaware of) to being a staunch and invaluable friend and comrade to both Buffy and Willow, while entering into one of the most enjoyable and believable (if unlikely) romances in television with ex-vengeance demon Anya.

Despite the fact that Xander has no explicit special supernatural abilities at all, he has proven himself so thoroughly that Buffy no longer even hesitates to rely on him in dangerous situations, telling the Watcher's Council earlier this season that he was an essential part of her team. However, I think Xander does have a specific superhuman ability that no one, not even he, is aware of.

I myself posit that, although no one articulates it fully, the rest of the Scooby Gang realizes instinctively that Xander's primary attribute is, in fact, staggeringly good luck, so adding him into the mix at any given time certainly can't hurt. I mean, think about it... Xander is, if not a bumbling idiot, then certainly the surrogate Normal Guy for everyone in the audience. He is obviously written into and kept in the show at least partially as comic relief, and yet, he also hangs around with the Slayer, on top of a Hellmouth, maladroitly involving himself in supernatural conflicts and demonic warfare often on a near-apocalyptic level... and he always, somehow, survives.

While I've been pleased to see Xander being occasionally depicted as having a bit more depth than a bumbling stooge, and the successes in his personal life have met with applause here, I still must say that if he weren't the flat out luckiest human being on the face of the planet, he'd be dead forty or fifty times over by now. When was the last time Xander even got HURT in a pitched fight? Wracking my brains, I have to think it was the broken arm he suffered during "Becoming", when Drusilla and her minions raided the library to kill Kendra and put the snatch on Giles... and just the fact that Xander survived that attack at all has to go down in the 'staggeringly lucky' column. Plus, if we're going to even remotely take seriously Xander's wrecking ball strike on Glory in the Season Finale, the only explanation for it is simply phenomenal luck.

Let's remember that when the Watcher's Council asks Buffy exactly what the hell she's doing letting Xander run around having adventures with her... unlike Willow, Tara, or Anya, he brings no special powers, experience, or knowledge to the mix... Buffy can't even remotely explain it, either. She tosses off some bit of dialogue about how Xander has more field time than the Watcher's Council combined, but that's simply a factual description of a ridiculous phenomenon, not an explanation of it. Xander's survival after five years of being the Slayer's near constant companion and sidekick through hundreds of adventures and half a dozen Apocalypses can only be explained by astonishing, superhuman levels of good fortune... and that's what he brings to the Scooby Gang.

Well, that, and a lot of invaluable tactical and strategic training gained directly from reading X-MEN comics.

Actually, in one of the weirder, and frankly, more ridiculous, plot developments of the BUFFY franchise, it turns out Xander does have a great deal of useful tactical and strategic military training... all stemming from the third season Halloween episode, when an evil enchantment cast by Ethan Rain caused everyone in a specific area of Sunnydale to be transformed into whatever costume they were wearing. As Xander was dressed as a soldier, he became an archetypical combat soldier... and apparently, he remembers being that archetypical soldier, and can now draw on that training at will. It's weird and stupid, and to me seems a pretty obvious and pathetic attempt to find some way to make Xander more pragmatically useful to the gang. However, it's been demonstrated several times that he does have these skills, so it seems we're stuck with it.

Xander has also turned out to be an apparently expert carpenter, bricklayer and all around small construction contractor, and wields a mean wrecking ball. At the close of this last season, Xander proposed to his girlfriend of the last two seasons, former 'patron spirit of scorned women' Anya.

According to Anya, Xander is a 'Viking in the sack', although she may have simply been trying to build up his ego (Faith certainly didn't seem overly impressed with Xander's one time performance with her). In addition to Anya and Faith, Xander has been romantically linked in the past to Cordelia Chase (I have no idea if they slept together), at one time had a monstrous unrequited crush on Buffy, and was the subject of an equally huge and unrequited crush by Willow.

Xander's parents are apparently perpetually squabbling and reconciling lushes he doesn't care for overly. He has no siblings or other relatives I am aware of.

Xander works for a construction contractor in a supervisory position, and apparently is well thought of by his employer, and well paid.

Nicholas Brendan, I should note, is with the departure of Seth Green probably the most accomplished comedic actor in the BUFFY repertoire. While everyone in the cast has shown a remarkable penchant for doing both subtle and obvious wit and physical comedy, Xander's buffoon is the member of the retinue most consistently tasked with getting the laughs, and Brendan does an extraordinary job bringing his character to three dimensional, interesting, and entertaining life every week.

WILLOW ROSENBERG -
AGE: Young Adult, same general age as Buffy.
PHYSICALITY: Average.
APPEARANCE: Babe level 6 to standard tastes, 9 to 10 to those of us who like smart chicks or when playing her own evil twin from an alternate dimension.
MENTALITY: Above average intelligence, great discipline, well educated, well developed minor psychic abilities, above average occult scholar and powerful magical practitioner.
GENDER: Female ORIENTATION: Bi (confused)
SEXUAL HISTORY: Experienced w. both genders
RACE: Mystically Altered (Super) Human (witch) / Jewish
AFFILIATION: Scoobie Gang.
MORAL ALIGNMENT: Goodie goodie.
CHARACTER TYPE: Mage.
COMBAT VALUE: 1 physically, 10 to 18 or so mystically (she'll kick your ASS, dude). The only known mortal to even mildly hurt Glory with her bare hands.
NOTES:
Willow was obviously early on conceived to be the team's computer geek, but in the second season developed a strong talent for witchcraft and magic after casting a powerful spell that, in Giles words, opened a door in her that she can't close. At this point, her powers have developed to a level where she can telekinetically manipulate small objects pretty much at will, and she was the only member of the Scooby Gang who managed to hurt Glory even slightly.

While most effective magical spells require long incantations, Willow's powers have developed to a point where she can cause the air to thicken and set up mystic barriers simply by concentrating and muttering a word.

What Willow brings to the Scooby Gang is frankly the highest level of supernatural power possessed by anyone in that particular group other than Buffy herself, and of an entirely different order. Willow is a powerful witch with vast 'natural' psychic powers and a huge potential for mastering magic who has already made enormous progress in her studies of sorcery and the various 'black' arts. As mentioned above, she has demonstrated a capacity to casually and deftly manipulate small objects with psychokinesis, even when she is not actually looking at them, and apparently, after making some sort of preparations, is capable of at least temporarily tapping into enough power to actually cause Glory pain. We've seen her create magical vipers, levitate herself and others, manifest really cool looking energy bolts from her hands that were powerful enough to make Glory scream, put up mystic barriers sufficient to hold out hordes of armed attackers, raise mystical wards around fixed locations to keep out specific sorts of supernatural creatures or to warn of the approach of such creatures, enter into the conscious and subconscious mind of a comatose person, and even perform a teleportation spell, although she collapsed for a few days afterward and ruefully admitted she had no idea where she had sent the target of the spell (Glory) to. Oh, she also got Angel's soul back for him once, right before Buffy stabbed him through the heart and booted him through a mystical limbo into Hell. (Dating Slayers is ever a rocky road.)

Willow apparently has a fairly unpleasant dark side she is normally at pains to keep well buried, even (or especially) from herself, which we have only seen evidence of in alternate versions of herself (in an altered timeline where Buffy never came to Sunnydale, a vampiric version of Willow was startlingly vicious) and this last season, when Willow finally went berserk after Glory had attacked and sucked the sanity out of her current love interest, Tara. Willow has also manifested a great deal of authority, personal strength, and natural leadership during several periods when Buffy has been unable to take charge of the Scoobies.

Willow is currently romantically/sexually involved with Tara. In the past, she has been romantically/sexually involved with Oz, and had an unrequited crush on Xander.

Willow apparently has living parents, but I've never seen either of them. She has no other relatives I know of. As with the rest of Buffy's friends, she is apparently an only child.

Willow is a full time student at Sunnydale College. I have no idea what her major is, but given the talent she displayed in taking over Sunnydale High's computer class after Jenny Calendar died, I'd imagine it's probably education.

Probably the most controversially sexually confused of all the members of the Scooby Gang, Willow spent her first season on the show pining for Xander, then hooked up with Oz for much of the second and all of the third season in what seemed to be a very fulfilling relationship for both of them, only to shock everyone (including herself) by falling in love with Tara in the fourth season, after Oz left to find a way to deal with his werewolf problem. Willow and Tara currently seem quite happy, but happy relationships never last in TV Land, and I personally have a hard time accepting that Willow is actually 'gay', given her background. However, Willow's ongoing struggles to define her own sexuality are grist for future character development, and for now, I'll just say that Alison Hannigan's portrayal of Willow is not only up to the very high par set by all the other actors on this show, it's also one of the most demurely sexy renditions of a self proclaimed female nerd/geek I've ever seen.

CORDELIA CHASE
AGE: Young Adult, same general age as Buffy.
PHYSICALITY: Average.
APPEARANCE: Babe level 9, although her personality makes her considerably less attractive to me.
MENTALITY: Average/above average intelligence, little discipline, ditzy, reliable in a crunch, has uncontrollable clairvoyance as a 'gift' from the Higher Powers.
GENDER: Female ORIENTATION: Straight SEXUAL HISTORY: Experienced
RACE: Mystically Altered (Super) Human (medium)
AFFILIATION: formerly Scoobie Gang, now Angel Investigations, serves the Higher Powers as Angel's medium.
MORAL ALIGNMENT: Neutral to Good.
CHARACTER TYPE: Medium/Ditz
COMBAT VALUE: 1. Needs rescuing. Adequate battering weapon. Can kill a really incompetent vampire if given special dispensation from God.
NOTES:
- In the beginning, Cordelia was just an annoyance, and obviously intended to be little more than a foil for Buffy and a constant reminder of the sort of shallow, silly, nasty, cruel, and egocentric girl that Buffy herself most likely would have happily been if she hadn't been forcibly deepened and evolved by her somewhat involuntary experiences as Slayer. Cordie (as everyone calls her) went through the same arduous character evolution as every other regular character on BUFFY has, and although her essentially shallow and frivolous nature resisted change and maturity better and for longer than anyone else's, still, in the end, she pretty much had to grow up at least a little.

I never liked Cordelia much, and still don't, although Charisma Carpenter is both a babe and, as far as I can tell, is pretty much as good an actress as anyone else in the ensemble (which is a very high standard to maintain). Cordelia has in the past had a romantic relationship with Xander (which ended badly) and a brief mutual infatuation with Wesley which didn't survive their first kiss (apparently, one or both of them are actually lousy kissers, judging from the looks on both their faces after they stopped).

While a regular on BUFFY, Cordie had no special powers or skills at all and was mostly just irritating, although she was frequently the catalyst for various adventures, as when her spiteful wish that Buffy had never come to Sunnydale was granted by Anyanka, the vengeance demon and patron spirit of scorned women, resulting in a truly horrific altered timeline in which Cordie herself was killed fairly early on by Undead versions of Xander and Willow, and later on, virtually everyone but Giles was killed at the hands of the Master.

Cordelia became a regular on ANGEL early on in that show's first season and, once Doyle died, apparently had his role as Angel's 'medium' passed along to her. She now gets irregular and unpredictable clairvoyant visions from the Higher Powers meant to guide Angel to the tasks he is supposed to do to 'redeem' himself, and apparently, not being even part demon, is not standing up well to the physical and psychic strain these visions are imposing on her.

From a shallow, selfish, and utterly egocentric beginning, Cordie has evolved considerably (especially since becoming "Vision Girl" for Angel) into a much more compassionate, caring, and altruistic person (although we know this mostly because Wesley tells us so, as Cordie herself rarely does much to display this). Her one-time staggering ignorance of computers has apparently given way to considerable expertise, allowing her to perform the 'cyber geek' function for Angel Investigations as well as provide him with occasional, arbitrary input from a higher plane.

Cordie has gone through a brief romance with a demon that ended up in a vastly accelerated pregnancy, which seems to have put her off men for a while, as she hasn't had any other permanent romantic relationships since. (She did recently have an infatuation with an otherworldly champion in a demon dominated dimension, but it's unlikely she'll be seeing him again soon.) In fact, bad romantic experiences (demonic and otherwise) seem to have converted the one time perpetually flirtatious boychaser into someone who is almost afraid of romance and/or sex.

She lives in an apartment haunted by a ghost named Dennis, who is apparently fond of her. Cordelia has a father and mother that I, at least, have never seen. She works for Angel Investigations, and is trying to break into the acting business. How she manages to pay her rent when Angel apparently never makes any money whatsoever off his various adventures I have no idea.

OZ -
AGE: Young Adult, one year older than Buffy.
PHYSICALITY: Average in human form, superhuman in wolf form.
APPEARANCE: Hunk level 5, but with a charm and appeal that belies his unprepossessing physicality.
MENTALITY: Above average intelligence, great discipline, resourceful and reliable
GENDER: Male ORIENTATION: Straight SEXUAL HISTORY: Experienced
RACE: Mystically Altered Human (Cursed) (Lycanthrope) / Caucasian
AFFILIATION: Scoobie Gang.
MORAL ALIGNMENT: Good/rampaging creature of the night.
CHARACTER TYPE: Van driver/lycanthrope/musician
COMBAT VALUE: 3. Can handle a human opponent or an incompetent vamp, but could use back up. When wolfed up, around a 12.
NOTES:
Gone but not forgotten, the dryly ironic Oz added a certain element of intellectual class to BUFFY that hasn't really been present since the departure of Seth Green, who more than ably portrayed him for two and a quarter seasons. Hooked up in an intermittent but generally intense romantic relationship with Willow, and later cursed with lycanthropy, Oz eventually suffered the fate of all characters whose TV actors feel the beckoning of a big screen movie career, and as such, he is most likely now off sharing a limbo with Detective John Kelly, Dr. Doug Ross, Assistant District Attorney Ben Stone, and various other much missed fictional creations.

Other than his ironic wit and innate sense of class, I've never been sure exactly what Oz brought to the Scooby Gang. His lycanthropy was more an affliction than a power, and other that that, I'm not aware of any special powers or abilities he had, except some unexceptional skills as a bass player in the unexceptional garage band Dingoes Ate My Babies.

Oz was romantically and sexually linked with Willow for most of two seasons. He apparently, like the rest of the Slayer's friends and associates, has no family.

ANYA -
AGE: Around a thousand years old.
PHYSICALITY: Average.
APPEARANCE: Babe level 7, but with an interesting personality that enhances her sex appeal.
MENTALITY: Above average intelligence, very knowledgeable in occult fields, reliable and resourceful, often annoyingly cheerful.
GENDER: Female ORIENTATION: Straight (as far as we know)
SEXUAL HISTORY: Experienced
RACE: Mystically Altered (Super) Human / Human (Altered Demon) (she's weird) Caucasian, apparently
AFFILIATION: Scoobie Gang, former patron spirit of scorned women.
MORAL ALIGNMENT: Neutral to good.
CHARACTER TYPE: Scholar/former demon.
COMBAT VALUE: 1, maybe 2.
NOTES:
First introduced in the exceptional second season episode "The Wish" as Anyanka, "a sort of patron spirit of scorned women", Anya became, apparently, a normal human girl at the end of the episode after her power-amulet was destroyed by Giles. (As that destruction took place in an altered timeline generated by a wish Anyanka granted for Cordelia after she broke up with Xander, I have no idea how much of it, if any, is remembered by the other characters, nearly all of whom died in the altered timeline anyway). Apparently Anya's former status as 'vengeance demon' did become reasonably widely known to the characters, as they seem to have pretty much shunned her up through the end of the third season, when she was reluctantly allowed into the ranks of the Scooby Gang after Xander discovered she had actually been present at a previous Ascension.

While Anya was generally referred to, and treated as, an ex-demon for most of the third and all the fourth season, halfway through the fifth we discovered she had once been human, and accepted the job as 'vengeance demon' for scorned women after a bad break up with her own boyfriend, whom she almost immediately turned into a troll.

Other than various weird and interesting experiences as a vengeance demon for several hundred years, Anya brings little to the Scooby Gang in the way of special skills or powers. She seems to have no discernible psychic or magical powers, isn't particularly useful in a fight (except as a potential missile weapon for larger monsters) and contributes little, other than enthusiasm, a rather unique perspective on human experience, and being a love interest/sex object for Xander.

As a nearly thousand year old ex vengeance demon, Anya has no living family we're aware of. (I have no idea where she lives when she's not sleeping with Xander, but she did recently get a job working for Giles in the Magic Shop.) Other than Xander, her only other known romantic/sexual involvement was with Olaf the Troll, who wasn't a troll at the time.

Anya may well be the most challenging character to portray on the show, and for that reason, Emma Caulfield deserves special recognition for the bizarre charm and subtle personality nuances she infuses Anya with in every episode.

ANGEL
AGE: 200+
PHYSICALITY: Vampiric (superhuman in most regards)
APPEARANCE: Hunk level 10 (he has his own show, c'mon, plus chicks love that brooding King of Pain in the flapping black coat thing)
MENTALITY: Above average intelligence, great discipline, average occult scholar, artistic talent
GENDER: Male ORIENTATION: Straight vanilla / serious dom/sadist
SEXUAL HISTORY: WAY experienced
RACE: Altered (Super) Human (vampire/demon) (cursed) / Caucasian/Irish
AFFILIATION: Scoobie Gang, Angel Investigations, serves the Higher Powers when in mood.
MORAL ALIGNMENT: Goodie goodie/Embodiment of Utter Evil
CHARACTER TYPE: Fighter.
COMBAT VALUE: 14 to 15. Kicks ass, lots of ass. Has never beaten Buffy in a fight, but that's probably due to his inhibitions.
NOTES:
- This guy is complicated. Probably the biggest success story in the BUFFY crew, as he has been successfully spun off into his own series, The Vampire With A Soul is doubtless the single character through whom we have learned the most about the actual state of vampirism on Buffy-Earth, as well as what a 'soul' actually is.

Still, inconsistencies are nearly Angel's middle name. Now that I've seen several first season episodes featuring Angel, it seems fairly clear that when the character was first conceived, Whedon and crew either didn't know he was a vampire, or, if they had that in mind at the time... and there's really no indication of it... they hadn't thought through the ramifications of his having been 'alive' for hundreds of years. The Angel who cruises modern day L.A. kicking ungodly ass with a style and strength nearly the equal of any Slayer (surpassing, apparently, that of Faith, whom Angel has beaten in combat at least once now) and a truly relentless attitude is a far cry from the wimpy, annoying, rather Doylesque Angel who first showed up as a mysterious informant type back in Buffy's first episode. The Angel from early in Buffy's first season was too scared to go with her to face the Master and his minions, which is hardly consistent with Angel as he is now... and as he must have been for the last two centuries, at the very least.

In fact, Angel grew a fairly large set of cojones between the start of the first season of BTVS and the end of that season, since he went from someone who sniveled about being kicked in the back by Buffy and who was scared to confront the Master to someone who went into hand to hand combat with three ferocious vampire assassins without, apparently, a second thought when Buffy was endangered. Again, while this is readily understandable in technical terms (clearly, the character quickly outgrew the vague initial characterization planned for it by the creative team), it still makes it difficult to reconcile Angel's brief period as an annoying Peter Lorre sort with what we now know of his consistent behavior for the past two centuries.

Explaining away this rather embarrassingly reticent and ineffectual inconsistency in Angel's behavior is, however, in retrospect, not all that difficult. Obviously, he wouldn't want a newly arrived Slayer to know he was a vampire, even if the Higher Powers had made it clear he was supposed to hang around and help her in her tasks. Therefore, assuming a somewhat meeker and more generally obsequious persona would be a good way to keep her from suspecting that he was actually a fiendish nightwalking horror in the shape of a man, Angel deliberately adopted a less assertive, threatening, and competent manner than would have been normal for him. As for his refusal to help her go up against the Master, which he ascribed to fear, well, most likely, what he was afraid of was that he'd run into some of his old buddies from back when he was part of the Master's gang, and they'd blurt out, in front of the Slayer, the truth of Angel's Undead nature.

Angel was, according to what we've been told and shown, an unusually cruel, corrupt, and evil creature even by vampire standards, and thus, seems to feel that no matter how much he now tries, he can never truly achieve redemption for the many vile and vicious things he has done in his long existence. Known as Angelus in those dark days before his soul was restored, Angel first slaughtered his entire family, reveling in their terror, and then embarked on a centuries long career of torment and darkness with Darla, the vampire who had sired him, as his constant companion. Angel and Darla later created Drusilla, who later created Spike. Later, after he lost his soul again, he became a vicious, fearsome, and all but unstoppable enemy to Buffy and her friends, not only casually killing any stray human who crossed his path when he was hungry, but also deliberately murdering Jenny Calendar and contriving some of the cruelest psychological tortures for Buffy and her friends imaginable. In fact, if the various seasons of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER can be defined by one particular arch villain or threat in each season, then Angel (along with Spike and Dru) can almost be seen as the arch villain for the last half of the second season, just as the Mayor is for the third, Adam is for the fourth, and Glory is for the fifth. So pronounced was Angel's villainy during his stint without a soul in the second season that he planned to destroy the Earth, and along the way, he actually engineered the death of Kendra, a second Slayer, and personally tortured Giles.

Angel's soul was restored to him by a Gypsy curse in 1898, after which, although he tried, he could no longer bring himself to kill innocents. Leaving Darla, he traveled the world, gradually coming to be more and more tormented by conscience pangs over what he had done in his days as a soulless demon and creature of darkness. It wasn't until 1996, as a homeless, half crazy Angel was scrabbling to catch a rat in a Manhattan alley to satisfy his raging blood thirst, that he was contacted by the Higher Powers, in the form of the rather nebbishy demon Whistler. Angel was offered the chance to become something more than he was, and took it, agreeing to help the new Slayer, Buffy, in her campaigns against evil. Since then, the Higher Powers have apparently indicated he should move on and transfer his attentions at 'saving the innocent' to Los Angeles, where he lived for quite a while earlier in this century.

Angel has all the powers of a typical vampire on Buffy-Earth - superhuman strength and speed, general invincibility to most normal forms of harm (although physical trauma still causes him pain), to the extent that he recently fell from about thirty stories up onto a cement sidewalk and got up after again after being stunned for a few seconds, enhanced perceptions, limited shapeshifting (by which I mean, he can transform his facial features from Normal Human to Slant Eyed Bumpy Browed Slavering Fanged Undead Horror, a transformation that seems automatic when he gets pissed off, but that he can also apparently do at will). He is apparently a very skilled hand to hand combatant and seems to have some facility with various pre Industrial hand weapons. Presumably he speaks several languages. He is a gifted portrait artist, and during intervals when not burdened with a soul, seems to have a vicious and wicked imagination. He has no other appreciable skills I'm aware of, and no hobbies or interests besides redeeming himself by protecting the innocent and 'saving souls'. He is also afflicted with all the vulnerabilities, limitations, and supernatural attributes of a Buffy-Earth vampire. What sets him apart from all other vampires is that he has a soul, but this does not seem to give him any special abilities; in fact, it substantially limits the parameters of his behavior.

The conditions of the Gypsy curse that originally restored Angel's soul, and that was re-enacted faithfully by Willow at the end of the second season, state that Angel must be miserable and unhappy at all times to retain his soul. If he is ever truly happy, even for a second, his soul departs again, and he reverts to evil. This first happened on the night he and Buffy first slept together, and since then, Angel had avoided any sort of sexual or romantic relationship at all while in possession of his soul. However, a recent, utterly despairing liaison with his ex, Darla, showed him that just having sex isn't enough to strip his soul away, which would certainly seem to reflect well on Angel's chances for at least getting laid a bit more in his show from now on.

Oh, Angel apparently knows how to drive, but I really doubt he has a valid driver's license. He is a terrible singer and has execrable musical taste.

Many ancient prophecies seem to be referring to Angel when they speak of The Vampire With A Soul, a sort of Earthly champion and paladin of the Higher Powers, which would seem to indicate that there is more behind the restoration of Angel's higher spiritual values than a simple Gypsy curse.

Angel has been romantically/sexually involved, to the best of my knowledge, with Darla, Drusilla, and Buffy. He mentioned, at one point, that he had known 'dozens of bad girls... hundreds'... but other than Darla and Drusilla, I have no clue who he could be referring to.

Angel appears to have bonded reasonably well with Wesley and Gunn, even after the difficult time of last season when he fired his entire support staff in order to keep them from being drawn into his obsessive and deliberately ruthless hunt for Darla and Drusilla. He has also managed to build a friendship with Cordelia, and rebuild it again after that same difficult period, but given that Cordelia has extensive experience with Angel in his evil persona, I myself would have expected her to be rather less accepting of Angel in the first place and consistently.

Angel is, as far as I know, an unlicensed private investigator, owner and operator of Angel Investigations (which I doubt has a legitimate business license) and owner or lessor (it's now unclear which) of the old former hotel he lives and operates the business out of. What he does for money I have no idea, as Angel Investigations rarely seems to collect even on the few invoices they actually submit to clients. Angel might have some large stash of illicit cash or other wealth laying around somewhere, but if so, Cordelia doesn't seem to be aware of it, as she has often complained about the company being on the verge of insolvency.

Angel has no known family I'm aware of, which only makes sense, given that he's almost three hundred years old, and he killed his entire family himself back in the 18th Century.

In my opinion, David Boreanaz does an absolutely astonishing job portraying this character, who has, over the course of both shows, run the gauntlet from extremes of evil to extremes of nobility and most subtle shades in between. In fact, Boreanaz is such a good actor, and Angel is such a fascinating character, that I'm actually willing to forgive him for being so goddam good looking.

WESLEY WYNDHAM-PRICE -
AGE: Adult, probably mid to late 20s
PHYSICALITY: Above average/athletic.
APPEARANCE: Hunk level 6 or 7, depending on if you like guys in glasses who talk like a ponce.
MENTALITY: Above average intelligence, well educated, above average occult scholar.
GENDER: Male ORIENTATION: Straight, as far as we know SEXUAL HISTORY: Experienced
RACE: Human / Caucasian (WASP)
AFFILIATION: former Watcher, now with Angel Investigations
MORAL ALIGNMENT: Goodie goodie.
CHARACTER TYPE: Scholar/fighter
COMBAT VALUE: 5 - 6 Can handle a human opponent or an incompetent vamp. With help and weapons, can handle big nasty demons.
NOTES:
Originally assigned as a new Watcher for Faith and Buffy after Giles was discharged (I haven't seen that ep yet, so I'm just going on what I've been told), Wesley started out as pretty much little more than comedy relief and a recurring annoyance to Giles, Buffy, and the Scooby Gang. Over time, Wesley has shaped up considerably and proven his worth, as a friend, an occult scholar, and even as a monster fighter. Along with Cordelia, he transferred over from BUFFY to ANGEL about halfway through Angel's first season, after it was decided to get rid of the amazingly obnoxious Doyle.

Wesley is British and, as indicated above, is a moderately competent occult scholar and hand to hand combatant against various demons and monsters. He seems to have the usual Watcher training with pre Industrial hand weapons. He can't sing, and his musical tastes are unknown. He has no known hobbies. He seems reasonably tough for an unenhanced human, as he has to date recovered fully from many injuries requiring hospitalization, including being trampled in a mob melee, being systematically tortured by Faith, and being shot by a zombie police officer.

He and Cordelia once had a huge mutual attraction to each other that they both seem to be quite over. He has been romantically involved with some chick whose name I can't remember, but who was played by the utterly yummy Brigid Walsh, formerly of KINDRED, and who dumped him several episodes back after he got shot by a zombie police officer and nearly died.

Wesley may have some issues with his own sexuality, as he reacts rather violently to being called a ponce.

Wesley apparently has a living father, in England, whose approval he craves but seems unable to attain.

Wesley is currently employed as the nominal acting manager and leader of Angel Investigations.

I can't remember the name of the actor who plays Wesley right now, but he's got a very deft touch for comedy and has done a good job of showing Wesley gradually evolving from his original status as little more than a shallow and annoying cliché to being a full blown, three dimensional, and interesting character in his own right.

RILEY FINN
AGE: Young Adult, a few years older than Buffy.
PHYSICALITY: Naturally an Olympic level athlete, briefly superhuman
APPEARANCE: Hunk level 8 to 9, unless you like your guys intelligent.
MENTALITY: Above average intelligence, good physical discipline, well educated
GENDER: Male ORIENTATION: Straight, but kinky (likes vampiric sex)
SEXUAL HISTORY: Experienced
RACE: Technologically Altered (Super) Human / Human - Caucasian
AFFILIATION: Scoobie Gang, the Initiative
MORAL ALIGNMENT: Goodie goodie.
CHARACTER TYPE: Fighter
COMBAT VALUE: 13/9 When superhuman, Riley was formidable against most creatures. At human level, he's still extremely effective as long as he's appropriately armed.
NOTES:
- Big, burly, relentlessly non-intellectual, and generally a doofus, Riley is a former U.S. Army Special Forces trooper once assigned to The Initiative. Apparently subjected to covert superhuman conditioning treatments by the Initiative's brilliant but insane head scientist, Maggie Walsh, Riley for a time period had superhuman levels of strength, coordination, and pain resistance, although his strength was disproportional to the actual toughness of his unenhanced human body.

Riley became and remained romantically and sexually involved with Buffy from early in the fourth season to early in the fifth. Never being overwhelmingly bright, he became dissatisfied with nothing but sex sex constant SEX with a drop dead gorgeous supernaturally powerful cutie who looked exactly like Sarah Michelle Gellar, embarked briefly on a self destructive career as a willing feedbag for vampire hos, and when that didn't kill him fast enough, rejoined the surviving remnants of former Initiative troopers and went traipsing off to Central America to fight demon hordes.

Riley was not without admirable characteristics, including his remarkably straightforward method for dealing with nests of vampires (he blew up their sheltering crypt with hand grenades during broad daylight) and his penchant for torturing Spike by stabbing him in the heart with a plastic stake over and over again. However, Riley's finest hour (in my eyes) came when he picked a fight with Angel and got his camouflage-clad fascist gun-totin' ass kicked all over the Sunnydale College campus.

Riley was a formidably skilled military Special Forces soldier, specifically trained in fighting various types of demons and supernatural creatures, who also worked as a Teacher's Assistant in a freshman psychology course. His interests and hobbies were all manly stuff like basketball, beer drinking, beating up monsters, and banging Buffy. He eventually left the Initiative after they captured and tortured Oz during one of Oz's lycanthropic phases, trashing his military career by attempting to rescue the beleaguered Scooby. He generally demonstrated initiative, resourcefulness, and a certain cold intelligence in combat situations, making efficient use of his equipment, weaponry and surroundings, as when he took out a cybenetically enhanced Initiative soldier by tricking him into blowing up a leaking oxygen tank he was standing underneath.

Riley has no known family, and his only known romantic or sexual liaison to date has been with Buffy, unless you count being willingly bitten by various vampire hos.

Riley is currently off in Central America somewhere beating up demons with what remains of the US military's response to demonic aggression. Or he could be dead, if I'm really lucky this week.

Mark Blucas seemed to do a pretty good job depicting Riley, and I suppose it's not his fault I utterly detested the character.

TARA -
AGE: Young Adult, same general age as Buffy.
PHYSICALITY: Average.
APPEARANCE: Babe level 6
MENTALITY: Above average intelligence and discipline, well educated, well developed minor psychic abilities, above average occult scholar and powerful magical practitioner, little self esteem
GENDER: Female ORIENTATION: Gay, apparently SEXUAL HISTORY: Experienced
RACE: Apparent Human, or possible Mental Artifact / Caucasian, Hillbilly
AFFILIATION: Scoobie Gang.
MORAL ALIGNMENT: Goodie goodie, apparently.
CHARACTER TYPE: Mage.
COMBAT VALUE: 1. Should be more formidable mystically but lacks confidence and is easily flustered.
NOTES:
Originally introduced as the only member of the campus Wiccan society besides Willow with real power, Tara seemed to be on the verge of being defined as having at least some demon blood before Whedon & Co. decided to simply make her a gifted human witch.

Apparently not quite as powerful as Willow, Tara still seems to be a fairly accomplished and knowledgeable mystic in her own right.

If Tara has any particular skills or abilities outside witchcraft and magic, we haven't seen them yet, or I'm forgetting them. She has proven herself to be loyal, courageous, and reliable in combat situations, but not particularly adept at combat itself. So far, the most impressive things she has ever done have been casting a spell to blind the entire Scooby Gang to the presence of demons, and helping Willow teleport Glory away to some random location.

Tara is singular, and perhaps unique, among Buffy's friends and associates in that she actually has not only a living parent, but also a sibling (a brother) and at least one cousin (female, and darned cute, too). Apparently, the males in her family have controlled the females for years by spreading the false rumor that the women are tainted with demon blood (the genetics of that boggle the mind) and need to be sheltered and protected by their male kin.

Tara is currently romantically and apparently sexually involved with Willow, although the peculiarities of our culture have kept the producers of the show from making the relationship as explicit as any normal heterosexual relationship could be depicted. For example, Buffy and Riley were frequently shown sharing a bed and even depicted engaging in sexual behavior; similar displays are apparently utterly verboten for a same gender couple. In fact, rumor has it that Willow and Tara's one and only clearly sexual kiss to date (both of them were fully clothed and nowhere near a bed at the time) was only televised after heated protest from the network. Such is the world we live in.

Other than her friendship with Willow, Tara has not seemed to bond well with the various other members of the Scooby Gang except for Dawn, whom she seems to get along well with. Buffy's declaration that the Scoobies were Tara's 'family', while facing down Tara's real family who wanted to take her back home and put her to work cookin' and cleanin', came as rather a surprise to me. Still, everyone seems happy to have her around, although Oz probably doesn't like her much (wherever he currently is).

