Extrait du SFX hors-série spécial "US TV" paru en décembre 2002.
Season six of Buffy divided fans - they either loved it or hated it. It seemed to attract a constant stream of criticism on the internet - of an unprecedented volume - which eventually began to wear down executive producers Joss Whedon and Marti Noxon. It's a well known fact that people are more vocal with their complaints than their praise, but the sheer volume and extremity of the comments about the show's attempts to do something other than have The Scoobies versus some world-threatening demon certainly gave the crew some pause for thought. Noxon, now back on the show having taken time off to give birth, is philosophical.
"Maybe this is me just flattering myself and Joss," offers Noxon, "but I kind of think there becomes a party line. We started to say, 'Yeah, we recognise that the season was dark,' and then everyone else starts saying it. But I've talked to a lot of fans who really enjoyed last season and who didn't have problems with it. Or if they did, it was with an individual episode here and there. There was still a lot of funny stuff last year and a lot of good. However, we definitely went to a very dark place, particularly with the Buffy and Spike stuff. I recognise that and the fact that we took that elevator pretty far down.
"It's not like we're not responsive to fans' input," she adds. "We got the message that people didn't like a dour Buffy and we absolutely agreed that she can't stay in that place. At the same time, it's hard to hear people say that the season wasn't to their liking. For us, we just couldn't deal with another villain saying, 'Be prepared for the coming Apocalypse."'
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WILLOW TAPS INTO THE REALM OF DARK MAGIC IN an effort to resurrect Buffy from the dead. Those efforts prove fruitful as the Slayer returns to life, rescued, presumably, from a hell dimension. Adjustment is not easy and Buffy is forced back to "work" right away thanks to a demon named Razor, but in the end she's willing to give death another shot. Only Dawn is able to talk her out of killing herself.
Marti Noxon: "Obviously those episodes were all about the problem of getting Buffy out of her grave. In some ways, they were challenging because we also had not originally conceived this as a two-hour movie, which is the way it aired. It was originally a two-parter, but it wasn't going to be continuous. It was a challenge because we had to stretch a story that wasn't quite a two-episode arc into one movie-length episode. The difference is that they're paced differently; they work out differently time-wise. It was more difficult to make it seamless."
DEMONSTRATING THE GIVE AND TAKE OF UNIVERSAL balance, when Willow brought Buffy back to Earth (a good thing) a ghost demon more or less followed her here (a bad thing). Meanwhile, as the episode unfolds, Buffy finally reveals why she has been feeling so distant; she tells Spike that she thinks she was in heaven, not hell.
Marti Noxon: "I don't think many people saw the revelation that she had been in heaven coming at all, so we were proud that we pulled that off. The moody, more sombre Buffy was intriguing - but only for so long, apparently, judging by the reactions. The big question of this episode was how long it would take Buffy to get back to normal and what she'd be like. We thought it was interesting that Spike would be the one she could tell the truth to. What we were suggesting there was that she knows how much it would hurt everyone else, and she still doesn't know how much he cares and how much it will affect him that she's in so much pain. In a way, to her, he's like a neutral party. He won't judge it, he'll just listen. She's treating him like a sounding board, because in some way he's less than human to her."
AS THE GRITTIER, MORE DOWN TO EARTH ramifications of her mother's death hit her (paying the bills, in other words} Buffy has to cope with the fact that she's nearly broke. She practically begs the bank to give her a loan and urgently needs to repair a major leak in the basement. Luckily, she doesn't fix it before she finds out it's the perfect way to drown a demon created by a troika of nerds who are plotting mischief.
Marti Noxon: "That's one where we were, like, 'The house is a metaphor for all the adult problems she'll be dealing with.' It turned out pretty well, but it's not that exciting to watch Buffy deal with bills. The show is not called Buffy The Debt Collector or Buffy The Credit Card User. So I guess we started toying with adult responsibilities and then decided we'd have to go the way of nasty sex instead. We had been asking in script meetings, 'What are adult responsibilities?' We tried out a bunch in 'Flooded' and kind of dispensed with them when we realised we didn't want to spend time with the actual realities of adult life. Uh, boring."
BUFFY IS STILL TRYING TO ADJUST TO REGULAR LIFE and getting into a daily routine, when she again finds herself the victim of the evil nerd troika's devilish whims, as they try to out-do each other with their individual schemes. Warren wins when he traps the Slayer in a time loop, and she's forced to relive a sequence of events in the magic shop over and over again (Groundhog Day-style). Unfortunately, these events include having to deal with a severed mummy's hand with a serious attitude problem.
Marti Noxon: "That episode was fun because, structurally, it was different. Joss came up with this really fun idea of doing it as this series of short stories. Also, we had to split that one among writers because we were getting a little behind. I thought that parts of that show were really successful. I thought the whole thing with the mummy hand was hysterical. Truthfully