Tara, apparently, is a full time student at Sunnydale College, although what she does for money now that her family is pissed off at her I have no idea.

It's worth noting that Tara's belief, taught her by her family, that she was at least part demon, was only dispelled through the crude mechanism of Spike smacking her a good one in the nose and getting a jolt from the chip in his head when he did it. This was taken as evidence that Tara was human ('there's no demon in there', as Spike put it) because while Spike can't attack humans without causing himself severe pain, he can attack demons all he wants (and enjoys doing so). To my mind, this doesn't prove anything, since I'm of the opinion that Spike's chip somehow detects the presence of a soul, and punishes him with pain if he attacks anyone who has one. Since Doyle was one quarter demon and still, presumably, had a soul (he certainly had a conscience), the presence of a soul does not preclude a certain percentage of demonic DNA. Therefore (at least if my hypothesis is correct about the chip's function) Tara could still be part demon.

There is a distressingly plausible theory in some fan circles that Tara may not actually be 'real', but may, in fact, merely be a three dimensional, solid, independently operating 'imaginary friend' come up with by Willow at her most desperately lonely after being left flat by Oz. While this theory had the wind taken out of it a bit by the episode in which Tara's family showed up, I myself must note that if Willow's subconscious was capable of cooking up Tara in the first place, it should be perfectly capable of cooking up supporting characters. Glory, upon tasting Tara's blood, pronounced her just a normal human, and then brain sucked her for cohesive mental energy just like she would any other human being who came into her grasp, and all of that would seem to indicate Tara is real, not just some imaginary energy construct... but there are simply too many indicators otherwise to be readily ignored.

For one thing, Tara first showed up after an episode in which Willow briefly gained the power to have everything she stated out loud come true. For another, Tara has never, to date, demonstrated any abilities that Willow herself does not have. Buffy's declaration that the Scoobies were Tara's 'family' seemed rather weirded out to me, and if the Slayer were momentarily befuddled by a subconscious enchantment cast by Willow, well, that would make a lot more sense. When Willow tried to move a soda machine across a room psychokinetically to block a door (she and Tara were hiding from the Gentlemen), Tara joined hands with her and the two of them together did it easily... which could simply indicate that they united their powers... but could also indicate that Willow put some of her own power into Tara when she created her, and momentarily needed to take it back. Early on, Tara remarked to Willow "I am, you know... yours", which, again, could simply be a declaration of devotion, but could also be something more. It's also odd that Willow could reverse what Glory did with Tara, but not with any of Glory's other victims, apparently. Last but not least, Willow doesn't think that she, herself, is very attractive; if she were going to create a playmate out of her own essence, and we assume for some reason she'd make that playmate female, it's likely she'd create someone like Tara... bigger, sturdier, and more voluptuous.

All of this may mean nothing, it may mean that Whedon had intended one thing with Tara but has since changed his mind... or the hypothesis could be valid. We'll have to wait and see.

Amber Benson does an excellent job depicting Tara from week to week, although it's hard for me to judge just how good an actress she is, because I don't find Tara, so far, to be a particularly well developed, detailed, or nuanced character. However, she showed an unexpected flair for depicting a loonie over the couple of episodes that Tara spent in a whacked out state after being mind-sucked by Glory, and I've generally enjoyed her work on the series.

SPIKE -
AGE: 100+
PHYSICALITY: Vampiric (superhuman in most regards)
APPEARANCE: Hunk level 7
MENTALITY: Above average intelligence, poor discipline, widely experienced, little formal education, some composing and poetic skills
GENDER: Male ORIENTATION: Straight SEXUAL HISTORY: Experienced
RACE: Mystically Altered (Super) Human (vampire/demon)/
Technologically altered Demon / Caucasian (WASP)
AFFILIATION: minion of the Master, now Scoobie Gang, kind of
MORAL ALIGNMENT: Evil to neutral.
CHARACTER TYPE: Fighter.
COMBAT VALUE: 13 against creatures without souls, 0 against creatures with souls. Has killed two Slayers in the past in unarmed combat.
NOTES:
We've seen Spike over the past season show signs of loneliness, of wanting to make friends with the Slayer and her Scooby Gang, of yearning for social and even family ties. All of this is understandable within the context of, again, a creative mandate to make the character of Spike more sympathetic and likeable, and it's also evidence that a vampire is not a demonic entity in a transformed human body, but is, in fact, the same person as before, just mystically altered and without the influence of a soul. Under the influence of his brain chip, which I've hypothesized elsewhere is actually starting to act somewhat as a 'synthetic soul', Spike's more socially oriented human emotions are starting to return... much to his disgust.

At this point, I can't be certain whether Spike's 'evolution' as a character actually reflects some sort of valid plot point, or if it's simply coming out of a desire, perhaps on the part of Marsters, or the scripters, to make Spike a more sympathetic and interesting character. I suppose it could indicate that the Initiative's behavior modification chip was simply more sophisticated than they anticipated, or has, over the past two years, had an evolving and interactive effect on Spike's brain chemistry, to the point where Spike has started to undergo a fundamental change, as if he actually had a soul. In other words, Dawn's flippant "Spike has a chip, same thing" may be closer to the mark than we think, and the Initiative may have inadvertently stumbled on a method for not simply providing aggression-inhibition through brain implants, but for the creation of an actual synthetic 'soul'.

Leaving aside all the fascinating metaphysical implications of Spike's evolution over the past two seasons, what Spike brings to the Scooby Gang (and no matter how hard they try to get rid of him, they do seem to inevitably end up stuck with him, and there were even signs of some vague bonding between him and a few other members in the Season Finale) is, well, vampire powers. Willow and Tara are the resident witches/mages, Giles is the researcher emeritus, Xander brings superhuman luck, Anya has several centuries of accrued and unique demon experience to draw on, and Buffy is the muscle... so Spike is, well, more muscle... with a rather surlier attitude than Angel ever provided.

Spike was, according to several flashback episodes this last season, originally a romance besotted and mostly inept poet in Victorian England. Apparently he was converted to vampirism on a whim by the ever-whimsical Drusilla, to be used as an eternal boy-toy, and as such, made up a vampiric foursome with Angelus, Darla, and Drusilla for a reasonably lengthy period of time... said association which was apparently ended when Angelus was cursed by the Gypsies with the return of his soul. Spike has had an on and off relationship with the recently vampirized Harmony, although Harmony's cameo on ANGEL recently indicates that that relationship seems to be over.

Spike is also distinguished as being the only vampire who has ever killed two Slayers.

(Given that Spike is decidedly Anglo-Saxon/Aryan in appearance, and the Slayers he killed were Chinese and African-American, respectively, one could almost take this as being racially offensive, if one were oversensitive and inclined to look for slights like that. Normally, being about as white a male as one can be without actual membership in a militia, I'm not inclined to look into stuff like that... but I have to say that lately, the vestigial twinges of kneejerk liberal in me have been more and more plucked by the relentlessly Caucasian make up of BUFFY's cast. Buffy is white, all her friends are white, all the recurring characters are white, even the enemy vampires are all white. The only time non-white human characters show up is in roles obviously intended to be non-recurring. Yes, I salute the casting director for making Giles' intermittent British fourth season girlfriend black, and yes, I think it was nice to see that Slayers aren't always WASP girls. However, the fact remains, all the non-white Slayers we've seen to date have died; the two surviving Slayers are both white, and so, too, are all the steadily recurring characters in BUFFY who are portrayed in a consistently positive fashion. If BUFFY is going to add any new characters in its next season, the producers should really think hard about casting someone non-white. Here Endeth The Lecture.)

Spike's characterization over the past two seasons also has provided the series with one of its most fascinating running moral subtexts, but we'll get to that later.

James Marsters clearly has a huge amount of fun playing Spike every episode, he does it well, and his enthusiasm is infectious. I personally hope Spike sticks around for a long time to come.

DAWN
AGE: Teenager (14) in appearance/less than a year as a human actually, uncounted epochs old as The Key.
PHYSICALITY: Average.
APPEARANCE: Let's wait until she's legal before we start oinking, but generally aesthetically pleasing.
MENTALITY: Above average intelligence, poor discipline, extraordinary psychological resilience.
GENDER: Female ORIENTATION: Unknown, probably straight
SEXUAL HISTORY: Inexperienced
RACE: Mental Artifact (Human in function) / Energy being / Caucasian (WASP)
AFFILIATION: Scoobie Gang
MORAL ALIGNMENT: Neutral to good
CHARACTER TYPE: Hostage/plot device
COMBAT VALUE: 1.
NOTES:
- Buffy's little sister... kind of.

As all faithful Buffy fans know, Buffy, like the vast majority of her friends and associates, was an only child for her pilot movie and the first four seasons of the show. Not the slightest hint nor merest casual mention had ever been made by Buffy or her mom of a little sister named Dawn, or, really, anything else having to do with their family, other than an absent father/former husband who seemed to be perpetually off in Spain with one of his secretaries.

While lesser creative luminaries, faced with a sudden impulse to abruptly shove a cute 14 year old adolescent chiclet into the midst of a successful TV franchise in order to, hopefully, enhance the show's appeal to a slightly younger and more feminine market share, might well have simply inserted a previously unmentioned kid sister who had been living for years with Buffy's estranged dad and just expect us to get over it, Whedon & Crew were not so complacent. Instead of just patching the new addition in with a few emotionally obtrusive flashbacks establishing that Ross had always had a crush on Rachel despite the fact that when she first showed up he gave every appearance of having no memory of her whatsoever, the creators behind the madness that is BUFFY gave us a fifth season opener in which Buffy was, clearly, and as usual, still an only child, and her mom, clearly and as usual, knew this... and then, in the very last minute of the ep, showed Buffy walking into a room, seeing this little stranger standing there, going "What are YOU doing in here?"... at which point, Joyce called out, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, "Oh, and Buffy, could you take your little sister with you?"... and Buffy and the interloper both, simultaneously, put their hands on their hips, turned towards Joyce, and protested stridently in unison, "MOM!!!"

It was, I must admit and you must concur, brilliant.

As we eventually found out, Dawn was, in fact, The Key, a mysterious mystical artifact composed entirely of shimmering emerald energy from the dawn of Time that an equally enigmatic (but powerful) entity named (at first) the Beast, and later, Glory, was stomping her way through ancient monasteries and torturing lots of people in order to get. At the last second, as Glory had tracked them down, a few surviving monks had hidden the Key... somewhere... and it later turned out, what they'd done was, they had transformed the Key into a fourteen year old girl and, with the same sort of powerful reality transforming spell as Jonathan has previously used to convince everyone he was Rilly Kewl, they had caused everyone concerned to 'remember' the existence of a 14 year old girl named Dawn Summers, daughter to Joyce, younger sister to Buffy, and to feel appropriate emotions for this Little Girl Who Was Not There... all of this, to keep Glory from ever finding The Key, and if somehow she did, to make sure that the most powerful human champion in existence at that time would defend The Key to the death.

Recent revelations, apparently yanked out of his ass at the last minute by Whedon to justify a completely insane sacrifice on the part of Buffy in the WB Series Finale, that Dawn is somehow "made out of" Buffy, would seem to indicate that Dawn should at the very least be a potential Slayer... but how much of this contrived plot fulcrum nonsense Whedon will remember or validate once the series moves to UPN and Buffy somehow comes back to life remains to be seen. While Dawn is in reality an energy construct called the Key, this has so far not allowed her to display any superhuman powers or abilities. To date, she has merely been a normal 14 year old girl, with apparently normal 14 year old girl interests, like boy bands, cute guys her age at school, witchcraft, (well, that's normal, given who she hangs out with), and annoying her older sister nearly all the time. She has no apparent useful skills or abilities, other than plucky courage, an inquisitive mind, and an enormous amount of inherent intransigence. (That last big word means she's obstinate like ze mule.)

Dawn, as noted, is to all intents and purposes Buffy's younger sister. Her mother is currently dead, as is, for that matter, Buffy. She has an estranged father, supposedly in Spain with his secretary, who didn't bother to show up for Joyce's funeral, or even call Buffy back after she tried to get in touch with him. Whether he'll show up now that both Joyce and Buffy are (however temporarily in either case) dead, remains to be seen.

Being a 14 year old girl (and sometime energy entity from the dawn of time), Dawn has no job. What she'll do for money, food, and a place to stay now that both her mother and older sister are dead, as with so many other things, remains to be seen.

Dawn has to date had no romantic or sexual involvements, (something for which I'm more grateful than not, c'mon, she's FOURTEEN) although she at one time at least acknowledged a significant crush on Xander. She seems to be the only member of the Scooby Gang other than Willow who has bonded to any extent with Tara, and she has also apparently inspired protective feelings in Spike, of all people.

Michelle Trachtenberg has done an astonishing job of depicting Dawn as a perfectly normal 14 year old girl facing up to unbelievable levels of stress with a singular, and yet, entirely credible, amount of strength and courage. Dawn clearly relied deeply on her mother and sister and came very near to breaking down upon her discovery of her true origin and nature, and came very close again upon the death of her mother.

GUNN
AGE: Young Adult
PHYSICALITY: Superior Athletic
APPEARANCE: Hunk level 8
MENTALITY: Above average intelligence, good discipline, street smart, reliable and resourceful, tough minded.
GENDER: Male ORIENTATION: Apparently straight
SEXUAL HISTORY: Unknown
RACE: Human - African-American (urban)
AFFILIATION: Angel Investigations
MORAL ALIGNMENT: Good
CHARACTER TYPE: Fighter.
COMBAT VALUE: 8

NOTES:
- Notable for the most part only in that he is the first non-white regular character to appear on either of the BUFFY franchise shows, Gunn is a fairly generic urban African-American street wise gangleader type. Gunn originally appeared in ANGEL as the leader of a tightly organized gang of homeless juveniles protecting their 'turf' (generally, the abandoned, condemned slum buildings they lived in) from incursions by urban vampires and demons. After initially battling Angel, he later became persuaded help Angel on several cases and finally joined Angel Investigations full time.

Gunn is a very competent fighter with no known superhuman abilities. He has extensive street contacts in the various slum sections of Los Angeles, which has to date provided his primary usefulness to Angel Investigations. We have not to date been made aware of any past romantic or sexual relationships he may have had, and he does not at present seem to be involved in any. He at one time had a younger sister he was forced to destroy after she was transformed into a vampire.

I suppose the actor playing Gunn does a good job, but honestly, he doesn't seem to have much to work with.

FAITH
AGE: Young Adult
PHYSICALITY: Superhuman (Slayer)
APPEARANCE: Babe level 10 (Shut up, she is)
MENTALITY: Average intelligence, lousy discipline, street smart, resourceful but erratic, emotionally vulnerable. Most likely has the Slayer mental powers of limited clairvoyance and the potential for enhanced perceptions, but I haven't seen her demonstrate them.
GENDER: Female
ORIENTATION: Apparently straight, but keeps asking Buffy to give her a kiss, so...?
SEXUAL HISTORY: Apparently vastly experienced with guys.
RACE: Mystically Altered (Super) Human - Caucasian (WASP)
AFFILIATION: Some women's prison, formerly worked for the Watcher's Council as Slayer
MORAL ALIGNMENT: Evil to neutral, seeking redemption.
CHARACTER TYPE: Fighter.
COMBAT VALUE: 13. Has been beaten by Buffy in unarmed combat.
NOTES:
- While Faith, like Oz, seems unlikely to ever turn up again in either show (Eliza Dushku apparently preferring to concentrate on a busy movie career), she was certainly an important enough character to be worth her own entry here.

I myself have not yet seen the episode where Faith first shows up. I had gathered that apparently, Faith was the next Slayer after Buffy's first death, although I've since learned that in fact, there was another Slayer in there named Kendra who didn't last long, and who is now remembered primarily for having named her favorite stake Mr. Pointy.

For a time, Buffy and Faith acted as a team under the aegis of new Watcher Wesley. However, Faith's darker, less inhibited, and more anti-social nature eventually led to her accidentally killing a human she mistook for a vampire, and after that act, she threw herself headlong into darkness and corruption, committing at least one more cold blooded murder while working for the Mayor and aiding and abetting him in his Ascension.

Beaten and stabbed by Buffy in an effort to obtain Faith's blood to cure Angel of a mystic poison Faith herself had inflicted on him with a bowshot from ambush, Faith wound up in a coma for eight months. Upon finally awakening and finding the Mayor long dead, Faith used a mystic artifact he had left behind for her to exchange bodies with Buffy. At this point she apparently attempted to redeem herself somewhat by fulfilling the duties and responsibilities of a Slayer, but she was foiled when Buffy magically re-transposed their minds. Faith then fled to Los Angeles where she was found and hired by Wolfram & Hart to kill Angel. After capturing and torturing Wesley almost to death, Faith was fought to a standstill by Angel and finally collapsed, crying "I'm bad! Kill me! I'm bad! Kill me!" With Angel's help, she eventually sought redemption by surrendering to the police and confessing to her crimes. When last seen, Faith seemed to be somewhat at peace, in a maximum security prison for women somewhere in the Los Angeles area.

As a Slayer, Faith has superhuman strength, coordination, resistance to damage, and healing capacity. She has not had the same amount of extensive training with pre-Industrial hand weapons, acrobatics, or martial arts as Buffy, but is nevertheless formidable in combat with natural and supernatural enemies. She seems to have a specific fondness for and natural skill with knives and the compound bow. In the past, she has been defeated by Buffy in combat when both were fighting each other with no holds barred and lethal intent, and also by Angel in combat, although in that case it seems like she was merely fighting in order to provoke him to kill her. She has a tendency to be overconfident.

Other than in Slayer related areas, Faith has displayed no particular useful skills or abilities. Her employment of various fetish terms and general attitudes would seem to indicate a fairly extensive and varied sexual background, which may be the closest thing she has to a hobby. She likes loud music, dancing, and has been known to read comic books.

Faith has mentioned an alcoholic mother that I have no idea of the current whereabouts of. Apparently, she was mostly raised in foster care. While working briefly for the demonic and malevolent but ever cheerful Mayor, she formed an apparently sincere father-daughter bond with him. She has in the past displayed a tendency to be casually promiscuous with any reasonably attractive male who happens to be handy when she's in the mood, and one of her casual sexual liaisons was with Xander. She was, at one time, close friends with Buffy, and has apparently bonded to a certain extent with Angel over their mutual desire for redemption.

What is there to say about Eliza Dushku that hasn't been said already forty or fifty other places? Having seen her portray a letter perfect Buffy (during the period when Buffy and Faith had switched bodies) right down to the different physical mannerisms and body language, I'm aware she's as good an actress as anyone else in the generally excellent BUFFY ensemble, and she's also, obviously, utterly hot. While I can't wish her anything bad in her career, I can only say that if she ever wants to do a regular TV show, a FAITH spin off would be more than welcome here. Maybe they could boot her through time into some dark, ROAD WARRIOR meets I AM LEGEND type future in order to keep it from being too much like BUFFY. Hell, I'd watch it if they set it on SESAME STREET.

HARMONY
AGE: Young adult
PHYSICALITY: Vampiric
APPEARANCE: Babe level 8
MENTALITY: average intelligence, no discipline, ditzy, generally clueless
GENDER: Female ORIENTATION: Apparently straight
SEXUAL HISTORY: Experienced
RACE: Mystically Altered (Super) Human (vampire/demon) / Caucasian
AFFILIATION: none at present
MORAL ALIGNMENT: Neutral to evil.
CHARACTER TYPE: Blonde.
COMBAT VALUE: 3, all from vampiric powers, as she's a ditz and a klutz.
NOTES:
- portrayed by the generally delectable Mercedes McNab, the character of Harmony started out as a satellite and sycophant of Cordelia, with all the self absorbed, clique/cool oriented cruelty one would expect. A relatively minor recurring character in BUFFY's first three seasons, she showed up as a vampire early on in the fourth season, after we had last seen her being fanged from behind by a bloodsucker in the big mass melee accompanying the 1999 Sunnydale High graduation and the Mayor's abortive Ascension.

Harmony is also strong evidence for my hypothesis that a vampire is not a separate demonic entity inhabiting a dead transformed human body, but is actually the same person as before, necromantically transformed and without the influence of a soul. While Harmony seems without conscience or higher moral judgement powers, her personality seems mostly unchanged, in that she still seeks validation through the approval and affection of others, and is generally a follower looking for an authority figure, although she did try, disastrously, to lead a pack of even more charisma and intellect challenged vamps against Buffy once. She has continued to see what she thinks of as 'friendship' (validation through the acceptance, approval, and affection of others) as a vampire, as her insecurity is clearly her driving character trait.

When last we saw Harmony, Cordelia had told her to get the hell out of L.A., because next time she saw her, she was going to stake her.

Harmony has been sexually involved with Spike, after both of them were vampires. She appears, at this point, to have no real friends or family. She seems to have normal vampiric powers, but has generally been incompetent and scatter brained.

DARLA
AGE: 300+
PHYSICALITY: Vampiric
APPEARANCE: Babe level 9 - 10
MENTALITY: Above average intelligence, good discipline, vastly experienced, resourceful and cunning, extraordinarily gifted at manipulating men
GENDER: Female ORIENTATION: Apparently straight, but who knows what she and Dru get up to when bored
SEXUAL HISTORY: Vastly experienced
RACE: Mystically Altered (super) human (vampire/demon) - Caucasian (WASP)
AFFILIATION: none at present, former minion of the Master
MORAL ALIGNMENT: Deeply evil.
CHARACTER TYPE: Villainess/psychobitch/hellslut.
COMBAT VALUE: While Darla generally doesn't like to fight, she seems to have a CV of around 9 or 10 when she's pushed to personal violence.
NOTES:
- continuing the BUFFY tradition for being an utter babefest, we come next to the totally and utterly hot Darla, who has only gotten even more doable since she gave up that stupid Catholic schoolgirl's outfit she used to wear back in the first season, before Angel originally staked her.

Darla is a very old vampire. Dying of a syphilitic cardiac infection back in the 17th Century, Darla was visited and turned to vampirism by the Master. A century or so later, she met a drunken Angel in the streets of Ireland and, apparently smitten with him, turned him to vampirism as well. Angel later converted Drusilla, who converted Spike.

As mentioned, Darla was staked by Angel early in the first season, when she was threatening Buffy with a pair of loaded .45s. At the end of the the first season of Angel's own show, he failed to prevent Wolfram & Hart from resurrecting some 'great evil'... which turned out to be Darla. As it later turned out, they had resurrected Darla as human. At first she sought out Angel to ask him to turn her back into a vampire. He refused and in fact worked to redeem her soul and get her to morally reform, a goal he had just achieved when both learned that the original syphilitic heart condition was going to kill her within a few weeks. The two of them had fallen in love again, knowing that they would only have a few weeks together before Darla died the true death, when Wolfram & Hart brought in Drusilla to convert Darla to vampirism again. Her soul once more gone and her vampiric nature restored, Darla has once more become an implacable foe to Angel, although she did take time out to have some wild sex with him late in his second season, under the assumption that this would, as it had with Buffy, cause him to lose his soul and revert to Angelus.

Darla has been referred to as a very powerful vampire, although she doesn't seem to have any of Drusilla's innate psychic powers. She is implacable, utterly amoral, and seems to revel in cruelty for cruelty's sake, not only cutting a bloody swathe through downtown L.A. alongside Drusilla after being revived, but also crashing a wine tasting Holland Manners was giving for several Wolfram & Hart lawyers and slaughtering everyone there, with the exception of Lindsay and his partner Lilah. A few episodes later an unusually ruthless Angel lured Darla and Drusilla into an ambush and set them both on fire, a trauma she barely survived and which took her several weeks to recover from. When last we saw her, she'd been warned by Angel that the next time he saw her, he'd kill her.

Darla is a favorite disciple of the Master and former longtime associate of Angel, Drusilla, and Spike. Her current whereabouts are unknown.

Julie Benz, in addition to being the hottest blond in the BUFFY franchise besides Sarah Michelle herself, is also an extraordinary actress, bringing this particularly complex and demanding character to exquisitely three dimensional and terrifying life with each opportunity she's given.

DRUSILLA
AGE: 100+
PHYSICALITY: Vampiric
APPEARANCE: Babe level 6 (hey, I don't like her, sue me)
MENTALITY: Whacked out, with powerful clairvoyance and some well developed telepathic capacities.
GENDER: Female ORIENTATION: Apparently straight, but again, who knows what she and Darla have gotten up to over the centuries?
SEXUAL HISTORY: Very experienced
RACE: Mystically Altered (super) human (vampire/demon) - Caucasian
AFFILIATION: None at the moment
MORAL ALIGNMENT: Vastly evil.
CHARACTER TYPE: Mystic/psychobitch/hellslut.
COMBAT VALUE: Hard to say. Has held her own in hand to hand with Angel. Probably around an 8. Killed a Slayer, but she was a lousy Slayer, and Dru cheated with her mental powers.
NOTES:
- played to a brilliant and psychotic 'T' by the obviously inspired and amazingly talented Juliet Landau, Drusilla is still a character I don't enjoy particularly much, most likely because unlike even the nastiest other vampires on Buffy-Earth, there's nothing remotely likeable or fun about Dru.

She is, however, interesting, in that she is the only vampire I've seen other than Dracula who has shown any of the classic vampiric psychic powers. Drusilla is clairvoyant, and frequently receives psychic visions. She also apparently has developed some limited telepathy, and can invoke glamors on herself (she once posed briefly as Jenny Calendar to get information out of Giles) and can rivet the attention of a victim with a hypnotic stare (she used this to paralyze the Slayer Kendra and kill her). However, Drusilla was psychic before she was turned to vampirism, so it may be that Dracula, even if he is actually a vampire, simply had psychic powers as a human, too.

Unlike Darla, Dru rarely seems charming or seductive (at least to me, I know other guys who think she's totally hot), and in fact, most of the time, she's simply acting utterly demented, even when not engaged in some horrific act of carnage. To an extent Dru may be a more successful vampire character than Darla or Spike, because I find her more consistently frightening than either of the other two... but I don't like her much, and it wouldn't bother me if someone staked her.

JENNY CALENDAR
AGE: Adult (currently dead)
PHYSICALITY: Average
APPEARANCE: Babe level 9 (quiet, you, I'm writing this)
MENTALITY: Above average intelligence, good discipline, above average occult scholar
GENDER: Female ORIENTATION: Apparently straight
SEXUAL HISTORY: Unknown
RACE: Human - Gypsy
AFFILIATION: Some Gypsy clan, the one that hates Angel
MORAL ALIGNMENT: neutral to good
CHARACTER TYPE: Scholar/mage
COMBAT VALUE: 1.
NOTES: -
Jenny is still dead, which I didn't care about prior to buying and watching the "Buffy & Angel" set of tapes, but which deeply grieves me now, as she was just SUCH a babe, and a darned interesting character, too. She must be brought back. Pronto.

GLORIFICUS
AGE: Never ask a Hellgod how old she is.
PHYSICALITY: Godlike.
APPEARANCE: Babe level 9 or 10
MENTALITY: Never seemed all that bright, but we can assume she has godlike will.
GENDER: Female ORIENTATION: Apparently straight
SEXUAL HISTORY: Unknown, probably mind boggling and horrific
RACE: Hellgod in human form - Caucasian
AFFILIATION: Some Hellgod pantheon
MORAL ALIGNMENT: horribly evil
CHARACTER TYPE: Hellslut
COMBAT VALUE: 20
NOTES: -
Glory being dead dead DEAD is a both a good and a bad thing. Good because she was darned scary. Bad because it means the utterly drop dead gorgeous and babelicious Clare Kramer won't be on BUFFY any more. And she was so good being a ditzy evil hellbitch, too, not to mention a snappy dresser.

BEN
AGE: Adult (currently dead)
PHYSICALITY: Hard to say. He went from sibling to Glory (and thus, obviously, a god in his own right) to mortal shell meant to trap her divine presence forever over the course of the season. He at least beats up toadie minions well.
APPEARANCE: Hunk level 9 or 10, I gather
MENTALITY: Above average intelligence, good discipline
GENDER: Male ORIENTATION: Apparently straight
SEXUAL HISTORY: Unknown
RACE: ::sigh:: Human, apparently - Caucasian
AFFILIATION: worked for Sunnydale Hospital
MORAL ALIGNMENT: neutral to good
CHARACTER TYPE: Medic/Mage
COMBAT VALUE: 2, maybe, if he's not a god; 20 otherwise
NOTES: -
As stated, while Ben was pretty clearly being defined as one thing (a sibling and full partner to Glory, which would have made him a Hellgod in his own right), he got relegated to mere mortalhood by various hasty changes apparently ordained from on high towards the end of the season. Now he's dead, so it doesn't much matter.

JONATHAN -
AGE: Young adult
PHYSICALITY: Below average to godlike
APPEARANCE: Hunk level 3 to 15, depending
MENTALITY: Above average intelligence, good discipline, shaky self esteem
GENDER: Male ORIENTATION: Apparently straight
SEXUAL HISTORY: Er... inexperienced in the real world, see NOTES
RACE: Human - Caucasian
AFFILIATION: none at present
MORAL ALIGNMENT: neutral to good
CHARACTER TYPE: Scholar/Nerd/Mage
COMBAT VALUE: 2 to 17 or so
NOTES: -
Jonathan was introduced as a constantly recurring minor character at Sunnydale High, a highly intelligent nerd who was often used as the butt of jokes by the cruel 'in' clique that Cordelia belonged to. He tried to kill himself with a rifle in the high school bell tower and was stopped by Buffy in the third season, then returned in the fourth season as the central figure in an altered reality resulting from a spell he had cast that made everyone believe he was a universally beloved and vastly successful media superstar, hero, and adventurer. Although it's unlikely Jonathan could have gotten laid prior to casting the spell, we saw him with a couple of cute blond twins in his bedroom while the world was under the influence of his glamor. The events that took place within his spell seemed to be 'real', if mostly forgotten when the spell was broken, so presumably Jonathan is now somewhat sexually experienced.

In the past, similar reality alterations have left their subjects in full possession of the memories gained during those periods, such as Xander's retaining all his military training from a similar episode. While Jonathan professed to have forgotten nearly everything that happened while the spell was in place, he may have simply been faking it, and could very well remember all the skills and abilities he gained as a media star and superhero. He certainly proved himself capable of casting an extremely powerful spell.

ADAM
AGE: less than a year old when destroyed
PHYSICALITY: Superhuman/monstrous
APPEARANCE: Hunk level 8 to -1 or so, as a pastiche of human and demon body parts
MENTALITY: Hugely superhuman intelligence and discipline; astonishing levels of knowledge
GENDER: Male ORIENTATION: N/A
SEXUAL HISTORY: None
RACE: Mystical/Technological Living Artifact (Golem)
AFFILIATION: created by the Initiative
MORAL ALIGNMENT: evil
CHARACTER TYPE: monster
COMBAT VALUE: 18 or so
NOTES: -
Although he's thankfully dead and not likely to come back, Adam was an interesting and effective villain in Buffy's fourth season. Created by the brilliant but clearly deranged Maggie Walsh for the Initiative, Adam was a Frankenstein's monster type golem pieced together from organic body parts both human and demonic. Out of Buffy's league as a physical opponent, Adam did not seem to be able to be hurt by normal attacks, and in the end, Buffy had to have her essence merged with that of Giles, Xander, and Willow in order to defeat him by utilizing a paralysis spell that only Willow could cast and only Giles could read, and that would only work long enough for someone with Buffy's strength and speed to take advantage of. While merged by this spell, the uber-Buffy demonstrated vast supernatural powers which still haven't been explained.

Adam's master plan was to encourage a huge battle between human Initiative solders and demons, to provide him with enough body parts to create an army of minions similar to himself. This was insane golem logic, and thankfully foiled by Buffy and the gang.

OTHERS - There are many other recurring characters in the Buffy/Angel mythic tapestry that are probably worthy of note... bad guys like Lindsay and Lilah, background characters like Jonathan and Amy, even deaders of note like Jenny Calendar and the Mayor and Ben/Glory and Maggie Walsh and Adam and Joyce Summers. And I may get around to giving each of these folks their own entry here, eventually... or I may not.

In the meantime, I think we've finished off the 'Data' section of SLAYER'S HANDBOOK for now, and can move on to Part 2. Analysis & Speculations.

John Jones, the Manhunter from Marathon, IL, no longer dwells in Marathon, IL. He has, since writing this article and its succeeding chapter, seen every episode of both BUFFY and ANGEL, and has most of them on DVD. He could, and probably should, update this thing. But that would be a lot of work, and it’s not like anyone will ever read all the way through the whole damn thing anyway, so screw that noise. Prove him wrong by posting a comprehensive comment on the link below, if you dare.

SLAYER'S HANDBOOK, SECOND EDITION

2006-07-30T10:22:00.000-07:00

The Metaphysics of Buffy-Earth (Expanded)
Part 2. Analysis & Speculation

By John Jones, Manhunter from Marathon, IL

IRL: http://www.angelfire.com/ny3/docnebula/index.html

"Only when you speak of the bottle are you informed."
BARLOW

Moving on to the Figuring Things Out phase...

This is where I take all that stuff I noted down in Part 1., Data, and try to make it make some sort of coherent sense, as far as constructing some sort of consistent, sensible internal continuity for the BUFFY franchise that intelligently and coherently explains... well... most stuff, if not all of it. Things like, if vampires are dead, how the heck to they smoke and have sex... what is the soul... what are demons, as opposed to Demons, and where do they come from... what are the Higher Powers... what is Magic... what is The Slayer, and where do its powers come from... and, you know, various other fun enigmas and queries like that.

A. VAMPIRES

Much of vampires... their spirituality, one might say (or lack thereof)... will be addressed in our next, and separate section, The Soul. However, this section will deal with their physicality... which, while in my opinion, is intertwined with their psyches, obviously can't have to do with an actual 'soul', because vampires, like demons, don't have a 'soul'.

In "Welcome To The Hellmouth", Giles cautions Xander that when he looks at his now Undead buddy Jessie, he is not looking at his friend, but rather, at the monster who killed his friend. This seems to be, in general, the official party line on vampires... they may walk, talk, and when they feel like it, act like your old buddy, but they're not; they're a demon, and they'll eat you. Whatever your friend once was, they are now gone, dead, and what remains behind is merely their body, animated by a demonic presence and being used to promote the demon's agendas, which are usually awful and evil. This demon in your former friend's body may have all your friend's memories, and even their quirks and mannerisms, but they are not your friend. Deal with it.

If what Giles says is true (and his statement is already clearly contradictory in one way anyway, but we'll get to that), then the 'real' person killed by a vampire has nothing whatsoever to do with the vampire itself created from that real person's body. The animating demonic spirit in the vampire body may have the previous inhabitant's memories as well as their mortal husk, and may, for reasons of its own, choose to behave in ways recognizeable and characteristic of the former living person, but it isn't them... it is an entirely separate, demonic entity.

So, again, assuming that what Giles says is the literal truth... that Undead Jessie, or Undead Harmony, or Undead Angel, or Undead Drusilla... are not, actually, in any way the real, living people who once bore those names before they were killed, their souls departed to wherever it is souls go, and their dead bodies were reanimated somehow by an infusion of some dark, necromantic energy that transformed them into bloodsucking monsters... then what we have in the vampire is a fairly simple case of demonic possession... albeit a possession that takes place after the body is dead and its original inhabiting human soul has departed. Somehow, the possessing demon makes its way from some outer, non-material, demonic dimension into the dead body... most likely, the ritual of 'turning' a vampire's victim is actually a magical invocation of sorts that summons the disembodied demon to displace the human soul from the blood drained body with itself... and as the body has not had time to decay, the new demonic inhabitant inherits it whole and undamaged, and thus, has full access to the recorded memories in the body's brain cells. It can, if it wishes (and apparently, inhabiting demons nearly always do) 'put on' the personality and memories of the now departed person and simulate them to an alarming degree... albeit, of course, without their provincial human morality or any semblance of human affection or regard for other humans.

This is a workable mechanism. Basically, it posits that there are, at least, two sorts of demons... those walking around in material bodies, and those without material bodies who take over the dead bodies of human vampire victims. This raises questions as to whether or not there is some essential difference between 'living' demons and the ones in dead, reanimated human bodies, and whether there is, in fact, any difference between human souls and immaterial demon entities. So... it's not a simple mechanism, but hey, sometimes life is complicated, and as I say, we can work with it.

However, there is a problem with Giles' assertion that 'you're not looking at your friend, you're looking at the monster that killed him'. In point of fact, this isn't true. The monster that killed Jessie was a particularly ugly, brutish vampire (played, underneath all that makeup, by everybody's favorite thug/cheap villain actor Brian Thompson, perhaps best known for his brief but chilling portrayal of Eddie Fiore, Primogen of the Bruja Clan in FOX's interesting but generally stiff and lugubrious KINDRED: THE EMBRACED) who served the Master (or it might have been Darla, for all I know, and let's say it was, because I can remember her name). If our above hypothesis is true, then Darla drains Jessie's blood enough to kill him, or, nearly, and then cuts herself (as we saw her do with Angel) and has him drink her blood. This act seems to drive Jessie's own human soul out of his body and invite a demonic spirit in. Earlier this season (the second, 2000-2001 season) on ANGEL, we saw Darla's re-conversion to vampirism in some detail, and so we now know that it takes some little time for the body to be changed and the new animating demonic spirit (again, under this hypothetical mechanism) to take control. So... soul leaves, demon enters, body is transformed over the course of a day or so out of the sun, then a new vampire... basically, a demon inhabiting a dead, necromantically transformed human body... gets up.

Yet Giles asserts that you are looking at 'the monster that killed your friend', and in fact, this isn't true. Undead Jessie is not the monster that killed Human Jessie, he's the one who took over Jessie's body after Darla killed Human Jessie. Darla is the monster who killed our friend Jessie, not Undead Jessie. In other words, the vampire's sire is the monster who killed the friend who used to own that body.

We can adjust this by increments to make Giles' statement technically correct... we could state, for example, that it is the entry of the new inhabiting demon that pushes the human soul out, because when a human is 'turned', their sire does not drain enough blood to kill them from that trauma and blood loss alone... and who knows, perhaps that's what Giles means. But emotionally, it doesn't seem valid. And we still have, then, the complications revolving around living demons and disembodied demons, human souls and demon spirits, and various other things that make the brain ache. And, ultimately, if Undead Jessie, Undead Harmony, and Undead Angel, are not really 'our friends', but are, instead 'the monsters that killed them', then we run into a whole host of problems revolving around Angel's moral responsibility for the various evil actions taken by the demon inhabiting his body when his soul is not in residence.

Given all that, I have to posit that something else is going on with vampires, and with souls. And try though I may to keep these articles separate, they are intertwined. Still, while discussing vampire physiology, I'll try hard to discuss only what a soul essentially is not, and therefore, to an extent, what sentience, and self awareness, and free will, and individuality, actually are. And, of course, what a vampire actually is. And on the way, I may well touch on what a demon actually is, as well.

Let's see... where to start. Hmmmm. Well, let's look at Giles statement in another light. Let's assume that, instead of being literally true, Giles statement might well simply be something that the Watcher's Council has formulated as a sort of propaganda, to help humans fight vampires without conscience pangs. After all, if the Watchers were to be taught, or to teach Slayers, or even humans being threatened by vampires, that in fact, those monsters do retain certain elements of their essential humanity, well, moral issues then come up. If vampires are, to some extent, human beings, as valid as any normal human being, but with superhuman powers, no consciences, and an insatiable craving for human blood... well, then, while killing them in self defense during a battle is certainly allowable, sneaking into their tombs and staking them while they're helpless would rather smack of murder. After all, there have been human psychotics through the ages who thought they were vampires; morally, most people would feel they should be captured and put in prison, not have a stake driven through their hearts by a vigilante Vampire Slayer, which certainly smacks of a lack of due process.

No, it's only if vampires are supernatural demonic entities without a trace of humanity, who actually have nothing of the previous body's owner left in them, who only simulate that identity as a convincing illusion, that a Watcher, a Slayer, or the average person can kill them without conscience pangs or troubling conflicts with the social contract. Let them retain their humanity, even slightly... let Undead Jessie actually, in some valid way, really BE Xander's friend Jessie, just changed horribly... and it's a whole different moral and ethical can of worms.

All of which would explain why the Watcher's Council, and Giles, would take the 'it's not your friend, it's the monster that killed your friend' stance. Vampires are unquestionably evil, just like Charles Manson and Ted Bundy; there are a plague of them, they are a menace to humanity, and they have to be killed... just like the Nazis and Japanese soldiers had to be killed during WWII... so the Watchers cook up a line of propaganda to make it easy for their Slayers, and other humans, to do so.

And we actually know that, in point of fact, certain vampires do retain at least some aspects of their essential humanity. The Judge was a demon with the specific power to burn away the humanity in sentient entities, and we saw his power work on at least one, rather human acting, vampire... and he claimed it would have worked on Spike and Drusilla, too (because they still retained the human capacity for affection, at least, for each other). Angel, (in one of his soulless intervals) on the other hand, was pronounced to be 'utterly clean' and completely inhuman. If vampires can retain some elements of humanity, and vampires have no souls, then clearly, the essence of self aware identity is more complex and arises from something more than simply a 'soul'... which is already self evident, since demons are self aware and possessed of individual identities, and they have no souls.

Again, what souls are, we'll explore in our next session. It's sufficient to say that now, the entire human essence does not depart from a vampire when the soul does. 'Humanity'... identity, self awareness, the essence of 'me' or 'you'... does not vanish with the soul. It remains... although, like the body, it seems to be altered and mutated by the presence of the necromantic magics that change the human husk into a vampiric body.

Spike, Drusilla, Darla, Angel... all of them are, even after being changed into vampires, still the same essential person, to an extent. The fact that their souls are gone does not make them into entirely different individual entities. There is a continuity of identity. What does 'identity' itself arise from, then? Most likely, from the consciousness and self awareness that reside in the brain. Can the identity live on after the death of the body, either seeking out a new body, in reincarnation, or passing on to a higher, immaterial realm, as in the standard beliefs in an afterlife, or even remaining behind in one earthly place as a disembodied spirit, as a ghost or haunt? Yes, I suspect it can. However, I believe that for the consciousness of the body to become freed of the body, the body has to actually die... and in the case of vampiric transformation, the body never does actually die, but is, instead, simply changed while in a comatose state... and the transformation it undergoes causes the non-physical component of a human entity we call a 'soul' to detach itself and go elsewhere. However, as the body is not dead, it does not take the actual personality, consciousness, or self awareness of the inhabiting human entity with it. That remains, and is transformed by the infusion of necromantic energy, just as the body is.

However, the departure of the human entity's soul does rob him or her of something... their ability to perform higher moral judgements. Their empathy. Their sense of connection to the material world, to the social body, to the human race. Their ability to regard other living beings as having any importance, as being anything except toys for their pleasure, as having any sort of right to live, to be free, to seek their own happiness.

In fact, virtually every demon seems to be lacking in this higher quality as well. They seem to be self serving entirely, to view all others as tools or toys, to put themselves first, to be incapable of compassion, mercy, or love, or really of any behavior that does not serve themselves.

So, in effect, a vampire is merely a human, with this quality of empathy, this capacity for compassion and love and friendship, this ability to perform moral judgements, removed, and placed into a mutated, supernaturally empowered (and limited) body. The same human as before the transformation took place... but without a conscience, or any sense of the validity or humanity of anyone else.

This is not merely an idle or academic question, because one of the ongoing central issues in the Buffy continuity is the morality and redemption of Angel, and thus, whether or not a soulless, vampirically animated corpse does actually, in some way, retain its former identity as a living sentient creature, or if, in fact, that identity departs with the soul and leaves behind merely a dead body being used by an extradimensional possessing demon is fundamental to this subject.

Unless a vampire is the living person transformed psychically, emotionally, and physically by the necromantic transformation of vampirism, then there's no reason why Angel should feel the slightest guilt for anything that his body has done while his soul was not inhabiting it. In which case, the central conflict that makes Angel the fascinatingly complex and conflicted and tormented character he is, is bogus... and any Watcher could and should have long since told him so. The things 'Angelus' does, when Angel's soul is out of his body, are not Angel's responsibility.

He has no control over them, and should feel no guilt. If the soul is actually the key and essential component to individual identity that survives the body after death, then 'Angelus' and Angel are two separate entities, and the former is always driven into dormancy when the latter returns and takes over control of his own natural form again... and that being the case, the heroic and noble Angel, whom Buffy loves and who has saved the world several times in his own right, is an entirely different guy from that demon Angelus, who also lives in Angel's body and who wakes up and takes control of it whenever Angel steps out for a while. And since Angel's departures and arrivals in his own body are never subject to his own control... well, he simply has nothing to feel bad about, or to make up for. He hasn't done anything wrong. It's all the demon who lives inside him.

If Giles truly believes that Angel is not, in fact, Angel when he is without his soul, but is, instead, the monster who killed Angel, then he should have long since advised Angel, and Buffy, and the rest of the Scooby Gang, that the evil, soulless Angel who for lengthy periods acted as Buffy's arch enemy and chief tormentor, is not, in fact, the same being/entity/person who loves Buffy, is a friend to the Scooby Gang, and a devoted enemy to evil. The fact that he hasn't irrefutably indicates that Giles knows there is more to personal identity than simply the presence, or lack thereof, of a soul.

Again... by inarguable and straightforward deductive and inductive reasoning, a vampire is not merely a soulless, demonic monster in a dead human body. It is actually something far more terrifying and horrifying than that... it is a human being, murdered and deprived of its capacity to make moral and ethical judgements, possessed of a ravening, insatiable hunger for living human blood, and, for all we know, also possessed by an additional, demonic personality urging the surviving, conscienceless, empathy-free human sentience to greater and greater acts of cruelty, brutality, and evil.

In short, the process of being turned to vampirism bears some resemblance to what happens when Glory 'brainsucks' someone. Glory robs people of their sanity by removing the 'coherent energy' of their minds, while being turned to a vampire robs a person of their conscience, empathy, and feeling of connection to a society or race.

I'm going to stress again... this must be how vampirism works, because, otherwise, Angel's guilt and remorse over the various evil actions he has committed over the centuries without his soul in place, and especially over his most recent transgressions against his friends and his lover Buffy, have no moral weight, conviction, or validity to them. They're spurious. Unless Angel, albeit Angel without a conscience, committed those acts, then he has nothing to feel guilty about... and Giles, or Buffy, or Xander (Xander reads comic books and science fiction, he should have spotted this instantly, it's the exact same premise as the Jean Grey is innocent/Phoenix is guilty premise in X-MEN for the last 20 years) should have told him this, if he's too guilted out to see it himself.

Having established that a vampire is not, in fact, simply a monstrous imperfect duplicate of the person it replaces, but is, in fact, to a very valid extent, that person him or herself, but corrupted, I'll now try to figure out exactly what a vampire, physically, is.

This is a difficult problem. Vampires are supposed to be the walking dead; necromantically reanimated corpses that shamble around attacking the living and draining their blood. In order for them to seem properly horrible and terrifying, this has to be what they are. (One of the reasons KINDRED: THE EMBRACED did not seem to find much of an audience may well be that much of the horror of the 'walking corpse' depiction was removed by the ongoing depiction of most Kindred as having working biologies that allowed them to go out in the daylight, breathe, and have a heartbeat, provided they'd fed recently. Of course, the other major factor was probably that most Kindred weren't evil, didn't act like monsters, and didn't kill people to feed, and what's the fun of vampires who run around being nicey nicey all the time?

Even the presence of major babes like Kelly Rutherford, Brigid Walsh, and Stacy Haiduk couldn't salvage a show about kinder, gentler, New Age vampires.) However, at the same time, while vampires as shambling corpses works fine when we want to horrify and disgust the viewers, it sacrifices an entire human dimension... something that would greatly hinder characterization, or, at least, standard characterization regarding romance and sexuality, with vampiric main characters... which is one of the fundamental elements of all successful soap opera.

You can't have it both ways. If your vampires are dead, necromantically animated bodies, that's fine and horrible and disgusting and scary, but their chances of boning a cute blond Slayer without making use of foreign objects and/or well trained Doberman Pinschers seem to be slim to none. They also can't smoke, shouldn't have to wear glasses, can't be blinded, shouldn't be hurt by a punch in the face or a kick in the nads, wouldn't feel pain, won't have any discernible odor, shouldn't have human perceptions, and can't be choked into unconsciousness (as we've seen Spike do with Drusilla, for example). Clearly, this denies the writers a lot of useful story elements, so... obviously, vampires can't just be dead, necromantically animated corpses.

In fact, if vampires do perceive things the way humans do (Angel talks about recognizing Darla's scent, although he's not aware that she's alive and human again when he does, and he also turns on lights when he walks into dark rooms), can be choked into unconsciousness, do feel pain when thrown into a tombstone or kicked in the scrotum, can and do smoke cigarettes, do have to wear corrective lenses, can be blinded, and do, most definitely, have sex with humans (and, for that matter, humanoid robots)... then, obviously, they're not just dead bodies. They sweat, their hearts beat, they breathe, they have a sexual/reproductive system, must have functioning glands, chemical secretions in their blood, a respiratory system... for that matter, we've seen vampires eat and drink normal food and liquors, so they must have some eliminatory/excretory system, too.

Therefore, obviously, Whedon's vampires in BUFFY and ANGEL are, to some extent, metabolically active and 'alive', just like the vampires in KINDRED: THE EMBRACED. Right?

Well, no... they're not. Hardly an episode of ANGEL, or of BUFFY if Angel or Spike is around, goes by without someone making some reference (and this has to be deliberate) to the fact that vampires don't breathe, their hearts don't beat, etc, etc, yaddity yaddity yaddity. The constant repetition of these basic facts cannot be a coincidence; Whedon and his writers are doing this to reinforce to us that the vampire is a monster, it's horrible, it's an evil necromantic creature of dark magic, not human, DEAD. Spike has even mentioned that he doesn't breathe WHILE LIGHTING UP A CIGARETTE, which would seem to underscore the fact that Whedon and his pals know how stupid this is, and they don't care. The fact that no one - not Slayer Buffy, who is intensely interested in how vampire physiology actually works, not the intellectual and relentlessly curious Giles, and not fanboy SF geek Xander - ever mentions, or comments on, these contradictions, is simply more evidence that the writers are aware of them... and don't care. We're supposed to suspend disbelief and ignore it, like good Germans or cheerful little morons, pretending never to notice that apparently, Giles has had an aneurysm, Buffy has been lobotomized, Xander must be heavily medicated, and every vampire in the world who has ever noted wryly, "Well, actually, I don't breathe" while puffing on a cigarette is clearly an idiot.

Obviously, again, while this is an enormous contradiction, and anyone as intelligent as Joss Whedon and his creative collaborators clearly are could not possibly be unaware of it, they simply choose to ignore it. I sincerely doubt they have any explanation, but one of the most overused words in Whedon's vocabulary as far as BUFFY and ANGEL are concerned is 'mythic'. The 'mythic' elements require that vampires be able to romantically interact with humans, and if you're going to have that, you may as well throw in cigarette smoking (it's a very useful bit of physical business and does wonders for establishing characterization, especially if 'good' Angel doesn't smoke and 'evil' Angel does), physical pain (vampires who don't respond when Sarah kicks them in the jahoobies are kind of boring), and scent (it's more fun and romantic if Angel claims to remember Darla's scent, and let's just ignore the fact that if she's got any odor at all, he should instantly realize she must be alive, and since Angel never previously knew her when she was alive, he couldn't possibly 'know' her scent).

Furthermore, vampires are subject to certain limitations and restrictions that, in all honesty, just can't be explained away easily. They don't reflect in mirrors (but, annoyingly, we've seen them show up on videotape, and they do cast shadows). They burst into flames when sunlight touches their skin. They revert to dust (and not much dust, at that) when killed. A wooden stake shoved through their heart will kill them, but a plastic or metal one won't. They can't enter a private dwelling without the explicit permission of someone who legitimately lives there. They're stronger, faster, and more resistant to physical damage than humans. Supposedly, they have superhuman perceptual powers. They live off human blood. They have limited shapeshifting abilities.

Is it possible to reconcile this massive contradiction and provide some feasible, plausible explanation for the nature of vampiric existence? Well, yes and no. Given what we've been told so far, I think it is, vaguely, possible to come up with... something. It won't completely satisfy, and some things I may have to simply ignore, or disqualify, or say "Well, it didn't happen the way they show us it happening on TV"... but I suspect I can assemble some sort of patchwork pastiche of a metaphysical hypothesis that will, generally, suffice to explain away most if not all of these contradictions.

So, that's the 'yes' part. The 'no' part, however, is that I can only do it for right now. Given that it's clear that Whedon & Crew simply don't care about this stuff, don't take their own internal metaphysical continuity seriously and could care less if they present anything in a reasonably consistent form as long as people keep watching the show, any explanation I suggest at this point is likely... almost certain... to be invalidated by some annoyingly lazy plot stupidity in some future show. As with STAR TREK, the plotters and writers of BUFFY and ANGEL simply don't care if it makes sense or not. It's 'mythic' for Spock to be a half-human, half-alien crossbreed, so it doesn't matter if that's senseless. We want people in the Federation to still get old and have various physical defects (blindness, male pattern baldness) so we ignore the fact that a matter-energy converter capable of creating three dimensional fantasy settings in a holodeck, self aware artificial life forms, dissolving solid objects, including human beings, into energy and then reforming them alive and functional again, and making nourishing food, should be perfectly capable of regenerating non-working optic nerves and resetting an older person to a younger, more ideal metabolic age. We want Data to be the only android in the universe, so we ignore the fact that we should be able to run off hundreds of Xeroxes of him in the transporter.

We want the crewmen to use control panels, so we ignore the fact that they should all be cybernetically hooked into the Enterprise's central computer... or at least, Data should. Data is always just fast, smart, and strong enough to do whatever the plot requires, but never enough to foil the bad guys before the final five minutes, just as Worf, Riker, and Picard are never competent enough to prevent the Enterprise from being taken over by alien terrorists, and Deanna's powers always work just well enough to advance the plot but never well enough to short circuit it. Everything is subordinate to the story, nothing works consistently or intelligently, there is no sensible internal continuity... and, on BUFFY and ANGEL, vampires are perfectly happy to remind the human standing three feet away that they don't breathe, while lighting a cigarette and taking a deep drag on it and then breathing out smoke... and the human is always too brain-dead to say "Uh... gee..."

I will say right now that while I think I can come up with a coherent explanation for how vampires can say they don't breathe while lighting a cigarette, and how they can have sex lives when they shouldn't actually have working metabolisms, and how Angel can think he recognizes Darla's scent without realizing that she's, at that point, alive... and I may even be able to explain why vampires don't reflect in mirrors but have shown up, a few times, on videotape, why they cast shadows, and why they need an invitation to enter an 'owned' private area... I can't explain why no one ever talks about this on the shows. Giles has enormous intellectual curiousity about occult matters, Buffy should want to know how vampire physiology works to improve her ability to kill them, and various others should at least notice and comment on the contradiction... and they don't... and I can't explain it, because the reason is, the WRITERS DON'T WANT THEM TO. Beyond that, there is no explanation. I hate that, but, well, that's how it is.

Still... physically, what is a vampire? What is its body composed of, that will cast a shadow and will be recorded on videotape, but that will not show up in a mirror? That will burst into flames when exposed to sunlight, that is stronger and faster and more resistant to physical trauma than a human body, that cannot enter an area inhabited by a living human being without permission, and that turns to dust when its animating energy is dispelled?

I hypothesize that the process which a human body undergoes during that day or so that it takes to be converted into a vampire body (as we saw with Darla's re-vampirization in ANGEL) is similar to the process of petrification that exists in nature, with certain plants. When a tree or plant becomes petrified, what happens is that over the course of years, the original biological elements of its cells are very gradually replaced by mineral elements... so gradually that the infusing minerals take on the same shape and appearance as the original biological cells. In effect, the original biological cells act as a matrix, or as a sort of jello mold, for the incoming mineral deposits, and what you end up with is a gradual build up of minerals in the exact shape of a tree trunk, or a plant of some sort.

This same process, vastly speeded up, is what happens when a human body is transformed by the vampiric mutation. Supernatural necromantic energy flows into it from some extradimensional source and replaces all the original human organic matter... but it does it gradually, and in such a way as to mimic the original cell structure. And the organic matter is not completely replaced, but is only 99.9999 some odd number of 9s % replaced. A tiny amount of the original human cellular matter remains as a template, spread molecularly thin throughout the replacement, vampire tissue which is made up of unnatural, demonic, otherdimensional energy in more or less solid form.

This, naturally, explains the supernatural and superhuman powers of the vampire. But how does the vampire simulate life, such as breathing (to smoke a cigarette), or normal human sight (as when a vampire turns on a light in a dark room, or fears having Drusilla put its eyes out), or a sense of smell (as when Angel insists he 'knows Darla's scent'), or, and most explicitly, when it has sex, with other vampires, and with living human beings, and with humanoid robots?

Basically, I hypothesize that the demonic, necromantic energy that makes up most of the vampire body is extremely responsive to the animating consciousness' psychic impulses. Probably, over the course of thousands of years of existence, any vampires who 'live' that long gradually forget what actual, physical, metabolic life was like. These vampires would, theoretically, start to behave more like 'living' corpses... losing their 'human' perceptions and having them replaced by more direct psychic perceptions, ceasing to respond to purely physical stimuli, and, most likely, gaining more and more unlimited capacity for shifting the shape of their necromantic energy bodies into other forms... such as the classical vampires are supposed to be able to.

However, relatively 'young' vampires still remember very strongly what it was like to be alive, and they still respond as if alive. Spike, while he's consciously aware of the fact that he doesn't 'breathe', or at least, doesn't have to, also subconsciously wants to smoke a cigarette... so, while he's smoking a cigarette, the necromantic energy in the shape of his lungs 'works'. When Spike and Harmony get horny and want to screw, their subconscious minds activate the appropriate anatomical parts, and, similarly, when Spike wants to screw his Buffy-'bot, or Angel wants to go to bed with Buffy or some other human babe, his subconscious reactivates his reproductive system.

Of course, a reproductive system composed of necromantic energy is only a simulation, and no actual pregnancy would be possible... but to all physical appearances, Angel would be perfectly functional. To a human lover who expected such things, there would probably even be a convincing sensory illusion of an ejaculation, although if such ejaculate had any actual physical existence, I have to assume it would be primarily ectoplasmic, and most likely, would just fade away or evaporate fairly quickly after the sex act was over.

In other words, a vampire's body is dead... inert... unbreathing, its heart still... none of its biological organs functional... except when the vampire consciously or unconsciously desires its body, in some way, to function in the 'human' manner to which it is accustomed. Then, temporarily, that particular system of the vampire's necromantically duplicated body becomes active. Spike breathes when he wants to smoke a cigarette or vibrate his larynx in order to speak; otherwise, he doesn't. Angel gets an erection when he wants to go to bed with Buffy; otherwise, he doesn't. Drusilla doesn't breathe unless she really wants to, but she isn't aware of this; thus, when Spike 'chokes' her from behind, her mind believes she should pass out... so she does. Or perhaps it was simply her way of surrendering, of not having to choose, between Spike and Angel. Or perhaps Spike took her by surprise, and while it seemed he was choking her, he was actually psychically forcing his will on hers, and making her go unconscious for a time. Vampires feel pain when punched in the jaw or kicked in the naughty bits, because they think they're supposed to. Basically, it's all psychosomatic, all in the mind of the vampire... but a vampire has to live a very very long time before they start to realize this and take conscious control over the necromantic energy that their bodies are now comprised of.

If we posit an unnatural, extradimensional, demonic energy as the basis for vampire bodies, patterned after the human bodies they are replacing, virtually everything becomes possible. An unnatural energy does not have to follow the laws of our universe (and could behave entirely differently in another universe, as we've recently seen in ANGEL). Therefore, in regard to all the various supernatural enhancements and limitations the vampire functions with, we could just at this point just, basically, say 'magic' and leave it at that.

Still, it may be useful, or at least, fun for me, and entertaining for my hypothetical audience, to explore exactly why vampires can do some things, and can't do others.

Vampire strength, speed, and resistance to damage is easy. If a vampire's necromantic energy body is more amenable to his own psychic manipulation, then most of a vampire's strength will, actually, be telekinetic, or that of the vampire's will, expressed through manipulation of the energy form he or she inhabits. This would explain why more highly motivated and ferocious vampires often seem to be faster and stronger and fiercer combatants than the dumber or more apathetic ones, and especially, why vampires seem so clumsy and vulnerable when they first get up out of their graves... their remaining human consciousness, having just awakened in a strangely transformed body, may not be fully attuned to the necromantic energy they now inhabit. They may also not be fully awake. Either way, they won't manipulate their bodies with their full capacity, and are fairly easy prey for any superhuman chickie poo with a piece of sharp wood who may be hanging around vulture like, ready to speed them on their way to Dustball City.

Why do vampires burst into flames when sunlight hits them? Uh... here's one where I'm just going to shrug and say 'it's magic'. Or it's possible that Earthly sunlight contains some wavelength of radiation that is missing from the sunlight of 'demon dimensions', and that acts on necromantically energized 'flesh' the same way intense heat would act on ours. In fact, vampire flesh bursting into flames in sunlight may be the Undead equivalent of radiation poisoning, significantly accelerated and condensed in time.

Perhaps the reason Demons 'lost their grip' on this dimension had something to do with the Sun's moving from one phase to another? Or maybe prehistoric Earth, back in Demon days, was perpetually wrapped in clouds, and when that changed, the Demons had to leave, because the unnatural energy they used as a basis for so much of their power, or perhaps that they even formed physical bodies out of (remember, the Mayor's Ascension took place in the darkness of a total eclipse) was damaged and destroyed by the Sun's radiation?

Vampires turning to dust when they are destroyed is fairly easy... most of their 'body' is actually energy. When something happens to dispel that energy... and there seem to be two central nexuses of this energy, one in the brain, and one in the center of the chest... it vanishes, leaving behind only the remnants of the original human body... the 'dust' that settles to the ground. The energy's mimicry of the human body may be so complete as to make the recreated 'heart' and 'brain' necessary to the continued coherency of the vampire body. It may well be that a stake to the 'brain' would also kill a vampire, but the skull is generally too hard to make this feasible, and the chest generally makes a much better target anyway.

Wood, for whatever reason, seems to be a mystically or supernaturally imbued material, in a way that plastic and metal are not. Perhaps wood retains some essential element of natural Earthly life that is inimical to otherwordly energies; an elemental force that plastics or metals do not have. Thus, when thrust into a nexus of necromantic energy, as could well exist in the center of the chest where the major circulatory system of the human body was, it could well instantly disrupt those energies, causing the seemingly solid energy of the vampire body to instantaneously disperse, and the relatively small amount of organic remains to crumble to the ground as dust.

Given that the brain is the most sophisticated, complex, and vital organ in the human body, it only makes sense that a necromantically duplicated brain would still be an essential organ in the vampire body, if not necessarily for the same thing. The various nodes that command the energies of the various different portions of the body would still lead into the brain, and the necromantic brain duplicate might well still be constantly active holding the necromantic energy patterns of the vampire body into a coherent matrix. Segregate the brain from the rest of the necromantic body and the energy flow would be interrupted and thus, the necromantic energy would almost instantly disperse... and again, the organic remnants of the original human body would sift to the ground as dust. (We have some indirect confirmation of the brain's vital function in vampires anyway, with Spike's chip.)

Why don't vampires reflect in mirrors? Perhaps most troubling about this is the fact that not only does vampire flesh not cast a reflection, but even the clothes vampires wear don't reflect... which is truly weird. One theory that might explain this is that vampires only really have one suit of clothing... the set they were buried in, which, like their own bodies, is also transformed by the necromantic energy flowing into them, and becomes susceptible to some direct mental manipulation. Very young vampires haven't learned how to do this yet, which is why Buffy could spot them sometimes simply due to the fact that they were still wearing the same outfit they'd died in. However, older vamps like Angel and Darla can shift their necromantically imbued 'burial' outfits around to look like different wardrobes, ensembles, outfits, and items of apparel, and may even do it without conscious thought, or at least, without bothering to mention it to mere humans. Doubtless, vampires also buy new 'real' clothes from time to time just because they like them, and those clothes most likely would reflect in a mirror... we've just never seen it happen.

Or, alternatively, even 'real' clothes quickly become suffused with necromantic energy when a vampire wears them, and thus, take on the supernatural aspects of that energy... which would explain why even the blankets that Spike and Angel cover up with out in the daylight start to smoke and burn after they've been wearing them too long... and why vampire's outfits don't seem to show up in mirrors, any more than vampire flesh does.

As to why necromantically imbued substances cast no reflections... it's magic! I myself don't even know why certain surfaces DO reflect images in them, and I'm not entirely certain modern science has an adequate explanation, either... I know I've never had even a physics professor supply me with a good explanation for a heat shimmer induced mirage of water on the highway ahead of me in the summer.

Why do vampires cast shadows? Well, for all we know, they don't, in the sunlight. We've only seen them cast shadows from artificial light, and artificial light, like other technological artifacts such as videotape, may well interact with necromantic energy in ways not taken into account by the legends and literature about vampires. Perhaps vampires don't cast shadows in sunlight or moonlight, don't reflect in 'natural' objects like shiny surfaces, water, and glass... but do block artificial light, and make an impression on videotape stock. We know vampires can be caused pain and even stunned by tasers (Wolfram & Hart has used them on Angel), so perhaps, as mystic creatures, they are merely susceptible to the influences of high technology... or, at least, affected by them in a normal fashion.

Why can't vampires enter a private, 'owned' dwelling space without specific invitation? Why, in fact, is the imposed limitation so specific and powerful that vampiric flesh can interact with the 'no invitation' barrier as if it were a physically solid partition? Most likely, I suspect it has to do with the sensitivity of necromantically imbued material to psychic energy. People tend to universally regard their private quarters as havens, sanctum sanctorums, their safe places, their private territory, their dens... places where they are safe and secure, where no one else is allowed to come without specific invitation. Normal human bodies, not overwhelmingly sensitive to psychic energy, can ignore such implicit wishes, boundaries, and parameters, but vampiric flesh is very sensitive and responsive to such. Furthermore, normal human bodies are of Earth, natural to this world and material plane, and as such, can move freely within it. Vampiric flesh is composed of supernatural, otherworldly, extraplanar energy. It can move freely in any place where psychic barriers have not been put up against it, but in specific, limited areas that are held as 'private', it needs permission to enter.

It's interesting (if a necessary plot device in that particular episode) that Angel once advised Gunn that no invitation was necessary for a vampire to enter a motel room, or other public space (and this seems true, because he previously had entered Faith's transitory quarters to save Xander from being choked to death by her without invitation), and I personally suspect the difference must lie, as with many supernatural matters, in a written covenant. In other words, where a lease has been signed, private space is considered to be 'owned', and an invitation is required to enter. Where the room is being paid for on an interval by interval basis, with no agreement extending into the future for more than a few hours or days, the space is transitory, and no psychic barriers form.

For what it's worth, in my own RPG, I allow any naturally sentient creature with a soul to attempt to 'claim' any defined area (usually a circle they draw, as a circle is a mystic symbol of considerable power, being endless) simply by repeating a simple incantation to that effect ("I claim this as mine, I claim this as mine, I claim this as mine") three times. This has no legally binding effect, of course, but it may very well establish the boundary as something an Undead would need permission to cross... but there is a Willpower roll off involved when the incantation is made, and I don't tell the player involved if they succeeded or not. (Most people don't have enough knowledge of magical lore or the supernatural to even make the attempt, anyway.) I realize that what happens in my RPG has no bearing on what happens in BUFFY or ANGEL, I'm merely explaining where the ideas I'm using came from.

Crosses (and, presumably, other holy symbols) seem to affect vampires exactly the way white hot metal would affect humans (forcing them to back away in pain from close proximity, leaving burns and brands on their flesh if they come into contact with them), and holy water seems to work on them like a powerful acid. While some of this could be psychic, with the holy symbol acting as a limited focus for the wielder's own subconscious telekinetic powers, this doesn't even begin to explain 'holy water'. As I myself have never seen Buffy or Giles explain where she gets her holy water from (and to be honest, I haven't seen anyone try to use holy water on a vamp since, like, the second season), I'm left merely to conjecture that certain religious organizations have the ability to invoke through prayerful incantation certain aspects and supernatural powers that are inimical to the necromantic energy vampires are composed of.

Call these supernatural powers the Higher Powers, if you like, but whatever the case, the Catholic Church, through prayer, seems to be able to 'bless' certain objects with the power to disrupt, if only in the specific area touched, necromantic energy. Vampires have, on the other hand, been shown to be able to enter freely into churches (although it seemed to come as a surprise to them when they did it, too), so apparently God, or the Higher Powers, only have power on this Earth when specifically invoked by someone who knows how.

Are all the crosses used to repel vampires on BUFFY and ANGEL produced by, and therefore, we assume, at one time at least blessed by, the Catholic Church? It seems safe to assume so. I've yet to see anyone on BUFFY or ANGEL simply twist-tie two popsicle sticks together and hold a vampire off with it, so it seems that the holy icon must have been prayed over, and the Higher Powers invoked upon it, at some point in its past.

Again, I'm curious where the Watchers get their crosses and holy water, though. Do they have a deal with the Catholic Church? And if so, why aren't more Watchers and Slayers overtly religious?

Fire is also harmful and even potentially lethal to vampires, and again, I'd surmise that this is because fire is an elemental force of this material realm, and probably possesses certain natural mystical powers of its own against unnatural, alien intrusions into this plane from outside. Or, on the other hand, necromantic substances may simply be very flammable... although in that case, you'd think Darla and Drusilla would have burned to ashes in a heartbeat when Angel lit them up earlier this season. So, no, it's probably an elemental mystic thing.

(The mythic charms against vampirism - fire, running water, exposure to sunlight in the open air - seem to reflect three of the four medieval elements of alchemy - fire, water, and air - and earth, or Earth, could well be represented by the wooden stake that kills the bloodsuckers. Various other mythological herbs that work against vampires - roses, garlic - could also represent earth, or be magical plants that are imbued with some sort of elemental earth power. Of course, on Buffy-Earth, vampires only seem troubled by sunlight, fire, and wooden stakes.)

How does Angel manage to 'know Darla's scent'? This bit, which is either a completely moronic and utterly self indulgent oversight on the part of the episode's writer, or an amazingly subtle and brilliant hint as to exactly how vampire perceptions work, certainly forces the hard working continuity obsessed BUFFY fan like myself to put in some overtime trying to figure out exactly howintheHELL we're going to explain THIS away. First, Angel shouldn't expect Darla to have a scent, since she's a vampire, and presumably, vampires don't sweat, nor does their flesh flake off into minute, microscopic particles that are what the scent receptors actually pick up. Second, Angel shouldn't have a sense of smell, because he's dead, and as he frequently reminds us, he doesn't breathe. As Angel had never previously known Darla as a human, he should by no means 'know her scent', and as a 200+ year old vampire himself, he should certainly have long since learned that humans smell different from vampires, because humans, you know, sweat. (And go to the bathroom, and eat things other than blood.)

There's simply no possible way to make this make sense. If Angel does have a sense of smell (and I've hypothesized that vampires can turn their human equivalent biological apparatus on and off subconsciously if they want to, so he could, and in fact, he's been frequently shown to have superhuman perceptions, usually expressed as a sense of smell), he still should have been instantly aware that Darla was alive, not a vampire.

But, wait. Actually, there is a way to make this all make sense, and this is where the whole 'either it's just plain stupid or it's utterly brilliant and subtle' thing comes in. See, Angel no doubt thinks he 'knows Darla's scent', because he himself isn't aware that vampire senses aren't human senses, and therefore, when his vampire brain picks up various stimuli and other data with its enhanced psychic perceptions, it translates them into familiar human terms... like aromas. So Angel believes he has a very sensitive sense of smell, but only when he wants to have one (someone who actually had a very sensitive olfactory sense would not voluntarily choose to live anywhere near, much less in the heart of, even a small human settlement, much less frickin' L.A.)... but in fact, what he has is a sort of direct psychic perception of his immediate surroundings (most likely all vampires do, at least potentially) that, as I say, his brain interprets into a 'sense of smell'.

Thus, to Angel, Darla has always has a particular scent, and that scent would not be changed whether she was alive or dead, because it's actually a 'psychic aroma' peculiar to her particular and individual personality and essential identity. (We can argue that the presence of a soul should change this somewhat, since Angel has never previously 'smelled' Darla with one, and perhaps it did, but not so much as to make her unrecognizable to him.)

I should acknowledge at this point that calling this a 'moronic, self indulgent, and just plain stupid' plot device was, perhaps, a bit harsh. As a writer myself, I'm aware that what the author was attempting to accomplish with Angel's declaration of "I know your scent, Darla" was imparting to the TV audience the essential information that Angel had good reason to know this was Darla despite the fact that he, of all people, should know she was dead, because he'd personally staked her. Tossing in an "I know your scent" line underscored that Angel was absolutely sure it was her and was, to a certain extent, put there to forestall the more thoughtful viewer wondering "What the hell was Angel doing, he knows Darla is dead, why didn't he believe her when she said she was just some normal chick who looked like Darla?"

However, I think there should have been less confusing ways to establish Angel's certainty, like, perhaps, the time honored unique birthmark or tattoo, neither of which we would have seen before, of course, but which Angel could have referred to at the time. (Hell, they could even have opened that episode with a flashback the entire point of which would have been to show us the previously unseen identifying mark. They've done it before.) The whole 'scent' thing is just way too confusing... unless, of course, some deranged whack-o who clearly has no life and far too much time on his hands like me comes along to try and explain it all.

A vampire's capacity to switch from normal human appearance to Demonic Happy Face would simply seem to be a very limited and specific shapeshifting power, one that they have little or no conscious control over at first but that simply happens when they're enraged, or about to feed; however, older vampires learn to switch from one 'face' to the other at will.

To sum up: the process of transformation from human to vampire would seem to involve the gradual replacement of human cells with an otherworldly, demonic, necromantic energy that takes the same gross shape and form as the organs and body parts it is replacing, in much the same matter as the natural process of petrification works. This energy is unnatural, and therefore, not subject to precisely the same laws of physics as substances native to this particular plane and material realm are. It is also more sensitive and responsive to psychic energy, so that although its physical, solid shape mimics that of a natural human body in every detail down to the cellular level, these organs and various metabolic systems only function when the animating entity consciously or subconsciously desires them to.

While I still think that the being who claimed to be 'Dracula' was most likely a demon trying, for reasons of its own, to get over on Buffy, I must admit that all the advanced powers this entity demonstrated are in line with what an immortal being possessed of the capacities I've outlined above could eventually learn to do, especially assuming that entity had had some psychic gifts already as a mortal. So Dracula could well be a vampire, simply a very very old one who has long since mastered his necromantically energized form to a point where a wooden stake through the heart causes only a momentary disruption of his form, who has learned to shift that body from one form to another, and who has developed his own psychic gifts to a point where he can easily enter and dominate the minds of most normal humans.

The process also involves the transformation of the original consciousness into a more brutal, anti-social, amoral, and sociopathic entity, due to the influence of the extradimensional demonic energy itself, and the lack of influence of a soul, which loses contact with the body and mind of the transformed person as they become a vampire. To an extent, from a 'demonic' standpoint, which is to say, from the point of view of an individual self aware intelligent entity without a soul, the conversion of human to vampire could almost be seen as a blessing... a restoration of the individual to the natural freedom of life without the behavior modifying, mind controlling influence of the soul that forces higher values upon the unenlightened self interest that is an individual personality's natural state.

Exactly what this means in term of the actual function and definition of that strange component of a sentient being's make up called a 'soul', we will explore in our next section.

B. THE SOUL

Okay. Just what exactly is 'the soul'?

The typical idea of most religions regarding the 'soul' is that it is basically an invisible, intangible duplicate for the body, that survives the body's death, and that carries with it the essential identity, or the 'real you', either to some afterlife, or into another mortal vessel, depending on what you believe. The 'soul' as such, when it does not reach the afterlife, or take on a new mortal incarnation, becomes a 'ghost'.

There is much in Buffy-lore to support this. First, Buffy has fought entities she assumed were ghosts. In "I Only Have Eyes For You", Buffy became aware of, and helped to resolve, what she felt at the time was a haunting... two spirits, frozen in place by the horrors of the events surrounding their deaths in 1955, forcing others to relive the events of those deaths, until somehow the cycle could be broken and they could be freed from their obsessions to go on to wherever it is that spirits go on Buffy-Earth.

Second, in "Becoming" we saw both occasions on which Angel's soul returned to him. Through a flashback to 1898, we saw the original curse take effect, and at the very end of "Becoming", we saw Willow's recasting of the curse take effect. In both cases, Angel seemed to become an entirely different person than he had been without his soul, and in both cases, he acted as if he had no memory of what had transpired with his body in the time his soul had been gone. In 1898, he seemed lost, saying "Where am I? I can't remember..." while in the modern day, he looked at Buffy and said "It seems like months since I've seen you."

All of these are strong arguments that the 'soul' is no more nor less than the actual essential identity of a human being that lives on after the death of its body, and seem to be insurmountable evidence supporting that particular hypothesis.

One straightforward problem with this is that in this model, the soul is the essential entity that provides sentience and self awareness and the individual personality, and the body is only a material form it wears during existence in this material realm... like a warm coat or other article of clothing. Upon death, the soul, which is the actual, true identity of a person, including their personality, self awareness, point of view, individuality, and sentience, travels on, either to some sort of upper, non material realm where the soul can exist with a mortal husk, or on into another body.

What's wrong with that picture? Nothing, in the real world, where we could assume that all sentient, intelligent, self aware, individual creatures possessed of complex personalities have souls. However, in the Buffy Universe, there is a vast population of entities known as demons who all seem to be intelligent, self aware individuals possessed of complex personalities... and, we're told, none of them have souls. Therefore, clearly, sentience and self awareness arise from something else, as we've previously examined in our attempt to define what a 'vampire', physically and psychically, is.

Moreover, if the 'soul' is the essential identity-entity, then creatures without souls - vampires, demons - should not survive the death of their bodies. That soulless creatures DO survive the deaths of their bodies, and have their essential identity preserved... somewhere... has been demonstrated beyond logical argument by last season's resurrection of Darla by Wolfram & Hart.

Another problem with the 'soul as animating ghost' model is that it makes the character of Angel essentially pointless, characterizes Giles as a sadistic prick for not letting Angel know he reasonably shouldn't feel at all guilty for what was done with and by his body in his absence, and shows the rest of Angel's associates to be pretty goddam stupid for not figuring this out themselves. Hell, Xander reads comic books, he should have been all over this from the outset.

In addition, not only is Giles a sadistic prick for not mentioning this to Angel, and Xander rather an idiot for not realizing it, but as briefly mentioned already, this also basically takes the center and heart right out of the essential characterization of Angel . I mean, it's nice in that Angel really has no reason to wallow in guilt and we can admire him wholeheartedly and not be troubled, overly, by what that scuzzy demon in his body does when his soul is out on vacation somewhere. However, it does utterly invalidate the central conflict that fuels Angel and makes him into an interesting and fascinating character, and, well, that's a problem. If 'Angel' bears no moral responsibility for the actions of 'Angelus' when Angelus is active and in charge of the body they share, then he's considerably less interesting, and we're being lied to in every episode of his series where he tries to 'redeem' himself from something that he's not even remotely responsible for.

Furthermore, given what Giles has told the various Scoobies over and over again about vampires, nearly any of them (but especially Buffy) should have figured this out long since, and also explained it to Angel. If in fact 'Angel' is represented by the soul which comes and goes, and 'Angelus' is the demon who remains regardless of whether the soul is present or not, then Angel has nothing to feel guilty over, any more than any normal living being would if they committed grievous crimes while possessed by a demon, or under the influence of behavior altering drugs they had not voluntarily consumed.

On the other hand, if vampires do not retain some essential aspect of their former humanity, again, Angel has nothing to feel guilty over, Spike could never have fallen in love with Buffy or conceived of affection for Dawn and Joyce, and Harmony would have had no reason not to chow down on Cordelia the instant she found out Cordie was alone in Angel's office.

If I seem to be obsessing rather a great deal on Angel in this discussion, it's because it's through Angel that I have obtained the vast majority of my information on just what a soul is in the Buffy metaphysics, by watching how his behavior has radically altered depending on whether his soul is attached to his body at any given time or not.

We also know that, while Angel was originally, apparently, in a state of amnesia regarding his vampiric actions when the curse first took effect, his memories of those actions did eventually return. That was the whole point of the gypsies' curse; they didn't want to cure Angel of being a monster, they wanted to torture him forever with guilt and remorse by giving him his soul back. To that extent, assuming gypsy mystics have some actual knowledge as to what a soul is, it doesn't sound like they were basically bringing back a separate entity... why bother? That entity isn't guilty of anything, why torture him?... but rather, like they were restoring the conscience, the higher moral reasoning center, of the entity that had wronged them, and that they hated.

In other words, it seems very much as if the gypsies were aware that the absence or presence of a 'soul' does not actually change the identity of a particular sentient being. The 'soul' is not the spirit-body and essence of personality that most religions believe it is; rather, it is an intangible element of sentient spirituality that provides what we call 'conscience'... the capacity to care for others, to regard others as being just as important as we ourselves our, to empathize with them, to feel their pain, and to feel remorse and guilt for actions we have taken in the past that caused harm to them.

Again, it's worth repeating... the soul, which we know exists in Buffy metaphysics, and whose attachment to a sentient, self aware entity seems to be the basic defining factor setting humanity apart from demonkind, cannot simply be the intangible, immaterial embodiment of consciousness and self awareness that carries the individual personality and intelligence of an entity on to the next stage of existence after the death of the body. This cannot be true for two overwhelming reasons: first, there are many self aware, conscious, and intelligent entities in the Buffy fiction-verse that do not have souls. Second, if 'good' Angel and 'bad' Angel are entirely separate entities defined only by the presence, or lack thereof, of Angel's soul, then 'good' Angel has no more reason to feel guilty about the actions of 'bad' Angel than someone would if their body committed crimes while being mentally controlled against their will by an entirely separate entity... in fact, that's exactly what would be happening.

The soul does not provide sentience or self awareness, and it is not the actual, immaterial mental, psychic, and intellectual essence of a being that is immortal and survives the death of the body, as is generally believed in most religions that are based around the principles of post-death survival of the individual personality.

So... if all this is what the soul isn't... then what is it? What does it do?

What the soul does seem to provide is a faculty for higher moral reasoning, for empathy, for the capacity to see others as being real people, whose wants and desires and needs are as valid as one's own. Without a soul, sentient beings seem to become the textbook definition of sociopathic, and lose all ability to regard other beings as anything more than objects - tools, toys, or annoying obstacles. In fact, this seems to pretty much sum up the demonic attitude towards life, existence, and other sentient beings... they like those who provide a useful function to them or whose continued existence gratifies them in some way, play with those they find interesting, ignore the vast majority, and will ruthlessly destroy those who get in their way. In other words, those without souls regard themselves as the only valid beings in existence. They are egoistic and utterly self centered; to them, the entire world is a subjective theater in which they are the center of the universe and everything else... including all other people/sentient beings... are simply objects, to be manipulated as they will. All relationships with other sentient beings are based on relative power level; to those without souls, it's all a dominance game, where one either rules or submits or is destroyed.

So what is the soul? What is that intangible spiritual artifact that changes all this, that allows an individual to see other individuals as worthwhile fellows, companions, brethren, kin, or comrades? What makes the very ideas of compassion, mercy, and love possible, feasible, acceptable, desirable, laudable?

My first hypothesis is that the soul is, basically, in the words of Rene Belloq, "a radio for talking to God". To put it less obscurely, the 'soul' is a psychic connection to the Higher Powers. I suspect its original function was probably something rather self centered on the part of the Higher Powers... a psychic or emotional umbilical cord through which the Higher Powers could feed on the psychic energy of lower, mortal beings, or perhaps, if we don't want them to have been quite that nasty at the beginning of time, then, at the very least, it was a connection through which they could communicate more clearly with these lower mortal beings, and perhaps help to protect them from the Demons (the big, non human Demons) that most likely preyed on them back in prehistory. Or the soul may have originally been intended to be exactly what it seems to function as today... a link, a conduit, a shining, silvery rope by which the essence of a living sentient being can travel after death into a higher plane (the plane of the Higher Powers, perhaps). Perhaps this was originally simply designed as an act of mercy by the Higher Powers, to allow the sentient mortal creatures preyed on and tormented by the Greater Demons to escape after the death of their bodies to another realm. However, this active link and spiritual lifeline works as a two way channel between the Higher Powers and the lower mortals who are gifted with it, and thus, those lower mortals who have 'souls' take on certain psychic attributes of the Higher Powers... respect for the lives, desires, feelings, and right to exist of other mortal beings, the capacity to bond with another sentient being whether it serves a pragmatic purpose to do so or not, the ability to identify with a social group. While the Higher Powers may have merely done the psychic equivalent of fixing a radio beacon onto certain mortal victims of the Greater Demons, what they may have ended up doing is providing consciences to these primitive, self aware mortals.

And in effect, they created the first race of 'humans', as distinct from 'demons'.

Under this mechanism, then, what is going on when the Gypsies, or Willow, manage to cast a spell and summon up Angel's 'soul' from wherever it is it went to when Angel became a vampire? In effect, Angel's higher spiritual lifeline is being restored to him, and with it, his connection to the Higher Powers is once more activated. His 'conscience' is restored, as is his empathy, his capacity to feel unselfish affection and friendship, and his ability to feel guilt and remorse over his actions.

Without his 'soul', Angel still exists, but like all sentient individuals untouched by the grace of some higher entity, he's an entirely self centered, egoistic, anti-social psychopath who does whatever he wants to... and Angel's brutal nature seems to have a natural capacity for the enjoyment of cruelty and depravity that is extraordinary. Angel has a dark side, like all of us, and in him, that dark side is a brilliantly malevolent evil genius. Without his connection to the Higher Powers, his humanity, his conscience, his soul, to keep his personal darkness in check, Angel is one of the most horribly evil sentient beings who has ever lived... and it's that knowledge that makes him sick with guilt and remorse, when his soul is in place. Angel at his most evil is just as 'real' as Angel at his most noble and heroic. His dark side is as much a part of his nature as his good side... and it's knowing that which is Angel's chief torment.

So, what precisely does having a soul mean? Well, it seems to mean that there is an active link in place between some higher plane and the mortal, sentient being here on Earth. As long as that link is in place, the actual essence of the mortal being, upon the death of the mortal body, is drawn up the link to that higher plane, where, presumably, it is judged by the Higher Powers and sent to some appropriate place... heaven, Hell, a new incarnation down on Earth... whatever. But... and I've said this before, but I can't stress it enough... the soul is not, in any way, the actual essential identity entity of the individual that survives after death. The soul is a lifeline that guarantees that the immortal part of all sentient beings goes somewhere... a higher plane, probably... where it will be judged, and dealt with appropriately, based on its actions in its past, material incarnation. That would seem to the primary purpose of the soul... although as a serendipitious secondary purpose, the presence of this 'connection' to a Higher Plane allows those sentient individual beings who have it to at least have the possibility of developing a higher moral philosophy than the 'me first' attitude otherwise typical to all lower orders, regardless of their relative intelligence. In other words, the soul has the capacity to develop into and function as a conscience... that little voice inside us that tells us the difference between right and wrong. However, how much we listen to that little voice is still a matter of sentient choice, there are those who were raised since childhood to ignore that little voice, or whose formative experiences taught them to anyway, and there are probably even human beings born with the soul-attachment who, due to some unfortunate physical deformity, can't 'receive' the signals from the Higher Powers very well, or who intermittently lose their ability to pick up the transmission, and thus, suffer from occasional lapses into sociopathic behavior.

And we all hate that explanation, don't we?

The idea that the 'soul', that thing which sets us, as human beings, apart from the rest of the mob, is some sort of artificial psychic device fastened to our distant ancestors back in antiquity by some hoity toity Higher Powers for obscure reasons of their own... no way, dude! That's not happening. The concept that this essential psychic component to our individual identities that allows us to attain higher ethical development is imposed on us from above and not a 'natural' part of our consciousnesses... that's just emotionally repugnant to us. So, let's take a look at an alternative theory, the "It Jest Grew There Maw" Hypothesis, as follows:

In distant prehistory, back in the mists of antiquity, those hominids who would one day be humans began to evolve what can best be described as a 'psychic organ'. While this organ had no physical component, it nonetheless was a real adaptation in neo-mankind's non-physical consciousness. Call it a mutation if you will, but it was one that bred true, and proved its survival value, and thus, was passed on to succeeding generations.

What this 'psychic organ' did, basically, was allow each individual hominid who possessed it to form a rudimentary connection to every other hominid who possessed it. In essence, it allowed our remotest ancestors to form a sort of primal telepathic network between themselves. This network wasn't powerful enough for most to be consciously aware of, so it became a sort of mass racial subconscious... but it was enough to allow those protohumans to form, accept, and internalize various social concepts, like the family, the tribe, the race, and eventually, the nation... and also more individual social concepts, like friendship, trust, companionship... and love.

Were there other hominids around at this time not blessed with this random psychic mutation that jump started the social evolution of what would become humanity? Perhaps. If so, the two groups would have rapidly grown apart, as those not gifted with 'souls' continued in their chaotic, egoistic, sociopathic, non-cooperative, doubtless violent and confrontational manner... and as those with them, humanity's direct ancestors, began to draw together into groups, teams, families, tribes, nations... social organizations aimed at mutual support and survival.

Several dynamics would have evolved between the two distinct groups. When the social protohumans with 'souls' could be caught alone, they made fine and easy prey, because their new 'empathy sense' weakened their naturally violent and viciously individualistic natures. They were naturally inclined to 'trust', to try to help someone they saw in need, and to behave in other completely irrational and utterly insane ways...which would allow a cunning soul-free hominid to trap them easily. In general, this dynamic would work to create, enforce, and increase hostility and distrust between the soulful and soulfree populations, and to force the newly socialized protohumans to draw together even more tightly, from outside predator pressure. The protohumans might well be driven into migrations by such predator pressure into new geographic regions free of the attacking soul-free creatures, and certainly, the intense competition between the groups would impel the protohumans to develop new innovations in defense... new technologies, new organization techniques, better methods of communication, improved weapons... which would have a synergistic inter-relationship with the fact that the protohumans, being already enmeshed in a psychic, racial subconscious telepathy web, would already have a far better capacity for cooperating in the invention and implementation of such innovations.

The end result would be that human evolution... social, intellectual, technological, and even genetic... would tend to leap ahead of that of their soul-free fellows, and that humans themselves would be far more inclined to an orderly approach to their day to day life, with higher and higher levels of social organization arising from each succeeding one. Increasing Order would successively rise from previous chaos, in a reversal of the normal entropic process. While 'demons'... the soul-free populations... would continue to be mostly chaotic and unorganized, fighting amongst themselves for dominance and being able to, at best, organize themselves into mutually beneficial cooperative unions for a very short term. Those individual 'demons' smart enough to think up innovative and effective advancements in any area would keep them to themselves, and thus, the demonic race as a whole and as a collective would not benefit from the genius of its individual members.

Eventually, mankind, with its strange, unforeseen 'psychic organ' mutation, would come to utterly dominate the Earth.

Basically then, in this hypothesis, the 'soul' is a non-physical component of individual human identity evolved by our distant, protohuman ancestors that through a subconscious telepathic network link with every other human, gives us all a rudimentary social consciousness... a concept that we are not alone, that we belong to something greater than ourselves, that the group can be as important, or more important, than the individual, and most important of all, that another individual, or every other individual, is as important, and valid, as we ourselves are.

Demons don't have this, and given that, from their viewpoint, it causes humans to behave in frankly irrational manners that make them extremely vulnerable to exploitation and depredation by those without such an inherent psychic flaw and weakness, they don't want it. The enormous advantages given to humanity by our natural aptitude for organization and team work are things that demons themselves can only dimly grasp and not really comprehend; they understand that somehow humans have come to dominate the Earth, but they aren't sure how, although most or all of them probably are truculently sure that we cheated in some way.

Under this model, when a human being is converted to vampirism, their body would be transformed from normal flesh and blood into a near-exact duplicate composed of necromantic energy... but the soul, being an entirely immaterial, psychic organ, would not be duplicated. Thus, the human self still existent within the transformed body would now find itself without that vital aspect of its individual consciousness that it has always had, and as such, would no longer have any instinctive feeling of sympathy, empathy, or socialization. There would no longer be a capacity for true friendship or love in the human who now finds him or herself in a vampiric body; they are cut off from the telepathic racial subconsciousness. That sense of belonging to something greater would be gone.

In some vampires, this would result in a feeling of enormous relief from an oppression they had never really been aware of, and they would revel in their new freedom to do whatever they wanted to all the sentient beings around them without conscience pangs. Others would find themselves vaguely and incoherently missing the social connections they no longer really feel, and would strive to recreate them as best they could, although it would be something a like a newly blinded artist trying to draw by 'feel'. Still, this would explain why some vampires form relationships in a disgustingly human manner, as the Judge might put it, while others take on a more classically demonic standpoint, regarding everyone around them as objects to be bent to their will or destroyed... tools, toys, or annoyances.

Ah. Now this hypothesis we're all much more comfortable with. The soul isn't some silly thing shoved into our heads by a race of divine meddlers for reasons not our own; no, it is a product of evolution (we all love evolution) that gives us a huge psychic advantage over those scuzzy demon types. It isn't something handed out like candy from on high that distorts our natural patterns of thinking, oh no, it's a natural part of our intrinsic humanity! It's what makes us so cool! Gosh, that's nicey nice nice!

Of course, the problem with this hypothesis is that virtually all of mankind's metaphysical beliefs going back into prehistory have centered around the concept of the 'soul' being a gift from the gods or God, something give to us from outside that makes us better than the mere beasts of the field. We have an entire occult tradition built up around the concept of 'selling our souls', something that would hardly be likely if the 'soul' is just a freak psychic mutation that resulted in a social, intellectual, and technological advantage for humanity over those similar beings who didn't get it.

Still, all that, once more, could come from confusing the 'self' with the 'soul', which most human cultures seem to do. And we'll get to that.

It's also worth noting at this point that the function of Spike's chip can be seen as consistent with either the 'radio beacon' model or the 'evolved psychic organ' model for the soul's function. The chip itself seems to perform a fairly sophisticated function, in that it constantly monitors Spike's brain activity, as well as whether or not there is a 'soul' in his immediate proximity, or especially attached to whatever entity he is currently focusing his attention on... and if his attentions become violent, the chip immediately tweaks the pain center of his brain, in much the same way the chip from Crichton's THE TERMINAL MAN functions.

In order to do this, however, the Initiative would basically have had to build either:

(a) the equivalent of a psychic radio receiver that can detect the presence of a 'soul'... and anything that can do that would, most likely, over time, start to receive the same general connection to, or psychic radio signal from, the Higher Powers, as an actual soul would. Weaker, perhaps, and strengthened by proximity to real souls, which would reinforce the 'broadcast'... but in effect, the chip in Spike's head is, more and more, starting to act to a certain extent like a sort of artificial soul. It's not as good as the real thing, and probably won't help Spike's own immortal essence attain a higher plane if he's ever staked (and most likely, he'd be judged pretty harshly by the Higher Powers if it did, anyway)... but it's enough to awaken his higher moral nature at least slightly; to allow him to feel loneliness, a longing to belong to a social matrix, affection, friendship, and even love. In other words, however much Spike hates it, the vestigial remnants of his humanity, strengthened by his artificial 'soul', are knitting together into a 'conscience' once more.

OR

(b) the technological equivalent of that same 'psychic organ', one that allows Spike to be tuned in on, and make a telepathic link (however weak and rudimentary) to the mass racial subconscious that the rest of us share. This would gradually have the effect of allowing Spike to start seeing individuals who have souls, especially those he spends the most time with, as 'real', as being as valid as he is... in other words, it would allow him to feel affection, want to make friends, to form a desire to belong to some social matrix... even to fall in love. If the soul is indeed such a psychic organ, then the chip was probably designed simply to detect its presence by attuning Spike's brain to its telepathic broadcast frequency; however, over time, that has formed a connection in and of itself that is very similar to a real, natural soul. Thus, as stated, while Angel is 'The Vampire With A Soul', Spike is pretty much the next best thing... a vampire with a chip in his head that acts like a soul, and allows him to connect once more with the telempathic grid/network that binds all humanity together into one psychic unit... more or less.

The 'psychic organ' hypothesis, however pleasing to our own human egos, does also have a problem when we consider it in light of the whole 'let's conjure up Angel's soul and jam it into his vampire psyche again'. After all, if the soul is just an immaterial mutation that proved to be a highly beneficial evolution for protohumanity, all this talk about 'conjuring up Angel's soul' is just so much mystic hooie. Angel doesn't have a particular 'soul', or if he did, it should have simply dissipated when he was turned into a vampire and that particular psychic organ was not duplicated.

However, mystic hooie is an intrinsic part of the supernatural. It's human nature to try to make things sound grandiloquent and mysterious, and unfortunately, there is a tendency to the pompous and the obscure in all of us. And it might behoove us now to remember that when the Rites of Restoration used to give Angel his soul back were discussed, mention was made specifically of using the sphere-thingie to 'conjure Angel's soul out of the ether'. While this could mean nearly anything, including grabbing Angel's original, surviving, disembodied personality back from wherever it had wandered in the cosmos, it seems more likely to assume that the whole ritual, and the sphere itself, were simply meant to focus psychic energy in such a way as to create another 'soul' for Angel... basically, giving him the spiritual equivalent of a blood transfusion or a kidney transplant, except in this case, Angel's new 'soul' would simply be formed out of psychic energy drawn out of the ether.

Thus, Angel's 'soul', while it's just as good and functional as anyone else's in connecting him to the racial human empathic network and, well, making him feel guilty as hell over all the bad shit he did when he was free of its influence, is not the soul he was born with, or even the one the Gypsies made for him. It's just a fully functional psychic organ crafted for him by Willow when she cast the spell again.

So there we have two different mechanisms to explain the 'soul'... one of occult, divine, and supernatural origin for irrational, mystical, New Age 'fantasy' fans, the 'God Gave It To Us To Make Us Better' Hypothesis, and the other for mechanical, engineering type SF fans in the John Campbell/James T. Kirk school of thought, who believe that intrinsic human individuality is ultimately the thing that will conquer the universe and that gives us a leg up on all other sentient beings, the "It Jest Grew There Maw" theorem. You pays your money, and you takes your choice... at least, until some episode I haven't seen yet comes along and invalidates both of them, leaving me back where I began.

C. THE SELF

We've spent a lot of time on the 'soul', and I've emphasized, over and over again, that one of the primary areas of emotional confusion that arises while watching BUFFY is that Whedon & Co. use the phrase 'soul' in order to evoke certain emotional associations, and yet, they seem to be defining that particular spiritual component in ways that are entirely unique, and thus, different from how most human cultures emotionally and implicitly perceive a 'soul' to be. To put it bluntly once more, the 'soul' in the Buffy Universe is not the 'self'.

If it were, soulless entities like demons could have no self awareness or individuality, there would be no point in punishing a soulless vampire-demon like Angelus by forcing an innocent 'self' who had taken no part in Angelus' crimes back into Angelus' body, as the only punishment would be to the separate self of 'Angel', who would erroneously think he bore responsibility for the actions of the separate demonic entity, and various people would long ago have realized, and explained to Angel, that he himself is an entirely separate entity from the demon Angelus, and has nothing to feel guilty over. Furthermore, not only could soulless entities have no individuality or self awareness, they also could not survive after the death of their physical bodies.

So, if the 'soul' is not the 'self', then what is the self?

Let's look at the last point we made above: if the 'soul' were the 'self', soulless entities, like vampires, could not survive the death of their physical bodies. Since we've seen Darla resurrected, we know that the 'self' cannot be the 'soul', because Darla's personal identity and discrete individual consciousness did survive the death of her vampiric body, and she was brought back to life in a body that was, apparently, a duplicate of her natural body around the time of her death.

In other words, the 'self', our personal identity, the individual essence that is 'us', does survive the death of the body in some form, with or without a soul, which makes it implicit and irrefutable that the 'self' and the 'soul' are not the same thing, and, in fact, that the 'soul' is not necessary for an individual entity to survive death in some self aware state.

What the 'self' may be and where it arises originally must remain speculative. However, this is the speculation section, so I'll say that I myself suspect the 'self' is some sort of immaterial energy-entity that is generated by the physical, organic, metabolic body over time. How much time, I don't know. If a baby dies, does some immaterial energy form comprising its barely formed personality survive and go somewhere else? Or does it take longer for the 'self' to form as a discrete entity that can remain coherent after terminal disconnection from the shell of the body? In which case, the question would become, how long does a person have to survive in a body before they are 'organized' enough as an energy entity to continue beyond terminal mortal disconnection?

I have no answer for that, although I'll point out that many mythological cults in human history and in human occult traditions specify the sacrifice of infants, for whatever reason... and that reason may have to do with some threshold below which the nascent individual consciousness does not survive physical death. Perhaps the death of an infant causes the dissipation of the newly formed energy entity in a way that can be absorbed and harnessed as psychic power, or that attracts the attention of certain extradimensional demonic entities that like to feed on such etheric elements, but are too weak normally to rip apart a fully formed, more solidly coherent personality.

Whatever the case, there is inarguably some sort of coherent individual 'self' that, with or without a 'soul', can survive the death of its sheltering body. That 'self' is altered in its behavior, psychology, and mannerisms by transformation into a vampire state, mostly by the loss of the 'soul' which somehow provides a higher moral judgement and reasoning center... but still, that 'self' has a continuity of existence from living human body into undead vampiric body, and so the essential individual remains the same. Angel remains Angel throughout his long life, whether he has a soul or not. Darla, similarly, remains essentially the same individual whether she is in vampire form or human. With or without a soul or a living, human body, the 'self' continues.

It's worth noting that in one case we've seen, the sense of self and identity was so strong that it managed to maintain a link to a severed body part across several miles of separation, even though that body part had been grafted onto another person and was supposedly under their control. I'm speaking, of course, of Lindsay's 'evil hand' problems, which seemed to resolve themselves after he obeyed the request of his hand donor... whose body had been almost entirely scavenged of parts by then, and yet, who still lived in a Wolfram & Hart sponsored life support tank... and killed him. Presumably, at that point, the donor's 'self' went on somewhere else, and left Lindsay to use the hand in peace. Nonetheless, the 'self' can be a very powerful thing.

It's also interesting to speculate that in fact, when human occult traditions speak of 'selling your soul', they are actually making a semantic error. In fact, what they are talking about is 'selling your self', which is to say, selling your immaterial and essential identity-entity, your coherent disembodied consciousness, into spiritual servitude, most likely after your body dies, but perhaps sometimes even before. Wolfram & Hart's employment contracts, as we've discovered, seem to extend beyond the death of the physical body, although the dead Holland Manners in the elevator to Hell with Angel seemed to still have his physical body, and said, in fact, that he wasn't a ghost.

Still, much of what that particular entity, whoever he was, said to Angel was most likely misinformation, and it seems at least possible that everything Angel thought he saw, after leaping at the Senior Partner, knocking him through the window, and putting his enchanted ring on, was probably an illusion meant to... well... disillusion him, break his spirit utterly, and, in the best Wolfram & Hart manner, finish the admirable job of corrupting him that they had started by bringing back Darla in the first place. (That the whole scenario was simply planned, probably without Lindsay or Lilah's knowledge, to fake Angel out and make him utterly disgusted with humanity and the world, seems well within the realm of possibility, and certainly within the reasonable capacities of Wolfram & Hart to successfully stage. Working an elaborate scam using various mystical and illusory spells would seem right in keeping for them.)

D. THE AFTERLIFE

We don't know much about it. Apparently, something happens to individual personalities upon the death of their bodies. Most seem to go somewhere other than Earth, but I don't think anyone we've seen who has returned to life retained any memory of where they'd been. Some may reincarnate into new bodies. A few hang around down here, apparently, as ghosts, as seen in "I Only Have Eyes For You". Still, the fact that various individuals have been resurrected would seem to indicate that there is an afterlife of some sort.

E. DEMONS

As stated in Part 1. Data, we've been told that the generally humanoid demons seen in the past, in both BUFFY and ANGEL, are not true demons, but are, in fact, 'tainted', whatever that turns out to mean. True Demons, with a capital D, are great big huge ugly monstrous things that need to chow down on vast amounts of provender, apparently preferring the human kind, and that, apparently, don't like sunlight much (implied by the fact that Ascensions from minor demon form to major Demon form are inevitably accompanied by a total eclipse). These great big monstrous Demons are vastly powerful, enormously ickie, and, in the words of a particularly hot brunette Slayer, 'wicked gross', but they are far from indestructible, as demonstrated by the fact that one was, in a long ago time, killed by a volcanic eruption, and the entire graduating class of Sunndale High 1999, ably led by Buffy and Xander, managed to blow one up real good with several tons of ANFO (ammonium nitrate fuel oil) explosive piled up in the school library.

As vampires fear and can be hurt or killed by fire, and as both Demons we know of died as a result of massive amounts of pyrokinetic force (one was buried by an exploding volcano, while the other was, as noted, blown up by a massive ANFO explosion), and as Demons don't seem to like sunlight, it does seem safe to say that Demon bodies are composed of the same unnatural, necromantic energy as vampire bodies.

Given the Analysis and Speculation, above, on the nature of the soul, and what it's absence might mean, it would generally seem that the lesser demons for the vast most part will tend to be anti-social, aggressive, violent, easily incited to anger and hatred, and generally just kind of mean, nasty folks. While their essential identities would most likely survive the deaths of their bodies, without a 'soul' they have no direct connection to a Higher Power, and as such, it would seem their discarnate personalities would either wander around causing random amounts of mischief and harm out of malice and spite, get eaten by psychic predators, get enslaved to provide psychic power to necromancers, or wind up leaving the material dimension of Earth entirely and winding up in some demonic Hell realm where, presumably, they'd be tormented and, at best, end up in the service of some more powerful Demon lord there. All of which would lead lesser demons with any intelligence and foresight to try to exercise one or both of two available options: either (a) making their physical bodies as close to immortal as possible to avoid the whole afterlife of torment thingie, or (b) making some kind of deal with some sort of greater Demon to enter into their service voluntarily, on this mortal plane and/or in the afterlife, so they would at least know where they're going to end up and what's going to happen there.

The gradual evolution of the soulless prehistorics into many different demon races, and the soulful primates into considerably fewer human races, may be attributable to direct genetic and magical manipulation of the demonic races by Greater Demons, as opposed to a relative lack of such manipulation of human genetics by the Higher Powers. In fact, vampirism and lycanthropy could well be the results of Greater or lesser demons attempting to screw around with human genetics, psyches, or essences regardless of the fact that humans are, supposedly, protected by the Higher Powers.

Whatever the case, we have lesser demon races here on Earth and Greater Demons dwelling in the Outer Dimensions trying to get back to Earth and all sort of demons of varying power levels and appearances and abilities in between living in other dimensions but traveling to Earth fairly often when summoned by some idiot who should know better but doesn't. Most lesser demons seem to have adapted, over the generations, and developed the power to shapeshift into a semblance of human shape, which would seem to indicate that they have at least some necromantic energy in their bodily make up. Most lesser demons seem to be stronger and tougher than normal humans, as well as meaner and nastier. Some of the more powerful lesser demons apparently can enter into pacts with Greater Demons for many different things, usually expressed as increased mortal power.

Whatever the case, despite the obvious fact that there are many physical differences between demons and humans (and between demons and demons, for that matter), the primary difference between the two groups is psychic, and defined by the presence or absence of a soul. This seems underscored by the fact that demons can be nourished by human flesh, can use human bodies as incubators for their own young, and, especially, can interbreed with humanity in many cases and have fertile offspring... all of which indicates that demons evolved in the same environment as humans did and have an astonishing amount of genetic consanguinity with humans.

Or, it's just magic, but that's kind of dull.

To an extent, Wolfram & Hart could be seen as a sort of demonic recruiting agency, employed in a concerted, organized attempt to strip away the crippling, spirit shackle that is a 'soul' and return poor, mind controlled humanity to the true freedom and liberation of the natural demon state. The process of recruiting a human and turning them into a vampire could also be seen this way, from the demonic perspective. What a human would see as corruption, a demon might well look on as liberation and emancipation.

In the Host's home dimension, whose name I can't recall right this second, there is an ancient and very unpleasant demonic priesthood that seems to have some essential link to Wolfram & Hart (or, at least, both organizations seem to draw on the same basic texts for their charters). This particularly ickie priesthood seems to be the essential factor in a demonic society that treats their human population as 'cows'... which may indicate that whatever Gods or Powers this demonic priesthood worships (I'd assume Greater Demons, myself) long ago thought of humans, or perhaps all prehistoric hominids, as cattle, and the priesthood is simply now relegating this status, millenia later, to humans. The Priesthood did not seem to have any particular abilities for draining psychic power, but on the other hand, they were obsessed with magically transferring Cordelia's 'curse' of clairvoyant visions (a direct link to the Higher Powers, apparently, much the same as the 'soul' I've been talking about) to another demon/human hybrid they could more directly control. Perhaps this priesthood does not have the power to tap into the human soul-link, but their ability to magically manipulate the 'vision' link would indicate they do have some capacity for exploiting certain kinds of psychic energy. Further, this priesthood controlled all enslaved humans through collars that their demonic masters could use to give them jolts of pain at will, and had a machine that would, supposedly, destroy every human in the dimension if they activated it... all of which sounds to me like it worked, somehow, through interactions with the human soul.... All of which simply indicates that while demons may, for the most part, be contemptuous of the human soul, they certainly seem to know what it is and, in many cases, how to manipulate it.

F. GODS

Gods seem to feed on psychic energy. They also seem to be mostly immaterial and to dwell, for various reasons, on other (perhaps higher) planes than that of the material Earth. They also seem to be able to directly alter or impact the material fabric of what we call 'reality' through an effort of their will, although they also seem to prefer to work through physical agents in this realm.

Or perhaps gods only need to feed on psychic energy when they are in living, biological, material forms, such as that worn by Glory in her earthly incarnation. We really don't know, although the fact that 'gods' seem to have encouraged sentient beings to worship them, and that higher demons (Demons?) seem to still encourage lower demons, and their human followers, to worship and sacrifice to them, would seem to bear out the notion that even if higher energy/psychic beings don't need to feed on the psychic energy of lesser material beings, they still like it.

We know that Glory needed to habitually feed on human psychic energy to maintain her own psychic coherency. She couldn't feed on demonic psychic energy, even though she was surrounded at all times by her demonic worshippers. We know that those who had been drained by Glory were then linked to her psychically, and according to Glory, could never find their way out of the darkness of their own shattered minds again. And we know that Willow managed to reverse this draining process and restore to Tara whatever it was that Glory had drained from her, that this seemed to break the link between Tara and Glory, give Tara her sanity back, and, according to Glory, it 'made a hole' in Glory's own psychic coherency.

I would hypothesize that Glory, for whatever reason, was not simply manifest in material form, but in actual human form. This would mean that she would have a soul, as humans do. And apparently, this soul kept her from forming the necessary psychic contact with demonic minds, who do not have souls. All of this seems to fit in well with my second hypothesis about the soul, namely, that it is a 'psychic organ' that allows each human being to be in constant subconscious telempathic contact with all other human beings. In order to get the psychic energy she needs to maintain her highly advanced mentality, Glory is required to drain energy from minds that her own 'human' psyche has an affinity for... and in effect, when she does so, she is building her own little psychic sub-network of those she has drained. She can't continue to get any useful amounts of energy from them, but nonetheless, they are linked to her and they feel what she feels, and that link can, under the right conditions, be reversed, leaving Glory with a sudden gap in the psychic network she has built and become accustomed to having around her.

Being incarnate within this material plane, Glory seemed limited to affecting the material plane in the same manner as the rest of us, i.e., physically, through the use of her body and whatever tools she might find or construct. Her much more advanced and powerful mentality allowed her to manipulate her physical body in ways that we cannot, making her effectively superhuman to an otherwise unattainable and invincible degree... but still, her vast natural psychic powers were constrained and channeled through her human body. Thus, she could destroy nearly anything she wanted with a blow of her hand or foot, she could move through the material world at huge velocities, and she could not be hurt by lesser physical attacks simply because her animating consciousness was superior to anything that might confront it... but she could not simply change or alter reality at a distance through a simple effort of will, as she could have if she had been on a higher dimensional plane and freed of her material body.

Just as lesser demons seem to occasionally have the opportunity to ascend to the status of Greater Demons, so I would assume Greater Demons have the occasional opportunity to ascend to Godhood. Or it may well be that Greater Demons are simply the material forms that these immaterial beings from the higher planes take on when they visit Earth... although they also seem capable of taking on more humanoid forms if they want to, as Glory has (although she seemed to have been forced to it) and as the Senior Partner supposedly did in one episode of ANGEL. In fact, the Greater Demon that the Mayor became may have simply been the next material stage for him in a process that would have led to his ascent to eventual godhood.

It occurs to me that the Tribunal could, hypothetically, wander around the various dimensions staging duels to the death and offering their protection to the winners of these duels in order to feast off the psychic energies released during these duels. This would also explain why, in general, they only accepted demons as champions in these duels, since demons would be easier to get access to in this way, not having 'souls' already channeling their energies to some higher plane. This would seem to indicate that the Tribunal were also gods, but that's only a theory. On the other hand, they seemed to have physical bodies... but so did Glory... so I don't know.

G. THE SLAYER

Exactly what is this strange metaphysical office known as 'The Slayer'?

According to the movie, and the blurb at the start of all the TV series' first season episodes, "Into each generation, a Slayer is born". We've since found out that this is... well... poetic, to say the least. Into each generation, apparently, many potential Slayers are born, although none of these candidates actually become full fledged Slayers until the death of an immediate predecessor causes the initiation of some mysterious activation process that endows the new Slayer with the superhuman powers that are the fundamental tools of her new office/profession/vocation.

What is it that makes a potential Slayer? Well, it isn't anything specific to any one race, apparently, as BUFFY and ANGEL have both been careful to show us Slayers of many different ethnicities. (As I mentioned before, it's vaguely troubling, though, that only the Caucasian Slayers seem to survive for very long, and, in fact, Buffy the WASPy White Vampire Slayer has on many occasions managed to kick the ass of both vampires who killed three other, non white Slayers. The Aryan Nation has good reason to be proud of BUFFY and the subtle message of Caucasian superiority that the franchise seems to be spreading among young white children everywhere.) Whatever the case may be, potential Slayers all do seem to share certain things in common, which could well be from a common genetic sequence scattered in prehistory amongst the human population. In general, these common traits seem to be:

* Gender - potential Slayers are all female. In the movie there was actually a reason for this; Slayers had the ability to detect the proximity of vampires through a reaction in their female reproductive systems that gave them symptoms like menstrual cramps. Apparently, this was considered comical (honestly, I just think that, if it was intended to be funny, it's simply vulgar) and removed from all mention in the TV franchise... leaving us with Slayers who are all female, for no readily discernible reason. We'll assume that for some reason (women's intuition?), chickiepoos are better recipients of 'Slayer powers' than men are.

* Athleticism - potential Slayers all seem to have the 'jock gene', which to say, they all seem to be among that elite (and generally annoying) few who have enormous natural physical strength, speed, stamina, coordination, and durability, who learn athletic disciplines easily and who enjoy physical exertion. Bruce Wayne, presumably, was fortunate enough to have the same 'jock gene', although his gender would have disqualified him from Slayer-hood.

* Attractiveness - potential Slayers all seem to be at the very least cute, and in many of the cases we've seen, way hot. No Slayer yet seen on screen has been even remotely homely. Spotty, porky, and/or woofy candidates need not apply, apparently.

* Presumably, all potential Slayers share some special affinity for or sensitivity to whatever it is that eventually chooses and makes some sort of psychic connection to them, in order to give them their powers. It would make sense if this was a gender-linked trait.

Why they're all female... well, see my last point, above. The reason they're all in the upper percentages of human athletic potential is equally obvious. Presumably, Willow, given the right psychic 'attunement', could be infused with 'Slayer powers', but chances are, she'd be considerably weaker and slower and more breakable than someone who was already naturally tough and strong and fast.

As for them being babes, one assumes this is primarily a coincidence, generated by the fact that they're all going to be on TV, and up until now, on the WB Network, and it is Against The Laws Of The WB Universe for any female characters or actors appearing thereon to Not Be Hot, unless they're really really old, members of an alien or monstrous race, annoying producer characters on Darren Star parody shows, or playing Nikki Cox's mother in law. But these are the only exceptions, and Vampire Slayers are clearly not among them. Therefore, all Vampire Slayers must be at least moderately hot, and the ones who are going to be around for longer than five minutes before Spike kills them have to be Totally Hot. Personally, I can only hope UPN continues in this stellar tradition and ongoing celebration of the aesthetically pleasing female physique, and personally look forward to seeing Jeri Ryan briefly cameo in a flashback as some 19th Century Slayer doomed to be choked to death with her own mammoth brassiere by Darla and the Master.

How are Slayers chosen from the available candidates, who does the choosing, and what happens afterward? Well, as far as we've seen, there doesn't seem to be any particular Earthly ritual involved in the 'activation' of a Slayer, and in fact, at least with Buffy, the Council seemed rather surprised at who the next Slayer turned out to be, so apparently they don't have anything to do with it. It would be helpful if someone at some point had ever explicated exactly how it is the Council manages to track down who the next Slayer is, but if this has ever been stated, I'm not aware of it. Apparently, Slayer candidates just wander blithely along in their lives with no clue as to their potential status as mankind's supernatural defender, until abruptly, some unknown power or authority decides to whack them with the Slayer stick... and shortly thereafter, a Watcher assigned by the Council comes doddering up, hurls a bayonet at their heads, and start exhorting them to hie off to the nearest graveyard and jam pieces of firewood through the chests of reanimated corpses.

It seems a rather odd procedure.

Given that we've never (at least, to my knowledge) been given much information on the nuts and bolts of actual Slayer selection and the notification thereof by unknown supernatural entities to the Council of just what lucky young debutante got handed the pointy stick this time around, the best I can do is speculate. And I would speculate that in fact, the office of Slayer was probably created mystically long, long ago, perhaps by some prehistoric human shaman as a covenant with the Higher Powers, to help provide a besieged humanity with some sort of powerful and effective help against the forces of supernatural evil (demons, and, presumably, vampires) that were, at that time, constantly prowling just beyond the circle of firelight outside primitive man's cave dwellings.

I tend to assume that all this took place back in prehistory, with a humanity that still dwelt for the most part in caves, because we've seen an entity called 'the First Slayer', and she looks pretty damn Stone Age to me. That's only my instinct, but dammit, the woman looks practically like an extra from QUEST FOR FIRE. Of course, the idea that the First Slayer came about due to some pact between a prehistoric cave shaman and the Higher Powers is all entirely supposition, based on my own probably insane and deranged conceptualizations regarding the nature of the soul and the connection between humanity and the Higher Powers and what have you.

However, all we know, to date (as far as I'm aware) is that there is an entity called the First Slayer that still, apparently, messes with Slayers and their buddies occasionally in their dreams, and who looks like a refugee from the flashbacks in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. We know that Slayers have superhuman powers they aren't born with, and don't train to get, and aren't given through super soldier serums or experimental chemicals or the bites of radioactive insects... in fact, they seem to just 'get' them, somehow, from somewhere that they themselves don't understand, and are often, apparently, surprised to find they have them, as when groaty old Watchers show up out of nowhere and throw knives at their heads, and they pluck said knives out of the air without conscious effort. (One wonders at the various lawsuits that the Watcher's Council has quietly settled out of court after various regrettable cases of mistaken Slayer identification.)

All of which is to say, the powers, which seem to be 'natural' to Slayers once they are activated as Slayers, were not present in the girls before, and are not instilled in them by any known force, process, or entity. These powers are quite formidable, and apparently, can be active in more than one Slayer at one time without any discernible diminishment in either Slayer's power levels (although Kendra, in my opinion, seemed to be a pretty lousy Slayer). These powers apparently remain for life, even after a Slayer is killed and resurrected, and apparently, can increase with experience and training.

Beyond that, Dracula, or the entity who claimed to be Dracula, spouted a lot of mysterious sounding wanker talk about how the Slayer's powers were similar to the powers of the creatures she fought, and the source of the Slayer's power lay in darkness, and similar bilge, which may or may not have been true. In addition to that, the First Slayer seemed to be doing her level best to kill Buffy, Xander, Willow, and Giles after they all fused together briefly into Uber-Slayer in order to beat Adam at the end of the fourth season... which seems like a pretty dark thing to do.

All told, then, I'm going to speculate and say that the source of the Slayer's power is demonic, and stems from some sort of ancient pact between humanity and this particular demon, or some entity which has authority over this demon. The pact probably states that this particular demon will provide 'power' to the Slayer, in exchange for... I don't know what... and that upon the death of one Slayer, the 'power' will then be provided to another person who will become the Slayer. Most likely, the pact contains various details and provisions outlining exactly the sort of person who will be deemed to be an acceptable Slayer, and who knows, the demon may always pick girls just because the original humans who set up the pact didn't specify gender, and the demon in question figured girls wouldn't be very good at it. (Demons are like that.)

This is, again, all speculation, and there are alternative explanations. However, I like this one the best. Buffy has seen the First Slayer a few times and been told that that form is 'only a vessel', so I suspect that what she has seen is not actually the First Slayer herself, who is long since dust, but merely a guise taken on by the supernatural entity (probably a Demon) that provides the Slayer with her power, patterned after the first human that this Demon was ever linked to. The reason this particular Demon tried to kill Xander, Willow, and Giles after the merging spell is most likely that the ancient pact specifically protects the Slayer from retribution by this Demon, but not anyone else. The merging spell made this Demon aware of Buffy's friends, and even gave it a psychic link to them, and as the Slayer pact does not protect them, it felt free to torment them and even try to destroy them.

Given the above, assuming any of it is even remotely close to being accurate, the Watchers could well be the organization that first created the Slayer Pact back in prehistory... or are, at least, the ancient organization that inherited custodianship of the Pact and that attempts to locate, train, and support each succeeding Slayer. No doubt they have ways of tracking the extradimensional link between the Demon who gives the Slayer her powers, and the Slayer herself... or they have the ability to invoke the Demon and ask it who the latest Slayer is, or, at least, do some sort of spell to give them a vision of the newest Slayer and her surroundings so they can try to locate her.

I'm aware there is a BUFFY book featuring Spike and Drusilla that states that the Watcher's Council has an active training program involving all the known Slayer candidates at any given time, but while this seems like an interesting idea, I've never heard it mentioned on the TV show. As a geek who is approaching middle age, I'm aware that writers in peripheral spin off medias tend to take liberties with creative properties that would often be greeted with derision or appalled shock by the original creator (writers of STAR TREK fiction, even the official stuff sanctioned by Paramount, often establish things that are clearly not a legitimate part of the franchise depicted on TV and in film), so I can't take this notion that the Council has a list of all Slayer candidates at any given time and trains them all to be potential Slayers seriously. As I say, it's an interesting idea, but not necessarily a sensible one, and would seem to be belied by the fact that clearly, neither the Council nor Buffy had ever heard of each other prior to her being somehow selected and mystically activated as the current Slayer.

It appears, however, that if the source of the Slayer's superhuman powers is demonic, it is perfectly capable of providing those powers to more than one Slayer at one time, and that once activated, the link between Slayers and the power source is not severed, even by death. Or, it could be that some mysterious force simply activates powers that somehow lie dormant in each Slayer candidate from birth... but while that's the simplest explanation, it doesn't seem to account for the psychic attack of the 'First Slayer' entity on Buffy and her friends at the end of the fourth season, or the focused nature of a Slayer's limited clairvoyance powers (which mostly center around imminent supernatural threats to mankind), or the Watchers' apparently ability to find a previously unknown Slayer after her powers have been activated. It seems to me that the extradimensional power source is the most likely hypothesis.

I suspect I'd know more about this if I'd seen the episodes where (I'm told) Buffy actually dies, and then is brought back to life... so it may be that all these speculations are clearly pointless and wrong, and have already been invalidated by something in a show or shows I haven't seen yet.

H. THE CHARACTERS -

As noted in Part 1, the characters are what make any show work, and if BUFFY is consistently a notch above the vast majority of television (which it is) and even most feature films (and any random episode of BUFFY, in my opinion, makes GLADIATOR look terrible by comparison), then the reason is the characterization. Credit for that has to go to Whedon, Greenwalt, the writing team, and, of course, the astonishingly talented acting ensemble.

Bearing that in mind, some general speculations on next season's character directions would be:

First, in general, Sunnydale is now without a Slayer. Now, there are several ways to deal with this. We've seen Buffy's tombstone, so presumably she's been established as being dead for at least a few days. How much longer she'll stay dead before the inevitable resurrection is unknown. So one possibility is that she comes back nearly immediately after the end of the last WB episode. This keeps things simple and requires no adjustments in the lives of the characters. Simplicity is rarely seen as a virtue on BUFFY, though (Whedon certainly didn't take the easy way out introducing a little sister) so things may be allowed to be more interesting than this. For example:

*A new Slayer arises. We've seen it happen before, once when Buffy died previous to this, and once when Buffy's successor, Kendra, died... at which point, Buffy herself was still alive, but still, the death of Kendra caused a new Slayer, Faith, to be activated. So we can assume a new Slayer is due to show up, in which case, if she shows up in Sunnydale, Buffy's team will probably try to form some sort of support nexus around her... with, as THE SIMPSONS are fond of noting, 'whacky results'.

*A new Slayer doesn't arise, or arises off in Philadelphia or Saigon or someplace Not Sunnydale. In this case, Sunnydale will still need some sort of occult patrol force to stake the newly hatched vampires and fight all the various demonic plots that keep being spawned there, and the Slayerettes, between them, working as a team, might just add up to one Slayer... nearly. Until Buffy's inevitable return, watching Xander, Anya, Willow, Tara, and maybe Spike patrol the night, bumbling and fumbling their way through various encounters with evil, could be fun.

Some or all of these possibilities will most likely be mentioned again in the individual character listings where appropriate, but hey, that's life. Nobody's paying me for this.

BUFFY SUMMERS - Analysis and Speculation on Buffy are, at this point, mostly fruitless, since she's currently dead, and while I feel certain that won't last, I have no idea what shape her resurrection will take, how long she'll have been dead before she comes back, and what she'll find when she finally returns. Chances are good she'll either have to get Dawn out of foster care, track her down if she's run away, or get into a custody battle with their father over her.

As to speculations on possible developments in the nature and behavior of Buffy herself - well, it seems inevitable that some kind of romantic interest will have to be generated for her, since she's been without that most fundamental of melodramatic plot staples for most of a season now. With Angel at another network, we can be reasonably sure he won't be showing up, and I can only pray Riley never returns, unless it's as a villain, so presumably this would have to be someone new. (For various reasons, it's obvious Buffy won't develop a romance with any of the male regulars currently in the series, and I can't think of any eligible peripheral males who have been hanging around lately, either.)

With Willow and Tara around, we can at least rest assured that Buffy will stay straight, which is something of a relief. (I have nothing against gay humans of either gender in concept, but I've already had my heart broken once by the delectable Willow taking a pass on my entire gender; having Buffy do it too would be more than I could bear.) With Giles dropping back to recurring character status, one has to wonder if Buffy will be assigned a new Watcher, and the other obvious complication for Buffy that could be looming on the horizon will be if a new Slayer is chosen upon her recent death. Since Faith was apparently chosen upon the death of Kendra, even though Buffy was still alive at that time (I think, I could be wrong) it would seem that the activation of a new Slayer is something we'll have to contend with.

Personally, since we have to go fishing in the Great Beyond to get Buffy back, I'll personally offer up a wish that they could cast a big enough net to get Jenny Calendar back, as well. I don't know what they'd do with her once they got her, but she was just a total babe.

RUPERT GILES - Dropping from regular to recurring character status, and with a rumored show of his own in the tentative planning stages, Rupert would appear to be not long for the BUFFY series, anyway. It seems unlikely, given all that, that he'll be developed in any interesting way here. Worse, it seems unlikely he'll be beating the living crap out of Angel with a lit torch again any time soon, either. I don't have anything against Angel as a character, but as the teenage bystander once told Johnny Smith, I love to see that guy take a beatin'.

XANDER HARRIS - With engagement to Anya in the offing, it seems fairly predictable that next season will end with a wedding. I suppose we should really commend BUFFY for having avoided that monstrous cliché for this long, but apparently, they just couldn't let their cast members get much out of teen agerdom without having someone get hitched. One can only predict that, as inevitably occurs in melodramatic fiction, marriage will make Xander and Anya steadily more and more boring (hey, art imitates life). Of course, Whedon could surprise me (despite his apparently penchant for recycling previous storylines, he still does that from time to time) and the most predictable surprise in the Xander/Anya relationship would be Xander breaking it off with her, and her reverting to vengeance demon state in order to punish him. Remember, folks, you read it here first.

While Nicholas Brendan has done an exemplary job working with the limited range of behavior and dialogue that Xander is generally given, managing to flesh out and add dimension to a character who started out as, and for the most part remains, a buffoon, one can't really see him managing to push the envelope too far. Xander may be the single character in the show whose major charms and interesting traits all stem from his immaturity, from watching him struggle along the road to adulthood and go through a coming of age. The problem with this is that either he comes of age and becomes a boring grown up, or he doesn't and becomes a perpetual adolescent. I have nothing against perpetual adolescents (I'm one myself) but I suspect the BUFFY audience won't take to it well... yet Xander really seems to have nothing interesting to grow into. Unless he gets turned into a vampire or a demon or something. I suppose Anya could turn him into a troll.

Whatever the case, while Xander is and always has been one of my favorite characters in the show, it's tough for me to figure out what they'll do with him after too much longer. As with many of the characters in NYPD BLUE, I'd think that eventually, the writers will just run out of ideas for keeping the character interesting. But maybe I'm wrong. He could always run for Mayor of Sunnydale; I understand the incumbent had to step down for health reasons...

WILLOW ROSENBERG - This season or next, I expect Willow to run into some problems as regards her perceptions of her own sexuality. Most likely, she'll meet a guy she likes and end up being very confused by that (and if Seth Green wakes up and smells the Dead Film Career, maybe it will be Oz... wouldn't that be nice). Should Tara turn out to be merely an imaginary friend cooked up by Willow's subconscious, doubtless that will cause her to have some issues to deal with, too (like resolving the fact that all the time she thought she was gay, she was actually just masturbating). As for her personal growth, a lot of that will depend on how long Buffy stays dead, as in her absence, and with Giles back in England a lot, Willow is the obvious candidate to keep the Slayerettes together and active as a protective force in Sunnydale, in the absence of an actual Slayer. (Willow, Tara, Anya, Xander, and maybe Spike, working together, should about add up to one Slayer, I'd think.) Even if Buffy pops right back up above ground again, Willow is still the obvious pick to take Giles' place as her major advisor and deputy leader of the group. I'd expect to see a much stronger and more aggressive Willow, as well as a more powerful one, emerging over the next season.

CORDELIA CHASE - Oh, who cares? (sigh) Presumably, Cordelia will continue to suffer steadily worsening side effects from her visions, and there will be much angst as she refuses to have them mystically removed in order to save her life, and Something Will Have To Be Done, said something which will doubtless involve her being strengthened my an infusion of demon essence (or some goddam thing) and she'll be all better, and maybe, given how vain she normally is, have horns and weird colored skin and a tail, too... nothing that would really interfere with Charisma Carpenter's babe appeal, but something Cordelia can angst about. (Can't be an actress with a tail, don't you know.) Or, she might die, but I can't get that lucky.

I should note, to keep from hurting Charisma Carpenter's feelings if she ever does read this, that my dislike of Cordelia is a tribute to her fine, fine acting talents in creating such a three dimensional and convincing portrayal of such a shallow little trollop of a character. And, she's a babe. Good work there on the babe thing, Charisma.

Personally, having now seen the Evil Angel episodes, and realizing for the first time to an emotional certainty just how evil he was, not just to random historical NPCs back in the 19th Century but to 'real people' I actually care about (Buffy and her friends) I find it wildly unlikely that Cordelia would ever be able to really relax and trust Angel again. (I actually find it wildly unlikely that Cordelia would want to be on the same continent with Angel again.) And I think Angel and Cordelia should sit down and have a chat about this. Were I writing the show, I would have Angel discover that Cordelia keeps an anti-vampire kit... crucifix, stake, squirt gun of holy water... in her purse, and not only that, she has ever since she started working for him... and have him talk to her about it, so the two of them can get this issue out in the open. Otherwise, Cordelia working for a guy who once killed one of her teachers and put her body in another teacher's bed, then sent vampires to the library to kill her and all her friends after luring the Slayer away... a guy she KNOWS can revert to The Ultimate Evil in a heartbeat... this strikes me as really, really unrealistic. Especially given that she also now knows that Angel can betray her without even losing his soul.

Where did Angel get the money to buy all those new outfits for Cordie, anyway? Did he secretly keep a chunk of the cash he stole from Wolfram & Hart and turned over to the shelter for homeless kids? Or does he have a magic rock in the basement that makes newspaper into gold?

OZ - As noted under Willow, Seth Green needs to take a good look around, realize he's never had it better than when he was on BUFFY, and send Joss Whedon a great big fruit basket to get back onto the show post haste. I mean, come on, he's in a remake of CANNONBALL RUN with Whoopie Goldberg, for gods' sake.

If Oz returned (and I haven't heard a breath of a rumor that he might, so I'm not expecting him to), I'd expect this to confound and confuse Willow, which can never be a bad thing. As for Oz himself, clearly, with his lycanthropy under some sort of control, and hopefully a bigger and better FX budget, he could add some much needed muscle to the Scooby Gang. But, as I say, I don't expect him to come back.

ANYA - My best prediction on developments with Anya is that Xander breaks off their engagement and she reverts to vengeance demon form in order to mess with him. I mean, how much longer can this 'quirky perspective on human affairs' crap go on? It would also generate an interesting running storyline for Xander, so that's two birds with one stone. (Yummy dead birds.)

ANGEL - I'm content to wait and see what will happen with Angel. Clearly, Buffy will no longer be involved, and, for that matter, neither will Faith (Eliza Dushku wants to concentrate on her film career) so who does that leave to be interested in... Gunn, Cordelia, and Wesley? Feh.

If a new Slayer is activated and shows up in L.A., that could be interesting. And Wolfram & Hart are always fun villains, although the loss of Lindsay will be felt there... Lilah is hot, but just doesn't have Lindsay's class or charm, in my opinion. Also, if we get back into more psychodrama with the bad folks from Angel's past... Darla, Drusilla, maybe a defecting Spike... that would be fine. Hell, I wouldn't mind seeing the Master turn up in L.A. as a regular villain for Angel; in fact, that would be kind of cool.

How Angel will deal with Buffy's death might also be interesting, although there's really no one for him to go after seeking vengeance. I imagine my interest in Angel and his crew will pick up once the new shows start, but right now, I'm still suffering from that awful Season Finale adventure in the truly stupid demon dimension. Angel certainly is a complex enough character and has a rich enough history of his own that we don't need to go traipsing off to idiotic alternate worlds, and if we do, we don't need to stay there for THREE EPISODES!

Having recently managed to see a commercially released package of six BUFFY episodes dealing with her relationship with Angel during the second season, I have to say that I'm only now aware that not only did he lose his soul for a time after sleeping with her, but he actually stayed evil, and became her arch enemy, for most of the last half of the second season. Seeing Buffy and her friends gradually come to accept that they would never see the 'good' Angel again had a pretty profound effect on me; prior to this, I'd intellectually known that Angel had gone evil for a while, but I hadn't seen it. To me, Angel had always been a tragic hero. Now that I've seen him as a brilliantly evil and malevolent sociopath, I really have to emotionally question the believability of, at the very least, Cordelia, reposing any trust or faith in Angel at all. Had I been around when he went nuts and killed Jenny Calendar, I'd never want to be in the same state with him... and if I had to be, I'd carry a damned big cross, a supersoaker full of holy water, and a nice sharp stake at all times.

In light of my theories regarding the function of the soul in the Buffy universe, above, it's interesting to speculate on just what is happening to Angel, when he loses and regains his soul again. Clearly, it seems like he transforms from one entity into an entirely different one, and since he is constantly going on about 'the demon inside me', and since on both occasions we've seen his soul return to him, he seems to have suffered from temporary amnesia as to his activities while the soul was gone, it would be easy to make the assumption that the soul IS 'Angel', the original Angel, and when it's not attached to his body, an entirely separate, demonic entity wakes up and controls it.

However tempting that may be, I don't believe it. For one thing, as I've mentioned over and over again, if Angel's evil acts are all committed by a demon who isn't really him, he has nothing to feel ashamed of. It's only the actions he takes while he's actually got his soul that should be of legitimate moral concern to him, because only those actions are actually committed by the real him. If Angel's guilt and torment over his own evil acts isn't really valid, the character is a generally pointless one. It would be like discovering in the last episode of THE FUGITIVE that Richard Kimble really did kill his wife, then had a psychotic breakdown, imagined the One Armed Man as a way to let him deny his own guilt, and then embarked on a years long odyssey for someone who didn't exist. Not only does it make the whole thing pointless, it makes you feel kind of stupid for having watched the show all along.

Furthermore, the pre-vampire Angel, back in 18th century Ireland, is not at all the heroic, noble crusading Angel we see in the modern day. He's a worthless lush, perpetually balanced between real good and real evil, irresponsible, brash, and foolish, wavering between extremes of great kindness and great brutality. In other words, he's a man who hasn't yet made up his mind between his light and his dark sides. What I postulate is that when Angel became a vampire and lost his soul, his higher moral sense departed, and his brilliantly evil dark side came to the fore... and it was that innate talent for cruelty and evil that Darla sensed in him from the start. That dark side is as much the real Angel as the heroic part, and without a soul, that dark side came out and became the 'real' Angel for over a century... and that's what Angel feels guilty about.

Let's remember, when Angel is first cursed, the Gypsy standing there tells him that his memories will return. Basically, the shock of losing his soul, and then having it suddenly returned, causes Angel to undergo a personality shift very nearly as profound as a schizoid break... and although he and Angelus aren't really distinct personalities in the same person (they share a common memory), the shock of transforming from one to another causes temporary amnesia... at least, in Angel. Angelus has no difficulty remembering being Angel; it disgusts him, but it doesn't threaten him. Angel, on the other hand, probably needs temporary amnesia after a stint as Angelus, or he'd simply go insane.

As I mentioned in Part 1, the recent revelation that Angel CAN have sex without losing his soul, as long as it doesn't make him happy, would seem to open the door for romance for our vampire with a soul... or, well, if not romance, then at least, a sex life. Of course, is Angel with a soul shallow enough to pursue sex just for sex's sake, without the intimacy of a romantic relationship? I suspect he may think he can, and then find himself tormented by deeper feelings for whoever he gets involved with, forcing him to break off the relationship because he'll never be quite sure when he might actually achieve happiness and then lose his soul again... man. Being Angel would be a bummer, cool hair or not.

WESLEY WYNDHAM-PRICE - Who cares? Okay... eventually Angel will have to make a push to once more take over leadership of the investigation agency, and since Wesley has this massive insecurity/inferiority complex going on all wrapped up with his disapproving father and his love life never working out and him generally being an incompetent bungler, that will make him all depressed and upset, especially if it happens because he's done something really stupid and Angel actually had to take over in an emergency and solve the problem. Then he'll be all mopey until some cute chick that for some reason he really shouldn't be sleeping with (like, she's evil) shows up and jumps him.

RILEY FINN - Please be dead.

TARA - I don't even know if Tara is real. If she is, I imagine she and Willow are going to go through a bad break up this upcoming season, after which, Tara will probably disappear (she doesn't bring anything to the show that Willow doesn't have, and they've had a season and a half to develop her into something interesting, and haven't).

Assuming Tara isn't real, she probably doesn't know it, and upon finding out, she might do some sort of mystical ceremony to give herself a truly independent existence from Willow, which would then require Willow to do something to re-absorb her into herself, which could turn Tara into an enemy of the Scooby Gang, because she won't like that. (I wouldn't, either.) Or Willow, upon finding out the truth and mystically re-absorbing Tara, could be so upset about it that she starts manifesting Tara as a separate personality, which would be an interesting acting challenge for Alyson Hannigan.

Or, like Steven Siegal, Tara could EXPLODE! - ON - DEADLY - GROUND!!!

But that probably won't happen.

If Tara is real, and she and Willow do go through a bad breakup, I suppose she could become a recurring enemy of the Scooby Gang, or even get et by a vampire and turned into one herself, or, I don't know, take over the job of vengeance demon that Anya lost and Willow didn't take back in the fourth season. Or she could get a job being fired out of a cannon at the circus. But probably not.

SPIKE - I like Spike, but honestly, I can't see anything more they can do with him, other than take his chip out again and let him go back to being bad... then stake him. Much of Spike's background is intertwined with Angel's, so most of that won't be exploitable. They could also have Spike continue to become more and more 'human', but ultimately that would hit a dead end, too.

One interesting thing that might be done with Spike at the start of next season would be to have him 'steal' Dawn out of foster care, or away from her father, because he's sure 'it's what Buffy would want'. Having Dawn spend some time living in Spike's tomb with him, with Spike as an authority figure, buddy, and role model, could have an interesting effect... especially when Buffy comes back to life and finds out where little sis has been. However, that's just an interesting speculation at this point.

Spike could also study the black arts and master various demonic rituals and powers allowing him to do freaky things like take his head off and walk around carrying it under his arm and stuff, while still talking to people, which would really give everyone the wiggins. Plus, he could then hurl his head as a missile weapon in combat, which could be useful.

Or, he could become a master of the boomerang.

I don't think those last two are very likely, though.

DAWN - Where Dawn ends up now that both her mother and older sister are dead (at least, for a while) is an interesting subject to speculate about. One would think foster care would be an option, or being taken by her father, or running away, or hiding out with Spike, who obviously wouldn't much care if its illegal for a 14 year old to live with someone who isn't her court appointed guardian.

An interesting possibility, what with all this 'the monks made her out of me' nonsense that Buffy was forced to spout off at the end of last season, would be that the new Slayer turns out to be... Dawn. A 14 year old Slayer might be exactly what the Scooby Gang would need to pull them together, as a training team and support apparatus, and could even make them all reluctantly cooperate with Spike sheltering Dawn in his crypt, since the alternatives would almost certainly be foster care or being taken away by her father... both of which would leave Sunnydale without a Slayer.

This gets even more interesting once Buffy inevitably comes back to life and finds out her younger sister is now a Slayer (as well as still being The Key). Sunnydale has had a Slayer team in residence prior to this, but having it be Buffy and Dawn Summers raises some fascinating possibilities... especially since there should be at least a few demonic entities dwelling in or around Sunnydale who will know that Dawn is a relatively new addition to the local timeline, and hasn't been around as long as everybody thinks she has.

Or, Dawn might not become the Slayer, but she could get a puppy instead.

GUNN - You'd think he'd have to get more interesting, but I doubt it. Unless they turn him into a vampire or reveal he's really 1/4 demon or somehow give him psychic powers, I honestly can't see him bringing much of anything to the Angel table except, you know, him being the token minority. I suggested to a pen pal quite some time ago that they could turn Gunn into a sort of makeshift, jury rigged engineer and weapons genius, sort of like the Kris Kristofferson character in BLADE, which would at least let him serve a useful function not already duplicated by someone else in Angel Investigations... but the writers have had most of a season to find something interesting to do with Gunn, and they still seem clueless. With Angel back in the group, he's kind of overshadowed as a fighter type, he's certainly not a scholar, and his street contacts don't seem useful enough to justify him having a full time role.

About the only thing I can think they may do with him is set up a romance between him and Cordelia... which, I suppose, could be interesting... but as I don't much like either character, I find at this point I can't much care.

If they did turn him into the engineer-weapons guy - MacGyver type, though, it would not only give him a useful function, but it would allow him to provide occasional comic relief, too. Imagine the following scene:

WESLEY: Good Lord, Gunn, why are the draperies on fire, and what in God's name is that dreadful smell?
GUNN: Oh. Heh heh. Just testin' out my new prototype flaming garlic blaster, ol' buddy. It works!
WESLEY: On the DRAPERIES? ::beating fire out with some heavy, ancient tome::
GUNN: Well, actually, I was aiming at a monster cockroach but those mothers are FAST.
ANGEL: Geez, guys, why are the curtains on fire and what stinks like burnt garlic?
WESLEY & GUNN: Burnt garlic.
WESLEY: And it's HIS fault.
GUNN: Just trying to get rid of the cockroaches, man.
ANGEL: I'm a vampire! I like cockroaches! Hey, aren't one of you two minions supposed to eat bugs? I read that somewhere.
GUNN: That sounds like a job for Cordie.
WESLEY: Yes, yes, I'll do a memo... wait a moment..!
WESLEY & GUNN: Minions?!?
GUNN: He just called a man with a half loaded flaming garlic blaster a minion... say, where'd he go?
WESLEY: He's much swifter than a cockroach.

See? It would be great! But no one ever listens to me.

FAITH - will stay in jail or die, since Eliza Dushku doesn't want to do TV right now. Maybe they can at least talk her into an occasional brief cameo.

HARMONY - Who cares? Mercedes McNab is both a babe and an excellent actress, but honestly, I have no real interest in Harmony. Sorry.

DARLA - Bring back the Master, put him in L.A., and team him up with Darla again as Angel's worst enemy, and you've got a ball game. Otherwise, it's hard to see what else we can do with Darla. (I can think of plenty of fun things to do with the utterly delectable Julie Benz, but Darla? Brrrrrr. Lindsay must be utterly insane.)

DRUSILLA - Ick. Ew. Drusilla should go form a romantic relationship with Riley's corpse in Central America.

In fact, I think she'd like that.

I. THE UNIVERSE

While I take second place to none in generally reviling the last story arc in this season of ANGEL, where our merry crew of heroes wound up in a truly appallingly stupid demon dimension undergoing various spiritual and physical transformations as they tried to rescue Cordelia, I have to admit, it allows for some interesting speculation as to the nature of the Buffy Multiverse.

One of the most interesting things is the fact that in this demon dimension, everybody speaks English. Not only that, but their holy books are written in English, and when demons come through portals from that dimension to Earth, they all speak English, too.

Now, naturally, we have a dichotomy here. There is the reason for this (the writers are lazy and think the audience is too stupid to notice), and then, hopefully, there is a justification for this (which I have to make up for you, because the writers were too lazy to tell it to us, and thought we were so stupid they didn't have to).

Primarily, I think we can explain this, and a bunch of other truly appallingly idiotic drivel that got splattered all over our TV screens during this badly conceived sidetracking into lousy Conan pastiche, by stating that our dimension, Earth, is, as has been implied in several episodes of BUFFY, the only really 'material' dimension. All other dimensions are more ethereal and spiritual, or, to put it another way, exist on a more highly energized quantum level.

What this means is that material bodies and solid objects, as we think of them, don't really exist in other dimensions. Everything is more or less virtual and existential... the entire planes of existence are basically mental in nature, and everything there is a mental projection. It's all subjective. And when beings or objects transfer from Earth to an outer dimension, or vice versa, a translation or transformation takes place. The more ethereal entities from the outer dimensions gain solid, material forms here on Earth. And, vice versa, the more material, solid forms from Earth gain more ethereal, intellectual, ideal forms in these outer dimensions.

This explains, basically, why Angel isn't a vampire on the Host's planet... his 'material' body there is simply a mental projection of Angel's own self image, and although Angel knows he is a vampire, he still essentially regards himself as human.

It also explains the whole language issue. Basically, in the outer dimensions, there is no curse of Babel, and the reason for this is, every individual self aware entity there is an entirely mental creature. They don't actually speak other than psychically. Therefore, there is no actual language; everyone effectively communicates telepathically.

I should note in passing, that of course, if this is the case, what we saw as the Host's dimension probably does not even roughly approximate what is actually there. It's simply how our heroes from Earth perceived it, their brains recasting the direct perceptions they received into more familiar terms (generally, from bad movies and TV shows and comic books). This goes a long way towards explaining a lot of the frankly absurd, inconsistent, and stupid details of that dimension.

It's also about the ONLY explanation I can come up with that not only covers Angel's body not being subject to vampiric limitations, Angel's body shifting depending on which of his personas was dominant at any given time, how a dimension can possibly not have music (music evolves, at its most basic, from mimicking the natural rhythms of nature all around us, including the rhythms of our own heartbeat and respiration; that a humanoid, sentient race could live for thousands of years and never even develop the drums as a musical instrument is simply nonsensical), and, well, the whole language thing.

It also explains how exposure to such a dimension over a course of years would gradually cause a human from Earth, used to a less subjective surrounding reality, to go insane, and how the Deathwalk Clan can continue to survive while beheaded, until their body is so chopped up and mauled that they can no longer hold it together as a coherent mental projection, and, most likely, how a psychic power can be transferred from one individual being there to another through sexual intimacy.

None of which makes the actual episodes any better, and I sincerely hope that our various heroes will be staying firmly on Buffy-Earth from now on.

Now that I consider it, this could also explain that 'tainted' crack Anya made regarding all humanoid demons. 'Tainted' could simply mean 'tainted' by being on Earth and having actual real, working, biological, material bodies... tainted with the flesh, in other words, or with mortality. This might especially apply to those demons who are apparently born on Earth and thus, have never been free of their material, biological bodies. Perhaps only demons from higher, immaterial dimensions are considered to be 'untainted'. Although that doesn't explain why the capital D Demons, who also have material bodies, are not considered 'tainted'. Perhaps the Mayor's Ascension was not supposed to stop with his transformation into a big snake; perhaps that was just a stage on the way to his actually becoming a mighty immaterial energy entity who would have left this Earth behind altogether... or worse, remained here as some unstoppable psychic being.

J. MAGIC -

If there is any discrete point where Willow seems to transform from being computer geek par excellence into a gifted and talented practitioner of the supernatural and sorcerous arts, it seems to be at the end of the second season, when she successfully conjures Angel's soul back for him (right before Buffy has to kill him to seal the portal that Evil Angel has opened, that will destroy the world). Giles himself had warned her, previous to her casting the spell, that doing so could 'open a door that cannot be closed', and Willow states after casting the spell that she 'felt something pass through' her.

This gives rise to some interesting speculations on the nature of magic itself. If Gods are, as previously hypothesized, creatures that can feed off and gain sustenance from the psychic energy of lesser, mortal beings, they also seem to be creatures that can effect fundamental, if generally short term, changes and disruptions in the very fabric of reality of the material realm of Earth. They can affect the weather, change history, grant wishes, alter the nature of reality itself... and yet, all of these changes seem to be of limited term and to take enormous energy to maintain, judging from what we've seen. They can also grant these powers to lesser, mortal beings, but the manipulation of reality in any way outside the consistent physical laws of the universe requires enormous, detailed rituals that often involve the blood of the practitioner.

I'd theorize that in fact, the gods, from a higher plane, have the ability to directly manipulate the material fabric of our reality more or less at will, with their higher, more powerful consciousnesses, in much the same way we can manipulate clay or make a sand castle. When a mortal being does magic, he or she is basically simply drawing on the power of the gods through a linkage to them. In most cases, they must do very elaborate rituals and often sacrifice someone else, probably to use the energy released by that entity's death to form a temporary, fleeting link to the higher planes to draw power through.

The rituals also help to both focus the mind and attention of the sorcerer, and to attract the attention of the gods themselves, who hopefully will favor the spell being done and help if they can, or at least, refrain from doing anything disruptive. Rituals could be the equivalent of a wizard putting up a psychic flag saying "I'm working here, please don't make a loud noise or slam any doors, thank you". Also, without a ritual, the witch's mind might not be focused enough, and the rush of power could well drive him or her insane, or even kill them.

Thus, it could well be that 'magic' is simply what we call it when a mortal being borrows, momentarily, through elaborate ritual, the power of the gods to make a fundamental alteration to local reality. Use of magic would increase the mortal mind's focus and discipline and almost certainly allow the honing of minor, 'normal' psychic powers, like limited telekinesis, which we've seen in both Willow and Tara, although the use of such 'powers' would not be considered 'magic' in and of themselves, as this greater intellectual and psychic facility is simply a byproduct of the mental disciplines of casting powerful spells, and does not require borrowing power from higher planes.

This would also explain what Willow did to strengthen her sorcerous abilities before confronting Glory head on... she doubtless conducted a ritual, or rituals, that would temporarily strengthen her psychic link with the higher planes, allowing her to draw on the power of the gods at a much higher rate and in a much greater amount than is normal for her. Such a connection didn't last long, and I'd honestly think there should be a high price to be paid afterward, which we unfortunately did not see at the time, probably because the writers were pressed to get a lot of plot into a 44 minute episode. Still, Willow should, at some point in the future, be shown having to pay some kind of price for the increased power she has wielded in the fifth season. It would be interesting to see Anya, or Xander prompted by Anya, confront Willow on this and ask just how she's paying for all this new power she's been throwing around.

BITCHING -

Having recently watched once more the episode of BUFFY where we first find out Ben and Glory share a body, or, at least, a space-time coordinate, I'm more and more chagrined to discover just how lousy a fit the obviously hastily cobbled together resolution to the Glory storyline was at the end of the Fifth Season. In this previous episode, Ben and Glory clearly refer to each other as siblings, and Glory tells Dawn that there is indeed a lock that the 'Key' fits into, and then goes into a deranged tirade about Dawn and Ben trying to get a look at Glory's 'unmentionables'... none of which accords well with what we were eventually told. It seems clear that outside pressures forced Whedon to abandon whatever his original storyline was and instead, we got this mess, which not only didn't fit at all with what hints and clues we'd been previously given, but which also turns out to be little more than a retread of basic conflict in 'Becoming', where Angel's blood is used to open a dimensional vortex that will destroy the world, and Buffy can only close the vortex again by killing him.

At this point, though, we seem stuck with it, as no one in their right mind would want to see BUFFY spend even more time on a plot line that was too damn long and drawn out already. From now on we'll simply have to ignore all conflicting evidence, accept this basically nonsensical story resolution, and move on.

What makes this all a bit more palatable to me is the knowledge that Whedon was most likely building up to something really interesting before outside considerations forced him to set his original story aside, and therefore, he hasn't just run out of ideas, as I'd been afraid he might have.

THINGS I CAN'T EVEN REMOTELY BEGIN TO EXPLAIN OR JUSTIFY ON BUFFY-EARTH:

*Humanoid robots built by some college sophomore engineering student that can pass not only a Turing test, but can also have sex with humans and vampires. Not to mention jump around acrobatically doing flying high kicks and such. This is utterly insane.
* Vampires who use hair gel. Where do they get it? Why do they care?
* How Spike has electricity in a crypt, and no one notices.
* How anyone who wants to, even a disturbed high school kid in a mental ward, can get hold of occult tomes that allow them to transform reality on a fundamental basis. Besides Jonathan doing this, we've seen the Monks of Whoozamajoogie do it with Dawn, and Anya do it by granting Cordelia's wish.
* Where a lot of people get their money from. (But this is pretty typical to TV shows, actually. Reverend Camden, on 7th HEAVEN, has to be the most highly paid preacher who isn't a televangelist on the face of the planet. Have you SEEN that house he lives in? He has SEVEN KIDS! He's paying to put two of them through college! They have two cars, at least! And they go out for pizza a LOT! It's totally whack!)
* Why no one ever seems to have noticed that Anya didn't have any parents, back when she was in high school. Where did she live?
* Why no one Buffy knows has siblings, except Tara, whose might not be real, and Buffy herself, whose isn't.
* How the Knights of Byzantium got from one place to another without someone complaining about all the horse crap.
* Why Ben and Glory referred to each other as brother and sister when we later found out Ben was just a mortal body built to contain Glory and keep her imprisoned by Glory's fellow Hellgods.
* Why Amy is still a rat.
* Why demons are all bumpy.
* Where werewolves' clothes go when they change.
* Whether Lindsay and Giles have ever played in the same band, and if not, why.
* How any living human being can get naked and jump into bed with someone they know is a bloodsucking ghoul. I'm sorry, but that's just frigging deranged. (Literally.)

And, in the end, that’s all I got, or rather, all I want to put down, as this thing is waaaay too long as it is.

BOOK OF THE DEAD

2006-07-30T09:58:00.000-07:00

Who And What Crisis Killed (besides my childhood, DC's Silver Age, and good writing in general in comics for ten years)

By John Jones, the Manhunter from Marathon, IL

Enjoy the work of John Jones' alter-ego, Doc Nebula, at http://www.angelfire.com/ny3/docnebula/index.html.

This may be a short article, I admit it. It's the 'besides' in the title above that lends its weight to that anticipation of brevity. I've written extensively in the past, in an APA, in email, and even in this column, about my belief that the Crisis on Infinite Earths marks a fairly definitive end to DC's Silver Age (I say fairly because there are exceptions; the damnable New Teen Titans actually debuted several years before Crisis occurred, but there is no way I include them in the Silver Age). I've also written at length about how Crisis seemed to equally mark a pretty final end to my childlike belief in heroes, and how it also seems to demark a point at which, by and large, any semblance of quality writing fled the DC mainstream screaming for its life. This article is not intended to belabor any of those points (although, what the hell, it might anyway) but rather, to set out a reasonably coherent list of all the various Silver Age characters and concepts irrevocably slaughtered by Crisis.

We need some ground rules before we go on, though. While I could make a cogent argument that Crisis did, in fact, gruesomely murder EVERY DC Silver Age character (since the rebooted versions we were given bore little resemblance other than in terms of the clothes they wore... and even that wasn't always a constant... to the icons they supplanted) nonetheless, we will eschew such painful truths for this article (maybe) and at least for the moment, stick with those characters who actually never managed to cross the great divide and find themselves transformed, will they or nill they, into some horrible Modern Version.

No, dammit, I take it back. We're not going to have any frickin' rules. It's my column and I will write what I wanna. "Killed by Crisis" will hereby mean whatever I am pointing to at the time, and anyone who doesn't like it can go eat a towel. I will, however, try to remain entertaining in my arbitrary, rampant derangement.

We'll start with my first and weirdest entry in the Book of the Dead: Kamandi, The Last Boy On Earth.

This one is rather bizarre and outside nearly any parameters, including the guideline I already set forth, and then just as arbitrarily, discarded.

Kamandi is one of my favorite Silver Age comics characters, and he was inarguably published at DC. Beyond that, it all gets fuzzy.

It's a bit of a struggle to call Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth, a "Silver Age DC character", for many reasons. The primary one for this article, though, is because emotionally, I never accepted him as living in the DC Universe with the rest of the four color fire brigade; I always figured he had his own little separate timeline thingie going on. I know, I know. Bob Haney had him team up with Batman in BRAVE AND THE BOLD; Mark Evanier teamed him up with Superman in DC PRESENTS, Kirby himself wrote stories establishing the one time historical existence, in Kamandi's timeline, of Superman and the Justice League. I read all that stuff, and, honestly, I didn't care. Anyone who has read the 70s run of BRAVE AND THE BOLD can see that Bob Haney obviously suffers from a chemical imbalance. Mark Evanier was doing a goofy tribute to Kirby during a period, at the very twilight of DC's Silver Age, when editors simply didn't much care what got published every month. Kirby himself was a little bit dotty... I just never believed any indication that Kamandi might actually share the same metareality as Superman, Batman, and the Flash. Kamandi, like the equally doomed OMAC, was off in a world of his own... or so it seemed to me, until CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS came along and proved that, once and for all, DC's editors really didn't have enough sense to pour sand out of a boot... although many of us already knew that.

So, okay, he was a DC character, part of the timestream, a legitimate subject to the insane, spectacularly poorly conceived revisionism of Crisis. Fine. Emotionally that still makes no sense to me, but I succumb to the weight of extravagant documentation. Now those of you who - all five of you, maybe - actually remember Kamandi, and what happened to him in Crisis, and even afterward, are saying to yourselves "John has jammed his foot in it again; made another of his infamous mistakes; Kamandi SURVIVED Crisis... I remember him crawling out of that bunker on the last page."

Well, this is one reason I led off with The Last Boy On Earth, so we understand MY definition of 'survived' Crisis right here and now. (In all actuality, this isn't going to help you understand any such thing, because I'm mad as an Edwardian hatter and nearly as cute. But still.) The name isn't enough. The CHARACTER has to survive, as well, and in most cases, that means the CONCEPT of the character has to endure, also. Yes, a little blond kid crawled out of a fall out shelter marked prominently "Command D" on the last page of the CRISIS mini. And what did he do? He grew up to become Tommy Tomorrow.

The REAL Kamandi, I suspect, would willingly, even eagerly, choose death over THAT denouement.

Beyond that, Howard Chaykin later pretty much put paid to Tommy Tomorrow, along with all DC's other science fiction heroes, in the truly abominable TWILIGHT mini, which paid no attention whatsoever to the fact that Tommy, supposedly, had at one time crawled out of that particular bomb shelter. In fact, the post Crisis history of the DC Universe has pretty much comprehensively ignored everything established as canon in Crisis, other than, you know, the couple of things they SHOULD ignore, like Supergirl's death and the removal from continuity of Superboy's career.

Now, I'm aware there was a truly mindbogglingly awful mini series a few years after Crisis called KAMANDI AT WORLD'S END or some such godawful tripe, but THAT wasn't Kamandi, either, and I'm also vaguely aware that Karl Kesel apparently did something with the Kamandi concept and Project: Cadmus in some SUPERBOY story arc, but, well, you see where I'm going with this . Crisis killed Kamandi. Marv Wolfman sat on The Last Boy On Earth's chest while Len Wein smothered his wildly struggling form with a big couch pillow. Sayonara, blond haired talking animal. We knew thee well, and miss you much. Rest in peace. You will never, to me, be Tommy Tomorrow, and that is the finest epitaph any imaginary friend could hope for.

Mentioning Project: Cadmus and SUPERBOY brings us neatly to the next whole buncha Crisis casualties: Superboy himself, the Legion of Superheroes, Supergirl, and Mon-El.

See, you're not dumb enough to try to run a "But there IS a Superboy and a Supergirl in the modern DC Universe" riff on me, because you know I'll just start sobbing like a child if you even try to pass off those appalling modern versions, which have absolutely nothing to do with the essential Superman concept, as the real, Silver Age Superboy and Supergirl. You know that. We're not even going to go there. (Although, I grant you that if you were to mention the extraordinarily moving Deadman story written by Alan Brennart for one of DC's post Crisis holiday specials, in which the ghost of Supergirl showed up to teach a sniveling Boston Brand a not so subtle lesson about the significance of unnoticed, even forgotten heroism... well, I'd be inclined to give you an A for effort, anyway, right after which, I'd sigh and point out that this story, as well as Alan Brennart's beautifully moving and intelligent post Crisis Black Canary origin, have both been consistently ignored by every writer and editor the company employs ever since.)

And Mon-El, well, you're not going to try and sneak that by me, either, because you know that the merest whisper of that awful V word will cause me leap out of my recliner with a bloodcurdling scream of outraged, berserker frenzy and start banging my head over and over again on the living room wall while shrieking "Valor SUCKS Valor SUCKS Valor SUCKS" until I finally pass out in a bruised and bloody heap on the carpet. We're on the same page here so far, I think. But you might, with some actual expectation of making a lucid and persuasive argument, at this point be thinking of mentioning that the Legion of Superheroes has, indeed, come through Crisis reasonably well, and have, in fact, had more different series since Crisis, in the Modern Era of Comics, than they ever dreamed of before Crisis... and that's counting their run in ADVENTURE, a later reprint title, and then their combined title with Superboy, which finally, just before Crisis, became two different all new Legion titles.

And, if I'm willing to omit Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, Green Arrow, et al from my list of Crisis casualties, by what reasoning can I possibly include the Legion? I mean, sure, the Legion was changed by Crisis, sure, the rebooted version bears only superficial resemblance to the Silver Age team... but so what? Why am I going to insist that, in fact, the Legion is actually as dead as Superboy and Supergirl, and was actually slain by the same agency?

Again, it's a conceptual thing. There is indeed a team running around in some alternate DC future timeline calling itself the Legion of Superheroes, and they do indeed have members somewhat similar to those that existed in a similarly titled comic published in the Silver Age. However, the modern Legion is not the actual Legion, and I'm not even going to go into pages and pages about how the actual Legion was an astonishingly innovative adaptation of Jack Kirby's little used 'kid gang' concept, blown up huge and gone totally whacko, but still, at base, a super powered group of kids, who behaved as kids... nah. Not going to do it. However, I am going to point out that in addition to all this, what the Legion also was... and this is crucial... was a Superboy spin off.

It's really that simple, to me. A DC Universe without Superboy can't have a Legion. A Legion without Superboy as an inherent part of their heroic mythology isn't the true, actual Legion, and, to a lesser extent, a Legion in which Kara of the House of El doesn't drop by every once in a while to make out with Brainiac 5 in the science lab also isn't the real Legion. As the real Superboy and Supergirl did not survive into the post Crisis DC Universe, neither did the Legion.

There are other cases similar to that of the Legion; instances where the character has survived in name, but not really in concept. Again, I'm going to be making some fine distinctions, here: in these particular cases, as with the Legion, I'll be exploring characters that technically existed in the Silver Age, pre Crisis, DC Universe, and that technically survived into the Modern, Post Crisis Universe... only to find their personal histories had become wildly revised.

First, and perhaps most wretchedly, we have Power Girl. Now, if the dissolution of any character by Crisis was ever justified, it's this one. Poorly conceived from the very start as the Earth-2 version of Supergirl, the only memorable trait Power Girl has ever had is her spectacular set of tatas... living proof, apparently, that they put something in the water in the Earth 2 Metropolis that just isn't present on Earth 1, since Supergirl's parallel set of mammaries are certainly impressive and perky, but have never reached the exaggerated Dollywood-esque proportions of her Earth 2 counterpart.

However, all of that is immaterial, although I will wryly note that for a superwoman to stand out in terms of cup size, she has to be pretty darn well endowed. I'll also mention, just because I'm like that, that it certainly doesn't reflect well on the character's creator and original writer, Paul Levitz, that the only feature people remember about this big blond bimbo is her boundless bouncing boobs.

Power Girl is a fictional construct who should have been thrice doomed - first, because she's nearly as big a creative embarrassment for DC as She Hulk is for Marvel, and coming from this Shulk hater, that's saying something. Above and beyond that, she's also firmly rooted in the Earth-2 continuity implant, which Mike Gold, one of the most influential architects of DC's post Crisis timeline, once referred to as 'that pulsating hunk of double talk', and which, according to persistent legend, Crisis was primarily designed to get rid of. However, Earth-2 origins can be dealt with, and in fact, were, fairly easily, for most of PG's contemporaries in that most clueless of all possible teen superteams, Infinity Inc. (I'll be getting to them in a moment), through the simple expedient of fusing the characters' histories seamlessly into that of the post Crisis, single universe, Earth-Zero timeline. However, that would not suffice for Power Girl, for the simple reason that she was also wedded inextricably to yet another aspect of Silver Age lore that had been resolutely tromped on in the post Crisis DC Universe, namely, that there were any other surviving Kryptonians besides Superman.

In point of fact, the Silver Age DC Universe had had quite a few surviving Kryptonians... not hundreds, by any means... probably not even a dozen... but between Phantom Zone inmates, Supergirl, Krypto, some wank who showed up in a Steve Gerber mini series in the early 80s, Power Girl, and some other guy who worked for the Science Police in the 30th Century named, I believe, Dev Em (and where he came from I'll never know, but I'm pretty sure he was Kryptonian), well, we certainly had enough for a good game of cut throat poker, anyway. All of which was wiped away by DC's post Crisis assertion that Superman was by God and you'd better believe it the ONLY survivor of Krypton.

Given that she was born on the wrong planet, in the wrong universe, and, you know, kinda blows as a concept anyway, you'd really think DC would have actually let Crisis accomplish something positive in the utter annihilation of Power Girl... but oh, no. They could turn Kamandi into Tommy Tomorrow. They could blast Barry Allen into carbonized fragments and editorially direct that no one ever bring him back. They could make Superboy and Supergirl never exist, wipe out Mon-El, reduce Krypto the Superdog to random integers. But Power Girl and her 44DDD gazongas... those they had to find some way to salvage. And, naturally, they turned the job over to the only man I personally would want to entrust such a delicate mission to: that peerless prince of pulsepounding plotlines, Paul "For God's Sake Someone Just Kill Me Before I Ruin YOUR Favorite Character" Kupperberg.

My pal Paul made your girl Kara into the grand daughter of Arion, Warlord of Atlantis.

No. Really.

Moving on to the two Wonder Girls...

What, you honestly thought I was going to EXPLAIN the story where the Earth-2 Supergirl was somehow retrofitted into the post Crisis continuity as the grand daughter of a long dead Atlantaean warlord? Please. It's bad enough I actually read it once. I'm amazed it didn't give me an embolism.

Two Wonder Girls. Yes. One of these, to give her her due, is the real Wonder Girl, Donna Troy, an orphan baby Wonder Woman rescued from a burning building and took to Paradise Island to be raised as an Amazon, and who later rejoined Wonder Woman as her sidekick, Wonder Girl, during that weird early Silver Age era where everybody who didn't already have a sidekick got one, whether they needed one or not. Why Wonder Woman, if she wanted a sidekick, didn't just go grab another Amazon is beyond me (and I'll note in passing that the producers of the Wonder Woman TV show seemed to find Wonder Girl's origin unnecessarily complex as well, as they simply made their version of the character into Wonder Woman's younger sister... something of a problem for a superheroine who is actually an animated clay statue, but the TV show never bothered with that particular aspect of WW's origin, either), but it hardly matters, since the Silver Age Wonder Woman is yet another casualty of Crisis I should get to at some point here. With the Silver Age Wonder Woman spread like goo across the post Crisis timeline, Wonder Girl was obviously left flapping in the breeze. However, her continued existence was an editorial necessity, since she was a popular member of DC's then most popular title, the New Teen Titans, and in fact, as such, she was being written by Marv Wolfman, the same writer who, in Crisis, had just made Wonder Woman never exist. How Marv would resolve the question of Wonder Girl's history in the post Crisis DC reality was a question everyone... ahem... wondered about.

How he eventually resolved it I couldn't tell you. It was really convoluted, complicated, and to the best of my knowledge, made no sense at all. In fact, Wonder Girl may be the character most comprehensively contorted and contused by Crisis; in the Modern DC universe, she's gone through identities like the Wasp goes through costumes, from Troia to Dark Star to some sort of perpetual multidimensional rape victim who has to qualify as perhaps the most disturbed story idea to ever come out of John Byrne's prolifically disturbed mind.

However, I think it's safe to say that the concept of Wonder Girl, orphan rescued by Wonder Woman, raised by Amazons, and sent to Man's World as junior partner to DC's primary superheroine... did not survive Crisis. I'm just not sure what took its place. And I don't think anyone else is, either.

The second Wonder Girl... sort of... would be more or less the Earth-2 version, a character named Fury, created by Roy Thomas as a member of his second generation teen team, Infinity Inc. In the pre Crisis DC Universe, the Infinitors lived on Earth-2 and were composed of the sons and daughters... mostly... of the Justice Society of America. Fury (Lyta Trevor-Hall) was the daughter of the Golden Age Wonder Woman and her husband, Steve Trevor, which was perfectly fine, until Crisis came along and made Earth 2 faw down and go boom, after which, Fury was... what? Hell, I don't know. Roy put together a revised origin story for her in which she was actually the daughter of WWII heroine The Fury, whom we had never heard of previously for the good and adequate reason that she had never existed previously (although Roy would fix that in yet another really lousy attempt to do a successful teenage superteam, the Young All Stars, which the original Fury was a member of, along with another lame character intended to more or less replace the Golden Age Superman who was called Arn "Iron" Munro). However, the agonizingly drawn out but nonetheless utterly apparent and inevitable failure of INFINITY INC., and the not quite quick enough demise of YOUNG ALL STARS, left both Furies effectively in limbo where they belonged.

However, to be fair, Neil Gaiman did make some interesting use of the second Fury later on in SANDMAN, proving that nearly anything can be story grist in the hands of someone with actual talent.

All of which, I suppose, means that the Infinity Inc. Fury DID survive Crisis, in some strangely altered state. So I suppose I should delete the above paragraph about her, but what the hell, it gave me a chance to rag on Roy Thomas, something never to be passed up, since Roy may well be the man who has done the most damage to quality comics writing, overall, in the industry's history.

Another out and out casualty of the Crisis was, as mentioned in passing above, the Golden and Silver Age Wonder Womenn. This character, en toto, seems to have honestly baffled Marv Wolfman and Len Wein, as she's the only fairly major character in DC continuity who had virtually no attention paid to her throughout the entire mini series, and yet, was rather cavalierly 'unmade' on the last page, to clear the decks for some rebooted version that DC hoped would have more commercial success. Since this character was, quite specifically and on panel, in CRISIS, turned into goo, and since the Modern Age Wonder Woman is an entirely different character with her own entirely separate and distinct history and continuity, I have to regard the Silver Age Wonder Woman as being inarguably an entry on the Crisis Memorial.

Yet another subtle but distinct 'kill' to be credited to the Crisis is the Silver Age Hawkman. Unlike other versions of a Silver Age character which simply had somewhat revised histories retrofitted into the new, post Crisis continuity, the Hawkman character concept was totally, consistently, and continually screwed up after Crisis. Credit for the inception of what turned out to be a cascade of bungling has to go to Mike Gold's inept editorial policies, as the first truly bad decision that was made was firmly in Gold's lap: namely, that the post crisis, HAWKWORLD versions of Hawkman and Hawkwoman did not arrive on Earth until well into the modern heroic age.

This meant that, to all intents and purposes, in the post Crisis DC Universe, the modern (Silver Age) Hawkman simply had never existed... and yet, post Crisis JUSTICE LEAGUE stories, as well as several other post Crisis series, had prominently featured the character. From this one continuity snarl a huge brouhaha of inconsistent and truly idiotic attempts at continuity patches grew, until finally, DC seemed to decide that the character simply wasn't salvageable, and they rather quietly dropped him out of their modern fictional reality completely. A Golden Age Hawkman has, apparently, existed and been part of the Justice Society, but, at this point, there is no modern version of the character, and in strict terms of post Crisis continuity, no such version has ever existed.

While I'm thinking of it, I might as well mention the Crisis' Poster Boy for Heroic Sacrifice, Barry Allen, the Silver Age Flash. Poor Barry seems to have gotten the nod to be DC's equivalent to Bucky Barnes: a lasting token sacrifice made to the concept that death really does mean something in a particular imaginary metaverse, and that no matter how many seemingly casual character resurrections are enacted by lazy, lousy, or just plain apathetic writers, this guy.... THIS guy right HERE... is staying dead.

DC has made this editorial intention plain and clear through the aegis of no less than two separate story arcs in the modern FLASH series in which it was strongly suggested that somehow, Barry Allen had come back from the dead... only to have that turn out to be, in one case, a surgically and mentally altered Professor Zoom, and in the second case, a future version of Wally West, Barry's successor in the Flash costume. Even for those of us who don't much want to get the message, the meaning is clear: Barry is not mostly dead. Barry is ALL dead. Even Miracle Max ain't bringin' him back.

The Justice Society of America was a Crisis casualty itself, for years after the CRISIS miniseries came out. They weren't dead, (they thought they'd go for a walk) just stuffed into limbo by my favorite writer/editor/idiot Roy Thomas, so they'd be safe from meddling by anyone else (especially anyone who might write them better) while he concentrated all his rapidly decaying creative talents on trying to find some way to turn INFINITY INC. into the massive sales success he and DC's editorial staff clearly thought it was supposed to be. (They weren't fooling anyone, you know.)

I suppose one should really try to be understanding of Roy's decision in doing this, but 'one', in this case, wouldn't be 'me'. The creation of INFINITY INC. may well have been partially motivated by Roy's genuine love of the JSA and a concomitant desire to produce some sort of legacy for those characters that would be an established and ongoing part of the modern DC mainstream, but I also have to assume... okay, I choose to assume, darn it... that it was at least equally motivated by greed. Teen superteams were the rage and the fad at the time INFINITY INC. was first published, and it strikes me as wildly unlikely that the numbers on Chris Claremont's and Marv Wolfman's royalty checks from X-MEN and TITANS weren't dancing in Roy's head like sugarplums when he first typed out his precis. After all, reasonably speaking, if the JSA are going to have a bunch of superpowered kids in the DC modern age, it's wildly unlikely that very many of those offspring are going to be teenagers in the mid 80s... and those offspring staying teenagers into the 90s is rather ridiculous.

Which brings us back to the Justice Society, and the reason why DC's editorial and publishing hierarchy was most likely relieved to have Roy suggest sticking them into some badly conceived limbo so he could concentrate on INFINITY... frankly, they were an ongoing embarrassment to the mainstream continuity. Why? Because both Marvel and DC, in their infinite wisdom, have decided to keep their mainstream comics current, and combined with this, they have also decided not to let their characters age discernibly. There are various reasons for these asinine and mindbogglingly absurd decisions that I won't go into, because they alternate between being stupid and corrupt, but nonetheless, this is the deal as it exists at both companies. That being the case, one can see that keeping the Golden Age heroes around was more or less a constant reminder of how idiotically comic book entropy works... because the Golden Age characters are all firmly date stamped by their World War II careers.

In a nutshell, what both Marvel and DC do is constantly update the histories of their popular characters. The Fantastic Four may have originally made their rocket flight somewhere around 1962, but since that would have to make them around 60 or 70 years old right now, and Marvel assumes its target audience will not either (a) buy a book about geezers, or (b) buy a book set in, say, 1968, what they do instead is to say that, well, the FF has been together for around six years, and it's currently the year 2000 in the Marvel Universe, so they took that rocket flight in... yes... 1994.

That this is deranged, maniacially stupid, loonie, rampantly cretinous, and absurd beyond the very concept of God as Three In One Oil, goes without saying, although I did just say it, and I said it rather entertainingly, too. However, it's what Marvel and DC do. (DC didn't always do this. In the mid 70s, Steve Englehart wrote a truly badly conceived 'untold origin' of the Justice League that was set in the mid 50s, and that featured, in addition to the Leaguers we all know, other stalwarts like Congorilla and Rex the Wonder Dog, fighting Martian invaders.

And in that story, an editorial caption informed us that 'superheroes have their own ways of remaining young!'... a truly astonishing assertion utterly mindboggling in its implications, and singular not only for those implied consequences, but for being perhaps the only explanation for rubber comic book entropy WORSE than constant updating of history.) Because DC constantly updates the history of its characters, the members of the JSA... whom, as I have mentioned, are rather firmly date stamped by their involvement in WWII... are, well, just increasingly ludicrous with each passing year. Unless we start assuming that the Golden Age Green Lantern, Hawkman, Flash, and Red Tornado were all, say, 3 years old in 1940, they simply have to be doddering relics by now, far more suitable to intensive care hospice beds than fisticuffs with the Secret Society of Supervillains... and this will never get better; in fact, it gets worse with each Earthly revolution.

The only reason the JSA were active at all in the DC modern mainstream prior to Crisis was Roy's insistence on using them as supporting characters in INFINITY, as well as their yearly crossovers with the JLA. Having Roy accede to what was most likely a long standing editorial request that those goddam geezers be gotten the hell offstage must have seemed like a godsend to the DC editorial staff.

However, Roy couldn't bear to kill them off, so instead, he shuffled them into some truly appalling alternate dimension where they were caught in a time loop, fighting Ragnarok over and over again, thus heroically and endlessly staving off the end of all reality. Which was where they stayed, legitimate casualties of the Crisis, for most of a decade, until finally Len Strazewski managed to talk the powers that be into letting him do a historical Justice Society mini series to see if there might be any interest in the characters if, you know, someone who could actually WRITE handled them. DC's bravery in allowing Strazewski to do this, and in giving him the talented Mike Parobeck to draw the mini series, was astounding, since up to that point, every modern JSA comics project had sold very nearly as well as blocks of Velveeta cheese-food carved into little Whoopie Goldberg statuettes. However, apparently someone in authority realized it might not actually be the JSA, but rather, Roy Thomas himself at fault, and they gave the mini the nod, with the result that a few years later, an updated, modern, mainstream version of JSA is one of DC's better selling titles.

(It's worth noting that when the Strazewski JSA mini was originally announced, Roy Thomas reportedly called up one of DC's more influential editors and screamed bloody murder about DC letting someone else write HIS characters. Roy was, according to my source, told that comics shop owners already had quarter bins full of Thomas JSA projects like LAST DAYS OF THE JSA that no one wanted to buy, and they would not be strongly inclined to order any other JSA projects with his name on them. To which I say, yay, comics shop owners. You rock.)

With the Justice Society, in fact, we have perhaps the first example of a concept and group of characters who were, actually, victims of Crisis, and its subsequent editorial "out with the old, in with the new" mandate, and who were later rehabilitated from that status and resurrected into some sort of viability within the modern DC mainstream.

Now let's move on to the larger victims of Crisis. For Crisis did not simply slay individual heroes and villains, or even concepts, backgrounds, and origins. No, Crisis was perhaps the most sweepingly enacted piece of imaginary genocide ever conceived of or enacted; more comprehensive even than FRED HEMBECK DESTROYS THE MARVEL UNIVERSE. After all, Fred, in his poorly drawn godlike power, limited his murderous depradations to ONE metareality. Crisis... Crisis wiped out millions of alternate timelines, and everybody in them, as well.

Some of those timelines, it must be admitted, deserved to go in the celestial toilet. Earth-3, where Columbus was an American who discovered Europe, and therefore, it logically follows that all superhumans were actually villains (it... I... they... we... look, just, don't even ask, okay?), while a beloved concept of thousands of fans (including myself) who had read the original story when they were 8 and thought it was really cool to see evil versions of the JLA just whomp up on the good guys, was simply goddam STUPID, and had to GO. (I note in passing that Grant Morrison's recent JLA graphic novel, EARTH-2, has pulled this concept back out of the cosmic leechfield, making it another entry on the 'killed by Crisis, but later resurrected' roll, and, apparently, returning to the DC Universe, in some way or another, the Crime Syndicate of America as more or less valid and legitimate villains.)

Another alternate timeline that badly needed blowing up was Earth-C, the home of Captain Carrot and his Zoo Crew, and Earth C 1/2, which was home of a superteam featured in comic books on Earth-C, the Justa Lot of Animals. Surely there is a particular circle of Hell reserved for so called 'creators' who attempt to cross germinate the funny animal sub genre with the superhero subgenre, in which said creators spend eternity buried to the upper lip in cartoon rabbit guano while badly animated cats and mice torture them by packing their various orifi with red hot beetles that occasionally, and at random, explode. Along with Earth-3 and Earth-C, we also had other spectacularly lousy, 'let's create a whole universe as a plot device for one bad story' Earths such as Earth-X, a world where the Axis powers won World War II and a group of truly rotten Golden Age Fawcett characters had formed together into the Freedom Fighters to, you know, fight for freedom. There was also the 'sure, what the hell' type of alternate Earth best personified by things like Earth-S, where all the Captain Marvel family characters lived.

All these universes, and just great big larruping gobs more, died like flies during the Crisis, although presumably, since the Freedom Fighters and the Captain Marvel Family still exist in the post Crisis DC Universe, they managed to jump into interdimensional lifeboats right before the end. In addition, the Golden Age Superman, Harbinger, and the Earth-Prime Superboy (Don't. Ask.) all also got whacked by Crisis, in some way we will never understand, as they went traveling off into a big glowing light (ignoring the very short woman standing off to the side shrieking "Stay away from the light! Stay away from the light!") and were never seen again. One presumes that they are, actually, y'know, DEAD... this is the general symbolism/mythology that our culture has come to associate with 'going into the light', after all... but, for some reason, a decision was made that THESE characters couldn't be graphically and heroically killed off in battle like Flash or Supergirl. Since no one, not even Paul Kupperberg, writes a worse heroic sacrifice scene than Marv Wolfman, we should probably be grateful.

I think there were some Western characters that were killed off by Crisis, too, but I honestly can't remember, and in all sincerity, don't care.

Mention, in passing, of the Golden Age Supeman, a bit above, reminds me of the Golden Age Batman, which reminds me of a few other specific Crisis casualties, namely, the Golden Age Robin and the original Huntress. All of which leads into another, probably lengthy digression. However, I can already see that it offers ample opportunity to bash on Roy Thomas and Paul Levitz some more, and honestly, how could I pass that up? To wit, then:

Going into Crisis, back when it was still being called by the working title Earth-Zero, it seems to have been pretty much understood by DC's editorial and creative staff that the primary purpose of the whole damned square dance was, basically, getting rid of Earth-2. Nearly 30 years after Gardner Fox had first introduced the Earth-1/Earth-2 juxtaposition in the thoroughly delightful "Flash of Two Worlds" story, enough general creative, editorial, and even fannish grumblings and vague discontents about the ongoing juxtaposition of these parallel worlds, one of which represented the Golden Age of Comics, the other of which just as clearly represented the Silver Age, finally came to a head. A decision was reached, and that decision apparently was that DC's continuity, which at that time stretched back to the very first publication of Superman in the late 30s, had to be clarified. Streamlined. Simplified. Cleaned up. Pruned. Revised. Despeckled. Smoothed out. Use whatever editorial euphemism you want, the intent was clear: something that was perceived as a mess (or, as has already been mentioned, a "pulsating hunk of double talk") had to be dumped in the trash.

This wasn't, of course, a simple matter, because no clear temporal dividing line could be drawn. When you have 50 years of continuity, you tend to have a lot of interweaving throughout the history of that continuity. As can be seen in the examples throughout this article, it's hard to simply say "Okay, everything from 1980 back gets chucked". However, one thing was pretty clear: whatever wound up surviving into the new, Earth-Zero DC Universe, would not number amongst its ranks any alternate dimensions. That, in fact, was what the whole "Earth-Zero" working title was about: no more Earth-Prime, Earth 1, Earth 2, Earth 3, Earth X, Earth S, Earth C, Earth whatever the hell. Nuh uh. It was all going; DC's continuity was going to be boiled down to ONE timeline, and everything that survived had to be made consistent into one non-branching linear historical event-stream.

Oh, aspects of DC's history, previously relegated to the ghetto of Earth-2, would be conserved. No one wanted to get rid of the Justice Society of America's place in the past; they made, in fact, a wonderful 'period' superteam and forerunner to the more modern JLA. And no one, at that time, wanted to get rid of INFINITY INC.; in fact, another persistent rumor still insists that one of the main motivators for CRISIS was the retrospectively insane idea that if DC got rid of Earth-2 and put the Infinitors on the same planet as the rest of the modern heroes, their book would start to sell well.

However, various of DC's 'big gun' characters presented special problems. Superman and Batman, for specific example, had both been around for 50 years. One of the charming effects of the Earth 1/Earth 2 continuity implant had been that the longevity of those careers could be explained. There were actually two different Batmans, and two different Supermans. One set had fought crime in the Golden Age, on Earth-2, and been charter members of the Justice Society; the other pair had debuted much later in time, on Earth-1, and been charter members of the Justice League.

This same effect was used to explain the way a more modern DC Comics had gone about reviving Golden Age character concepts in rather revised, updated Silver Age versions... the Golden Age versions of the Flash, Hawkman, Green Lantern, and the Atom all lived on Earth-2, while the Silver Age, more modern, often rather vastly changed, versions lived on Earth-1. Eventually, this effect was applied on a rather sweeping basis to every modern DC character who had ever had any sort of Golden Age career, such as Wonder Woman, and even Green Arrow, who also gained an Earth-2 doppelganger, although that particular character was singular in that he was not a member of the Justice Society.

Other Golden Age characters whom, for whatever reasons, DC's modern editors did not choose to revise and update, remained more or less unique to Earth-2, like Hourman, Starman, Johnny Thunder, the Red Tornado, etc. (This later became rather confused under Roy Thomas in the singular case of the character known as Manhunter, when Roy stuck the Golden Age Manhunter in the background of several large group shots of the Justice Squadron of America, who were at that time still on Earth-2.

This was rather perplexing, because this Manhunter was one of the few Golden Age characters who had actually been established as existing on Earth-1, through the expedient of being revived, after suspended animation, and given a new costume and somewhat new superpowers in a modern, Silver Age version who eventually teamed up with the modern, Silver Age Batman - thus establishing definitively his presence on Earth-1 - shortly before dying. Apparently, Paul Kirk has the singular distinction of being alive on both Earths at the same time period, although whether or not the Earth-2 Manhunter was put in suspended animation and revived in the modern day must remain a moot point, since Earth-2 no longer exists. Paul Kirk is apparently also singular for being the ONLY Golden Age superhero to exist on Earth-1, where all the other superhumans waited until the late 50s or early 60s to make their debuts.

Fortunately, with the reduction of all the various alternate Earths to one blended planet/dimension/timestream, it no longer matters, but for a while there, it was a little bit bewildering. I honestly think Roy Thomas never even realized he'd made a mistake.) Even later, the original Black Canary actually bodily crossed the dimensional barrier to Earth-1, joined the Justice League, and became, in effect, her own Silver Age version.

That this was, especially for the Black Canary, a rather nonsensical and absurd telescoping of natural entropy was something that, amazingly, escaped the notice of fans and pros alike for nearly thirty years. Simply put, no one actually paid any attention to the fact that the JLA's premiere female acrobat and martial artist had had a prominently documented and acknowledged crimefighting career starting just prior to World War II, and therefore, pretty much had to have been born somewhere around 1923. In the late 1960s, when she first joined the JLA, this would put the character in her early 40s... not too great a stretch; she might have great genes, good make up skills, and clearly, she worked out a lot. However, by the time Crisis rolled around, Green Arrow's still apparently youthful 'pretty bird' had to be pushing 60, and, well, now that we're on the verge of the 21st Century, she's just WAY too old to be vaulting around kicking the Catwoman in the face.

It was little glitches like, well, all of the above, along with the apparent confusion of young fans who did not understand why the Superman we occasionally saw in INFINITY INC. was, like, OLD, and the Green Lantern over there had that really stupid costume, that really led DC to believe that it simply had to do something to simplify and update its continuity. And, as I mentioned, the 'big gun' characters, who had pretty much identical versions in both Golden and Silver Ages, presented particular problems.

Much of the Earth-2 continuity... anything DC's editors wanted to salvage, in other words, like the historical career of the JSA, and the present day existence of Infinity, Inc... could simply be brought over to the new, post Crisis reality relatively intact. However, it went without saying that the Golden Age Superman could not be made to co-exist with the Silver Age Superman. It would simply be too confusing. Similarly, the Silver Age Wonder Woman and the Golden Age Wonder Woman could not be placed on the same Earth. And the Golden Age Batman, while conveniently dead for years in the pre Crisis Continuity, still had lent his legacy to other characters, like the Earth-2 Robin, who was not only an adult who had taken up his mentor's mantle, but was actually, in the early days of the 'modern' JSA, depicted as having some grey hairs himself (as well he should, given that the character debuted at the age of 10 in the early 40s, and as such, should have been in his 40s or 50s by the time the 1970s and 1980s rolled around).

Further complicating things was the fact that in the late 70s, Paul Levitz had created, as a back up series for one of the Batman titles, a character named The Huntress, who was the adult daughter of the Earth 2 Batman and his wife, Catwoman. The character was one that intrigued fans, for various reasons no one has ever been able to adequately figure out. Basically a more modern and much more violent version of Batgirl, she had an admittedly better looking costume, an actual sex life (which, towards the end of her pre Crisis, Earth 2 career, rather queasily began to involve her with the adult Dick Grayson, who was in some weird way both a foster brother and honorary uncle), and although she never really managed to support her own title, there was clearly some sizzle to the character that DC would have liked to conserve... an impulse that we can see reflected in the fact that 'the Huntress' has been one of the most revived and tinkered with characters in the Post Crisis DC continuity.

In the end, Crisis wound up simply killing both characters in action, since there was really no way to justify either of them in the new, streamlined timeline. And, although we briefly saw the graves of both characters in, of all places, THE LAST DAYS OF THE JUSTICE SOCIETY, it wasn't long before the winds of changing entropy erased all memory that the characters had ever actually existed from all the survivors and inhabitants of the post Crisis DC Earth.

And when the dust settled in the new, streamlined timeline, we similarly discovered that there had never been a Golden Age Superman or Batman... that, in fact, the Modern Age versions of those characters were the first, the original, the only, the unique, Superman and Batman. They were unprecedented. There had never been a Superman or Batman in the 1930s, 40s, or 50s, nor had any such characters ever been members of the Justice Society of America. (Studying these two characters 'now you see it, now you don't' status as members of the post Crisis Justice League is very nearly a microcosm of just how ineptly DC has handled the establishment of any sense of coherent continuity in their post Crisis timeline. Batman and Superman pop in and out of the Justice League's history, sometimes as charter members, sometimes not, every time a new writer takes over any of half a dozen different titles that reflect somewhat on that history. I myself am also currently unclear as to whether, in the post Crisis DC Universe timeline that exists this week, Batman has ever had anything to do with The Outsiders, or if that particular team is even considered to have existed any more.)

One of the truly good ideas that came about at the end of Crisis (as opposed to the plethora of spectacularly bad ones that bloomed in the post-Crisis DC soil like some sort of horrible weed of a truly terrible crime) was to do a new SECRET ORIGINS comic series which would basically present the revised origins and history of all the post Crisis DC characters. This was a very intelligently conceived concept, and handled correctly, should have allowed some conscientious DC editor to step right in and shape for all us startled and yearning readers the brand new continuity in a straightforward, inarguable, and completely coherent format. I know that I and the few buddies I had back then who still read comics were pretty much united in our approval of the idea, when it was announced, and looking forward to seeing something, ANYthing, that would try to outline and explain exactly what we would be looking at, once the Crisis dust had settled. (Wolfman and Perez' two volume HISTORY OF THE DC UNIVERSE, which had been marketed as doing exactly that, was obsolete before the second volume came out, so many fans, disappointed by the fact that the 'definitive timeline' laid down in that pricey set had been invalidated before they finished reading it, were ready to fasten on the new SECRET ORIGINS series with both hands, if only it would do a better job.)

Instead of that, though, we got a series that basically was nothing from its deranged first issue to its ignominious last one but a Roy Thomas vanity show.

The very first issue set the tone for the entire series, and signaled pretty clearly to anyone with half a brain that if you were looking for a coherent presentation of the post Crisis DC Universe, you hadn't better look too hard in SECRET ORIGINS. This is because that very first issue was divided between two stories, both written by Roy Thomas, which re-presented the Secret Origins of (you're really not going to believe this) The Golden Age Superman and The Golden Age Batman.

I know. I know. Honestly, you're not saying anything right now that I didn't say, more loudly and profanely, upon seeing the comic for the very first time. The series that was supposed to give us a definitive, character by character, depiction of the new DC continuity was starting off... with stories of characters that everyone agreed did not exist and had never existed in the new DC continuity.

I can't explain Roy's 'reasoning', because, well, in my opinion, Roy Thomas is a self indulgent hack who shouldn't have been allowed to even tour the offices of any major comics company, much less work for them in anything other than a janitorial capacity. Worse than this, he's at best a mediocre writer, at worst a truly lousy one, and nearly always, just plain nuts. What was going through his addled, daffy mind when he decided to devote the first issue of the new SECRET ORIGINS to stories that actually had no bearing whatsoever on anything relating to the actual new fictional reality the series was supposed to define, I have no idea. What was, in fact, going through the minds of DC's editorial staff in allowing Roy to hijack the SECRET ORIGINS concept, which should have been the keystone in their whole post Crisis continuity arch, I similarly have no clue. The best I can do is to reprise, from memory, Roy's introductory caption to the issue, which went something along the lines of "Although these characters have now, officially, never existed... once they did. And we remember them. And so, as a gesture of our fond memory, we now present these stories of how they began... because while they may be gone from our history, they will never be gone from our hearts". Or some such twaddle.

SECRET ORIGINS, if anything, went downhill from there. When it was used the way it had been originally intended to be used, it enacted horrors, such as the previously mentioned revised origin for Power Girl, in which it turns out that in some truly unintelligible and appalling fashion, the character is somehow the grand daughter of Arion, Warlord of Atlantis. (Try and make up a worse revised origin for the character. Go ahead. I'll give you two weeks and allow you to use Captain Carrot and his Zoo Crew, if you want, plus the entire casts of GILLIGAN'S ISLAND, MELROSE PLACE, and TITANS.

I'll bet you can't. And mind you, 'worse' can't just be 'more stupid', that's too easy. It also has to be 'more wildly inappropriate to the character's powers and modern day presentation, and at least as goddam boring'. There's no way. Like SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE, Paul Kupperberg's revised origin for Power Girl holds some sort of dubious but spectacular trophy for All Time Worst In Its Field.) Most of it, though, was monopolized by Roy Thomas, who used it to give us Secret Origins of a lot of obscure Golden Age characters no one actually cared about (like a blatant Spirit rip off called "Midnight" that only Roy would have been creatively challenged enough to dredge up and include in DC's World War II continuity).

Still, we're ranging pretty widely from our thesis, here, which was, originally, to simply give some sort of categorical list of the characters and concepts actually slain by the events of the miniseries CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS. Not that it matters much, since no one is paying me for all this babble and maybe four people other than me will ever read this thing, anyway.

I could make a pretty good argument that Hal Jordan was killed off by Crisis, as well, since the Hal Jordan of the Silver Age bore very nearly no resemblance to the Hal Jordan who was redefined in the truly appalling Jim Owsley EMERALD DAWN mini series. (I think E.D. was drawn by Mark Bright, and it's probably unfair to heap all the blame on Mr. Owsley, but as others have noted before, I tend to put most of the credit and/or blame for actual story material on the writer, not the artist.) Even leaving aside this bizarre drunken frat dude doppelganger that took Hal's place post Crisis, I could still make an argument that Crisis at the very least sewed the seeds of his doom, since Crisis was the instigating factor that turned Hal Jordan into a so called supervillain named Parallax, and eventually killed him.

Still, that's an ephemeral argument at best, and I'm too tired to make it. Ultimately, Kevin Dooley killed Hal Jordan, and someone should at the very least slap him two or three times for it really hard.

So. The CRISIS body count, at least, as far as my aging, wheezing, extremely fatigued mind can recall right at this moment, runs like this:

Kamandi. Superboy. Supergirl. The Legion of Superheroes. Mon-El. The Golden and Silver Age Wonder Women. Power Girl, as the Earth 2 Supergirl. Fury, as the daughter of the Golden Age Wonder Woman. Barry Allen. Wonder Girl, as anything remotely sensible. The Silver Age Hawkman. The Golden Age Superman and his entire supporting cast, which would pretty much include every surviving character who had ever appeared in the very first superhero comic strip ever published. The Earth-Prime Superboy. Earths 2, 3, X, C, C 1/2, and S, among an infinity minus 4 of others. Captain Carrot and his Zoo Crew. The Justa Lotta Animals. The Crime Syndicate of America. The Earth 2 Robin and the Earth 2 Huntress. General Zod, Jax Ur, Dev Em, and every other Kryptonian character other than Superman. The versions of Jor El and Lara with hair.

I suspect some of the dopier Classic Superman supporting characters also died during Crisis, like blatant Popeye ripoff Captain Strong, and the panty and vest clad superhuman Sonny Bono look-alike known as Vartox. However, their deaths, as far as I know, did not actually occur on panel, they were simply quietly dropped into a waste can, which was then surreptitiously booted under someone's desk. And, honestly, it's hard to blame those who handled the post Crisis Superman continuity for not reviving any of THOSE hosers.

And probably at least a few more I'm forgetting, right at this minute. And some of those have since been dusted off and resurrected, like the Crime Syndicate of America, and at least one of them, the Earth-Prime Superboy, is too silly for words, anyway. Oh, and Crisis itself outright resurrected Superman's adoptive parents, Ma and Pa Kent, who as far as I know are, in the current continuity, still alive and well in Smallville, God love 'em.

(In fact, given that Superboy and Superman, pre Crisis, were both constantly trying to travel back in time and prevent the Kents from dying... what the Kents died from changed in every story, but the fact that they croaked, that Superboy was helpless to prevent it, and that even Superman, through the agency of time travel, was also helpless to undo it, remained one of the constants of Superman's life... I myself theorize that the Crisis was not actually caused by the Anti-Monitor. Instead, it was caused when finally, somehow, Superman was successful in altering history and keeping his adoptive parents alive... and somehow, some effect of that rippled through history and kicked off the Crisis. So now the Kents are alive, but an infinite number of universes, and a lot of good characters, are dead. Fortunately, Superman has no memory of doing it... or at least, that's his story and he's rather obstinately sticking to it.)

And, while this article is mostly an entirely pointless exercise in bitter, middle aged nostalgia, it occurs to me that this catalogue of the various failures, mistakes, and horrifying consequences of DC's attempt to divorce itself from many decades of cumbersome continuity may actually have some relevance to current events in superhero comics, as well. Because it looks like Marvel, at long last, is hesitantly and in a thoroughly aimless, half assed, 'let's try hard to sneak up on this in such a way as the X-MEN fans don't notice us doing it' way, getting ready to try the same thing, with their gradual introduction of their ULTIMATE comics lines, and the much larger, newsstand targeted, glossy magazine format versions of those same ULTIMATE issues.

Marvel seems to think they're learning from DC's mistakes. Rather than announcing a massive continuity update and doing it all at once in one hugely touted, vastly selling miniseries, they're trying to avoid virtually all notice by doing it gradually, carefully test marketing each change before they make it, and keeping around the non Ultimate versions of their titles as well, so they aren't committed to anything.

This is not, however, the proper way to go about learning from DC's mistakes. The proper way is simple: Don't. Do. It.

Certain contingents of fans are always going to whine, and the most vocal of those whiners are always going to be the adolescent and young adult age groups. And while this is the preferred target audience of all television advertisers, Marvel should try to keep in mind that adolescents and young adults these days are not spectacularly literate, have vanishingly short attention spans, are massively overstimulated, and as a general rule and for the overwhelming most part, would far rather spend a couple of bucks on renting something that moves and makes noise and that maybe they can interact with, than on a 22 page comic book... whether the continuity in the comic book is complex and detailed, or streamlined and simple. As such, Marvel would do well not to make all its creative decisions on the basis of what it thinks the 14 to 23 year old market wants.

That's the real lesson to be learned from Crisis: decades and generations of elaborate continuity is not something awful that should be discarded. Properly used, it is an invaluable and irreplaceable asset to any creative endeavor. Throwing it out is simply stupid.

Don't. Do. It.

It's too late for DC. They should really just give up on their comics line and concentrate on the next Batman movie.

* * * * * * * * * *

John Jones, the Manhunter from Marathon, IL,no longer dwells in Marathon, IL. He realizes that he is probably the only comics reader left in this particular universe who still actually cares about what happened during the Crisis on Infinite Earths. However, as with many things he realizes, he also just doesn't care. If you honestly think he should write about things that have more relevance to modern day comics, especially the ones you think are really cool, like HITMAN and PREACHER and THE AUTHORITY and TRANSMETROPOLITAN, then you should send him a great deal of money and he might. Send those offers pouring in to martianmanhunter2@juno.com.

CONTINUITY ON BIZARRO-EARTH

2006-07-30T09:55:00.000-07:00

By John Jones, Manhunter from Marathon, IL

I am, frankly, astounded.

A few weeks ago... maybe not even that long (it all gets hazy whenyou're as old as I am) I was doing a little webcruising, trying totrack down a site that might verify for me just which AVENGERS writer had originated the trademark Beast line "Oh my stars andgarters!" (Never mind. You don't even want to know why.) One of the search results took me to a web page that, as it turned out,was part of an extremely large and extensive and amazingly impressive site dedicated to the Silver Age of comics. The textposted there was generally articulate, amusing, entertaining, and frequently hilariously funny. I'm not gonna name the fan that wrote it here, because, well, there seems no point to it. Given some of the viewpoints I'm about to propound, it might even seemlike I'm attacking him. And, really, I'm not. I enjoy the site, for the most part, and I enjoy his writing.

But some of the things I learned on this site... well, as I say, they frankly astound me.

One of the chiefest among these is the strange notion that apparently, just as video killed the radio star, so too, has continuity killed the comic book industry.

I mean... WHAT?

I've been reading comics since the mid to late 60s (when I was a wee small tot and sneaking into my Uncle Rick's room to hide under the bed and read SUPERBOY and JIMMY OLSEN because I knew he'd just kill me if he caught me) and collecting them, since, I don't know, 1973 or so, when I bought an issue of CAPTAIN AMERICA AND THE FALCON off the newsstands for, I think, 20 cents (I can't rememberthe issue number, but it was the wrap up of the Cowled Commander storyline). I bought and kept comics for the rest of the 70s and the early 80s, although I nearly fell out of the hobby twice: once after Gerry Conway forced my two favorite writers to leave Marvel and then, a few years later, after Crisis took one of my beloved imaginary realities away from me. Since then, I have barely hung in there, buying, over the course of the last 20 years, no morethan maybe half a dozen comics per month.

Okay. On a real busy month back in the early or mid 90s, maybe a dozen titles.

My perspective is no doubt a weird one, being, as it has been, that of a person most definitely non-immersed in comic books, but still passionately interested in same, for the last two decades.

What I have seen, over the course of the last three decades, since I first began reading comic books, is a steady decline in the sales figures and general readership of the comic books I was mainly interested in, superhero titles. At the same time, I have also seen a steady rise in the general awareness most people have of the characters that populate said comic books. In the early 70s, a majority of the general population had heard of Superman and Batman, but not from the comic books... they'd heard of them from their respective TV shows. Wonder Woman was, right about then, due to become well known as well... also from her own TV show. As time would go on and the special effects necessary to the commercially successful adaptation of more and more super characters became economically feasible, more and more comic books saw themselves adapted to TV and film.

Okay, let's hold that thought for a minute and go back in time a bit to the 1940s. The so-called Golden Age of Comics. When MILLIONS of people of all age ranges - kids, teenagers, young adults - read comic books. And threw them away. I'm not kidding, this was status quo for comic books back then. I mean, for God's sake, if millions of issues of a particular comic were printed a month, how could the few surviving copies that still exist today be worth anything if the vast majority of them HADN'T been thrown away? Comic book collecting was virtually unknown, back then, and the few people - kids or adults - who actually did want to, and manage to, toss their comics in a box and keep them, hadn't the vaguest clue about things like polybags and nitrogen-free environments and all that good happy-crappy.

Now let's fast forward a little bit to the early Silver Age, when, well, hundreds of thousands of people read comic books. Kids, teenagers, young adults... for the most part... read comic books.

And a lot of them still threw the comics away when they were done (or their parents did). I tell you, no lie, that a good half of my comic book collection in my early teens came from three other guys I knew whose parents let them buy comics and read them... but wouldn't let them KEEP 'em. And I have read, over and over again in various fannish memoirs over the years, about the comic book collections trashed by condemning parents. People reading comics and throwing them out was still pretty common, and among the nascent 'fan' base - i.e., my generation, the kids of the time - you were lucky if you had a set of parents who didn't condemn comics out of hand, or at the very least, ones understanding enough to respect your privacy and not routinely search your bedroom for contraband.

Now hit the FF button again to the late Silver Age (by my standards; I posit the death knell of the Silver Age as being the publication of GIANT SIZE X-MEN #1). Sales figures have dropped by more than half, but by this time, which for me is my last couple of years of high school, many of the kids I know who like comic books also collect them. Parents seem to have lightened up a ton on the ol' funny books. At the same time, though, apparently, there are far fewer kids reading comic books than there ever have been in the past.

Adults who read comic books, as far as I know, are all but unknown. My Uncle Rick, whose bedroom, you may remember, I once used to sneak into so I could read his comic books, has not only stopped reading comics long since (he's eleven years older than me, just so y'all can keep track) but he no longer more than vaguely even remembers them. My mom occasionally reads my comic books, and she's the only grown up I know who even has the slightest interest in them. On the other hand, virtually every kid I go to school with knows who Batman, Superman, Spider-man, Wonder Woman, and the Hulk are. Why? Because they've been on TV, and Spider-man has a newspaper strip.

I'm very carefully laying a mosaic here, tile by tile. I want to proceed very cautiously, because when I get that far, I'm going to be saying some things that, apparently, are going to be controversial in today's comic fan environment... although, to ME, they're just common sense.

The circulation of comic books steadily declined throughout the 80s. It bumped up again in the early 90s, by, like, a TON, although I'll admit, it did so mostly due to the relatively brief involvement of addlebrained speculators in the comics market who mistook comics, for a time, as the next big money collectible. Once THAT particularly insane frenzy worked itself through the industry, things fell off again... waaaaaaaay off.

As things currently stand in the industry, a 'best seller' moves an order of magnitude fewer units than an average seller for the Golden Age. A moderate seller might do 50,000 to 65,000 units a month in business. Even this is somewhat vague, because virtually all comics sales these days are DIRECT sales, meaning, if the shop doesn't sell the issue, they can't return them, they have to stick them in back issue bins and hope someone buys them. Still, it's generally hard to find recent back issues of best sellers, so we can assume that these figures are reasonably accurate.

Now, apparently, there are at least some intelligent, analytical comics pros and fans who look back over all this and wonder why the hell, if comic books were selling a million copies a month in 1947, the same comics, featuring, in a few instances, the same characters, sell only 60,000 copies a month now. They trace the steadily diminishing sales figures, and they compare these figures with what they feel they remember about what was happening with the product and the story content during this period, and they arrive, with a triumphant bellow, at a conclusion: It's that god damned continuity that did it.

To an extent, it's hard to fault them. The people who have made this claim live and breathe comic books, they are immersed in the mainstream and have been forever, and, perhaps coincidentally, many of them seem to be huge Grant Morrison fans, and Grant Morrison is on record early and often heaping scorn and derision on the entire concept of continuity. So, if Grant Morrison says continuity is EEEEEEvil, and if a glance back over what we know and remember about the development and evolution of storytelling in comic books also bears out that continuity has grown more essential to superhero comics at, seemingly, the same time sales figures have declined... well, by God, it must be true! Continuity sucks! Bring back Good Stories!

I have to tell you, I have my own somewhat different perspective.

First, I don't think there is any one particular influence or element that has solely been the bullet in the heart of the comic book industry. What we're seeing right now, as we finally approach the real dawn of the 21st Century (don't start with me on this 'when the new Millenium really starts' crap, either) is the end result of a great many factors, some of which I understand (I think) and some of which I, frankly, have no clue about. But let me lay out, again, slowly, piece by piece, what I have observed from my peculiar vantage point:

In my opinion, the absolute zenith of comic book storytelling is represented by 6 titles published at Marvel from the early to just after the mid 70s (if I am recalling correctly). Those titles are: Steve Gerber's DEFENDERS, MAN THING, and HOWARD THE DUCK, and Steve Englehart's AVENGERS, CAPTAIN AMERICA, and DR. STRANGE.

I know how that sounds, and honestly, I don't mean to short sheet anyone, but hey, everyone has their list of favorites. Assuming this article ever gets read by a reasonable cross section of comics fans, that paragraph above is going to occasion absolute HOWLS of outrage. What about WATCHMEN? What about DARK KNIGHT RETURNS? What about the Fox/Sekowsky JUSTICE LEAGUEs, the O'Neal/Adams BATMAN and GL/GA, the Kirby/Lee FANTASTIC FOURs, the Miller DAREDEVILS, and yaddity yaddity yippy yappy "... MY FAVORITE COMIC SERIES IN THE WORLD?"

In my opinion: The listed six titles have three elements in common that none of these others can possibly claim all three of: 1. They were sophisticated and intelligent, 2. They were FUN, and 3. They were primarily bought, read, enjoyed, and collected BY KIDS... yet all of them can be read with an equal, if entirely different level of enjoyment, by adults. And when I say 'by adults', I do not mean 'adults who first read these stories as kids, had these stories imprinted on them as kids, and thus, can still re enter that childlike viewpoint again when they reread them'. I'm not talking about adults who enjoy these comics as a sort of nostalgia, 'gee whiz, remember when' trip. I'm talking about adults who have never read these comics before in their lives, the kind of adults who would rather have a fist fight with Stone Cold Steve Austin than be caught dead reading a comic book... but whom, if you can actually find some way to make them sit down and READ one (blackmail usually works, or holding them at gunpoint), will be drawn into the storytelling like a Fred Pohl hero into a black hole, will eagerly read every single one they can get their hands on, and who will, upon arriving at the screeching, heartbreakingly abrupt 'DAMN Gerry Conway to HELL' end of the run of Gerber DEFENDERS, scrabble around in confused bewilderment, then turn to you with fearful but demanding eyes and say "Okay, where's the REST?"

(Then you have to tell them that there is no 'rest', that they really don't want to see what Gerry Conway and David Kraft did to the book for the years following, and that they'd just rip their eyes right out of their heads if they could see what DeMatteis had inflicted on the book in the early 80s... and it's just ugly.)

Find me a single other instance of 'my favorite comic book EVER' on any fan's list these days published between 1961 and 1998 that you can say THAT about (Okay, I can think of one... the Baron/Rude NEXUS... which was never remotely a sales success.)

The single point I'm trying to make in the above paragraph is that, as far as I can see, those six comic books were a peak of comic book storytelling...at least, in the fundamentally absurd superhero genre. They were comic books AS comic books, utilizing and exploiting the unique strengths of the medium (third person narrative captions, thought balloons, panel to panel graphic continuity with a visual 'pace' that could be varied, depending on the skill of the writer and the artist involved, to an enormous and at the same time, very delicate, degree). The plots of these stories were dense and layered, the concepts examined and explored in them were both breathtakingly cosmic and immediately, involvingly human. They were character driven, sophisticated fantasy capable of stimulating the intellect, the emotions, and the imagination.

They were also very concerned with continuity, but let's leave that aside for a moment.

Um, no. On second thought, let's not. Accepting, for a moment (as I do, and you may not, ever) that these six comic series ARE the zenith of all superhero comics storytelling... let's just look at how important the much maligned 'continuity' WAS to the fundamental quality, or even, ongoing existence, of these comics.

Virtually every plot element in every series listed grew out of something that had been done, previously in that series, or elsewhere in the self contained, internally consistent, Silver Age Marvel Universe. The three Gerber books pretty much fed each other continuity bits, with Howard the Duck, for example, showing up for the first time in MAN-THING, and eventually crossing over into DEFENDERS. DEFENDERS itself, at its wildest, wackiest heydey, concerned itself deeply with previously established Marvel continuity, like Nebulon, the Celestial Man, and a bunch of old characters from single shot horror stories Gerber dug out and gathered together into the biggest pack of nutty supervillains you EVER saw, the Headmen. Engleharts's books were equally heavy in their continuity emphasis; in fact, storylines he started in CAPTAIN AMERICA he later finished in AVENGERS, at one point. A large part of stories he ran in both CAPTAIN MARVEL and AVENGERS centered around the history of the famous "Blue Area" of the Moon... perhaps Englehart's own most enduring addition to the Marvel continuity canon, and one directly deriving from Kirby and Lee's previous work on FANTASTIC FOUR.

Continuity was a key part to these stories, and in all honesty, I don't think it had anything to do with the fact that they only sold, oh, around 150,000 to 300,000 copies a month.

I will tell you what continuity did have DIRECTLY to do with: the fact that in the early to late 70s, the vast majority of the comic books I bought and enjoyed were published by Marvel. DC had some books I liked too... Carey Bates SUPERMAN and FLASH and SUPERBOY were all favorites of mine, and I would occasionally pick up and enjoy a DETECTIVE or BATMAN from around then, too, usually written by O'Neil or Robbins, and almost always drawn by Irv Novick... but it was the Marvel comics I loved, and the reason for it was simple: they seemed more REAL to me.

In DC comics at that time, the heroes were absurdly powerful. The scripts, in the hands of those who knew how to handle them (in other words, Carey Bates) were a great deal of childish fun, but nothing ever seemed to change in those comics, and nothing of any real lasting emotional interest ever happened. One had to continually, not really suspend one's disbelief, but just sort of accept one's disbelief numbly, after the Flash spent another 22 pages or so finding a way to defeat the bizarre machinations of the Mirror Master, when we were all aware from the splash page onward that in point of fact, Flash can move faster than this jerk can think, so why is he having any problem with the doofus AT ALL? By the age of 13, I had long since realized that there WAS no actual, valid reason WHY there was any crime or injustice at ALL on the DC Earth. Superman, the Flash, and Green Lantern, between them, could have fairly easily mounted an omniscient and omnipotent 24 hour global patrol against EVERYTHING remotely bad on Earth 1. And they were apparently smart enough to realize this, and heroic enough to DO it (remember, they could have traded off 8 hour shifts), and hell, after the first week of round the clock Justice From Above, Take Cover Evildoer! activity, crime would have dropped off to near non-existence. They didn't do it because, well, the editors didn't want them to. All of which made the DC Universe, at that point, just kind of fundamentally silly to me. I read the stories, I enjoyed them, but... I couldn't BELIEVE them.

Now, there are those in the hypothetical audience who are at this point going to leap up and say "Superheroes are fundamentally absurd, and if you're saying you have to be able to BELIEVE in the stories to enjoy them, you have PROBLEMS. What, after all, is so inherently believable about a guy with a supersoldier serum, an ancient Norse deity fighting bank robbers, or a billionaire in a set of armor so advanced that we don't have a hope of duplicating a tenth of its everyday functions even now?" All of which is a valid point... if you accept that this is an issue that can only be answered by one extreme or another... either you suspend your disbelief totally and accept the most absurd nonsense if it's a fun story, or you demand absolutely credible and believable storylines and characters no matter what, except that they have superhuman abilities and wear costumes and spend much of their free time having fist fights.

However, I don't like those two extremes. I want something in the middle. I want superheroes, yes. People with superhuman powers, with perhaps somewhat more extreme moral codes and, maybe, a somewhat morally simpler world. People who wear cool costumes, and yes, people who occasionally, or even often, settle their differences in viewpoints by knocking each other through a building or two. However... I would also like those superheroes to be treated with some degree of realism and depth. Which includes, having whoever is writing those characters treat their previously published adventures as representing actual historical events that have actually occurred to those characters... unless some satisfying and intelligent way is found to explain why they aren't and they didn't.

I'm not demanding ORDINARY PEOPLE with costumes. By the same token, I also don't want SUPERGOOF MONTHLY, either. What I want, basically, is a superhero comic book that doesn't insult my intelligence. I don't mind suspending my disbelief, but when I need a crane to do it, and when the things I'm willfully ignoring are just egregiously, blatantly, grotesquely STUPID... like the fact that a superhero who can run faster than the rate that nerve impulses travel back and forth from the human sensory receptors to the brain STILL somehow has a problem with a bunch of hosers whose basic powers are based on technological gimmickry they have to point and fire at him... or the fact that a character who began his crimefighting career as a young adolescent is now a young adult, and his adult partner/mentor hasn't aged a day in the meantime... or simply the fact that the flagship icon of a particular super universe somehow has the power to actually MOVE THE EARTH in its orbit, despite the fact that (a) it is impossible to intellectually comprehend a humanoid being that physically strong and (b) how physically strong you are doesn't MATTER when you have no solid place to stand on as you wouldn't if you were actually moving the Earth, and (c) any attempt made by any humanoid being strong enough to actually move the Earth would simply result in said person tunneling his way INTO the Earth... well.

Excuse me for preferring characters that, while superhuman, dressed in head to toe leotards, and frequently engaged in hand to hand combat with other guys similarly afflicted, nonetheless, seem to inhabit and interact with a world that operates on a somewhat more believable physical level.

At risk of sounding pedantic and childish at the same time, I want to say here that 'continuity' is not synonymous for 'evil' or 'stupid' or even 'too convoluted for anyone but an obsessive idiot savant to understand'. When those who apparently hate continuity say this, they invariably point to examples of comic books storytelling that I, myself, would not label, primarily, as continuity. What would I call them?

Bad writing.

Do you hate the last 20 years or so of X-MEN continuity? It's not the continuity you hate. It's the stories. They make absolutely no sense, and no one I know of claims to be able to actually explain them in any coherent manner. Do you hate the entire 80s post Crisis run on JUSTICE LEAGUE? Don't blame you, they sucked, but they have nothing to do with the continuity of the DC Universe at that time, for two reasons: first, the DC Universe at that time had no consistent continuity (and it blew because of it) and second, the editors kept telling us on the letters page that if we didn't like the way the characters were portrayed in that particular comic, we should consider those portrayals 'outside regular continuity'.

Did you hate all the big crossover events of the 80s and 90s? Okay, me too, but don't blame continuity, blame marketing policies that put sales gimmicks ahead of telling good, character driven stories.

Continuity, when written well and with respect, is that additional element in a fictional universe that makes it coherent and believable, and that allows characters we like from one area to meet characters we like from another area. It is also that thread that runs through the best fictional universes and that tells us that all the various adventures we have bought, read, and enjoyed about our various favorite heroes represent real, valid events in those character's lives, that the characters have been effected by, and will continue to remember and be effected by in the future.

Continuity is not a shackle or a straightjacket. If a new writer or editor comes onto a book and wants to 'undo' something that has been established before, they're free to do so... assuming they can come up with some way to do it intelligently and respectfully, that will keep the core concept of the character intact. This was the fundamental motivation underlying Crisis; to find an intelligent, respectful way to downsize and streamline a fictional multiverse that the marketing department felt had become too unwieldy and embarrassingly childish to allow them to write 'serious' stories about.

In short, DC wanted to do Marvel type, somewhat more realistic, stories with their characters. The characters' core concepts, power levels, and loooooooong histories, much of which were the product of earlier, less sophisticated times, mitigated against this... so DC decided to dump it all and basically start over.

Perhaps they had a point. I don't know. I hate Crisis with a blind, virulent passion, and it's hard for me to be objective. I understand that, basically, DC felt it was necessary for them to find a way to do comic books more like Marvel, and so, they undertook to do Crisis. But afterwards, for all I could see, they still didn't do Marvel style comic books. Nothing DC did post Crisis, or, for that matter, as far as I can see, pre-Crisis, has ever remotely compared with the stuff that two of comics best writers did at Marvel from 1972 to 1975. Nothing. Not the Roy Thomas ALL STAR SQUADRON, or the occasional brilliantly crafted little gems by Alan Brennart, or even Englehart's brief, wonderful run on GREEN LANTERN (at the point it turned into GREEN LANTERN CORPS it took a sudden hard spin into the toilet, but the nine issues or so leading up to that post Crisis transformation were frickin GREAT) or the Ostrander SUICIDE SQUAD... none of it can compare.

Moore's early work on SWAMP THING, and the entire run of Neil Gaiman's SANDMAN, I will admit here and now are as good as the six comics I listed as an all time best... but I don't think of them as superhero comics. I can't come up with a handy label for them other than 'fookin BRILLIANT', though. But they weren't superhero comics. However, for what it's worth, they are also very intensely built around a coherent and intricate internal continuity. Just more evidence for my 'continuity is not a BAD thing' argument.

Oh, yeah, and I'd be remiss not mentioning here that Scott McCloud's DESTROY! is the single most brilliant superhero comic ever done, but, you know, it's not part of any fictional universe I'm aware of, so continuity concerns hardly apply one way or the other. It's just, like, brilliant.

And what I'm bringing out of all this is something I deeply feel: that continuity, in and of itself, has little to nothing to do with the gradually steepening decline of the popularity of a uniquely American art form. Continuity is, at baseline, a good thing, something that, done right, elevates 'good fun comics stories' into something that can be ranked with quality adult fantasy in ANY medium. Yes, continuity can be twisted and contorted and made all but incoherent, but that isn't continuity's fault, any more than the abuses and distortions that 'writers' like Claremont and Byrne have heaped on various different characters over the years means that the very storytelling element of 'characterization' is, in and of itself, bad.

So, what do I think is responsible for comics dwindling popularity?

Well, as I said far above, I think it's a mixture of things, but if you put a gun to my head and make me pick out just one, I'm going to have to go along with a big vast crowd on this one and say:

Television.

Why was EVERYONE in the 40s buying comic books? Well, literacy was generally higher then, people read for pleasure more, other printed, graphic storytelling mediums like newspaper comic strips were hugely popular... and... well... in my cynical heart of hearts, I have to wonder just how much all of that might have had to do with the fact that the Idiot Box wasn't even science fiction at that point.

Why were more people in the 60s buying comic books than now? They didn't have as many channels on their TV, and there weren't as many superheroic power fantasies on TV. In 1967 or 1974, if you actually hankered for super powered science fiction adventure, or interesting and intelligent occult derived fantasy with costumed weirdos that hit each other in it, or any odd combination thereof, where did you go? Comics. That was pretty much it. The only SF on TV back then was STAR TREK, and let's remember that back then, TREK was considered a commercial failure. (I will continue my tradition of pissing off my hypothetical audience by also stating here that Trek has never, by any stretch of the imagination, been closer than maybe 10 A.U.s to being real, valid SF, anyway.) There was heroic fiction on TV back then, yes, but it was all well within the range of normal human endeavor. Westerns. Cop shows. Private eyes. You want someone who can fly, pick up a building, blow things up with a beam from their fist? Head for the spinner rack, folks. It wasn't on TV.

I will also take a moment here to point out something else: one of the general effects television seems to have, especially in prolonged exposures, is to kill the active imagination. It's not just me saying that. Harlan Ellison has written about forty pounds of high volume social commentary about it, and various studies have indicated that in fact, watching TV over a lengthy period causes an almost complete cessation of electrical activity in the areas of the brain associated with active visualization and creative conceptualization.

As comic books have declined, other entertainment media... mostly TV, but also film... have, on a more and more broad basis, adapted the themes and concepts of superhero comics into their own productions. I'm not just talking about specific comic book adaptations, although those have increased exponentially over the past few decades, as well. However, movies and TV shows utilizing comic book type superhuman, heroic, good vs. evil themes, have also proliferated. One no longer needs to go to the newsstand if one wants to see superhumans beating on each other. One can see it Saturday mornings on FOX and the WB, Monday nights on ROSWELL, Tuesday nights on BUFFY and ANGEL, and Friday nights on TIME AND AGAIN... and if you don't want to wait that long, you can tune in the Sci Fi Channel or the Cartoon Network any old time and have a decent chance of seeing SUPER FRIENDS, THE HULK, SPIDER MAN, THEADVENTURES OF LOIS AND CLARK, or WONDER WOMAN. You can see them for FREE, in your living room or bedroom.

This is more significant than most of the 'completely immersed' fans want to believe. The one thing we keep coming back to is that 'comics has lost its casual readers'. I agree. I just don't thinkit's 'continuity' that did it. There's plenty of continuity on various TV soap operas, (daytime or evening) and they have audiences numbering in the millions. The average teen age viewerright now could sit down and list off the cast and characters of every show on the WB Network and accurately chart all their relationships with each other, and some of that continuity isnearly as complex as the idiotic stuff in X-MEN that supposedly, is what's killing comics. If convoluted continuity is killing comic books, then it should also be killing BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, and trust me... it's not.

I believe that what has drawn the casual reader away from comic books is quite simply the fact that superhuman conflict is no longer the exclusive province of comics... and to the generations succeeding mine, specifically (I was born in late 1961) TELEVISION IS A PREFERABLE ENTERTAINMENT MEDIUM. Television has movement and sound effects. It shows real people, not flat pictorial representations of demonstrably fake people. It LOOKS more impressive. Again, going back to Harlan Ellison, he once commented that Hawkman was a character created for the wrong medium; he looks kind of boring on a page, but done correctly, he'd be impressive as hell on TV or in a movie. In point of fact, Hawkman is hardly the only super character this is true of. Few supercharacters don't look more impressive when translated to a moving, photographic medium, assuming one has the good sense to adapt the conventions ofcostumery from one genre to another.

Exactly why is all this true? Why is a particular character more appealing and commercially successful on TV, in film, or in a video game, than it is in a comic book?

Because TV, and film, and video games, over time, deaden the active imagination... and it takes active imagination to read, understand, and enjoy comic books. I submit it takes even MORE active imagination to read, understand, and enjoy comic books than it does to read a non-pictorial novel, or to enjoy a melodramatic radio serial adventure. Why? Because comics, the serial presentation of images and text in conjunction with each other, in a manner that simulates sound and motion without actually having either, requires a certain acquired 'knack' to read. It's a 'knack' that is easy to learn in childhood, and somewhat harder to learn as an adult, andthe reason for this is, it requires active imagination to make those flat images and words take on actual sound and motion. And if you don't believe me on any of this, go out and buy ScottMcCloud's excellent UNDERSTANDING COMICS, which goes into far more detail on this subject than I have time for.

For those of us who are still comics fan, this may be something that we don't give much thought to. We know how to read comics, to understand comics, to enjoy comics. We 'get it'. In fact, it has so much become our second nature that we really do not understand that to an adult who never read comics as a kid, comics are a somewhat frustrating medium. They're boring. They seem stupid. These folks can look at a panel to panel sequence that we think is absolutely stunning and all they'll say is 'real people don't look like that'. What we don't get is that they don't get it. They can't 'see' comics the way WE see them.

More and more adults these days grew up as kids in an environment filled with live action or animated storytelling mediums. Many of them learned to READ from live action or animated storytelling mediums, like SESAME STREET and its ilk. Sure they can READ, but they can't IMAGINE. For them, the images have always been presented to them in a box, and the images move, and make noise. To them, graphic storytelling is a three panel HAGAR THE HORRIBLE strip. Sophisticated graphic storytelling is DOONESBURY, which, lest we forget, almost never shows any actual movement in the depicted figures.

And if the ADULTS these days, of a generation or two behind me, are like this, I can only vainly try to imagine what today's KIDS are like. Other than to say that the active imagination necessary to turn a brilliant page of Jack Kirby panels with Stan Lee scripted word balloons and Artie Simek lettered sound effects into a sweeping panorama of exploding energy beams, flying costumed bodies, and stunning galactic backdrops... is going to be a very rare thing.

To an extent, this may explain some of the success of Image Comics, with their 'every single panel is a fight scene or an action pose' style. Such a lack of any sort of actual storytelling elements isn't going to matter to an audience that doesn't have the imagination to create a contextual link between the panels anyway.

I mean, is it really any surprise to anyone that the popularity of a largely textual medium, whose visual component is flat, silent, and motionless, has decreased, over a time period in which thepopularity of high impact, live action or animated entertainment mediums that move, and make sound, and have bright colors, and that occasionally blow up real good, has exploded exponentially?

And still, we're blaming the continuity?

Again, if continuity was a problem for the 'casual reader' we all agree has abandoned comic books, by and large, then TV shows like NYPD BLUE and BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER and any daytime soap opera, would not have audiences in the millions. Or, to put it anotherway, if superhero comic books still had as many people buying them as paid for tickets to see any of the STAR WARS sequels... which depend on an intricate and consistent continuity... none of us would be worried about the future of the medium.

I understand that it's a lot more reassuring to blame continuity.Continuity is something that the industry could DO something about,after all. Marvel and DC could both launch reboots to get rid ofall their onerous back history and start all over again, althoughthis is only a temporary fix to continuity problems, since by nomeans is anyone even remotely trying to imagine that saiduniverses, post reboot, would not incorporate internal continuityas well. We could reboot every six years or so, just as soon asthe continuity thickets get too indecipherable. (Or we could justlet Alan Moore, Tom Peyer, Mark Waid, Roger Stern, ChristopherPriest, and Kurt Busiek write everything, in which case, thecontinuity would probably continue to make sense for a good longtime.) But the point is, if it's 'continuity' that's the problem,or the screaming of anal, obsessed, fixated fanboys (which I willpoint out now that, within this community, simply means 'any groupof my fellow comics fans who like a bunch of comics I don't',because, face it folks, we're ALL anal, obsessed, and fixated, orwe wouldn't be reading or writing all this crap), then we can DOsomething about that.

If, on the other hand, it's just a generally increasing contempt for any entertainment medium that doesn't jump around, scream like a banshee, and occasionally explode, then... well... we're BUMMIN'. Comics can't do that. Or, if they do, they will no longer be comics.

Unfortunately, I honestly think that we may be standing on the brink of developments in our technology and our social culture that will make literacy basically obsolete within another couple of generations. As Egon once remarked, "Print is dead". And when it goes... comics goes with it.

I know none of us like that or want to accept it, but please... let's stop blaming continuity, and PLEASE, let's stop blaming thoseof us who like continuity. I did not kill the comic book industry.

Hell, I didn't even kill the radio star.

* * * * * * * *

John Jones, the Manhunter from Marathon, IL, no longer dwells in
Marathon, IL. He also holds out little hope for the survival of
the printed word as a viable means of entertainment and/or
communication much longer than another three generations at most.
Barring, of course, global disaster, which is one reason he was
really hoping that the Lovebug Virus might just wipe out all the
Pentium processors and put us back to using text based editors
again. Oh, well...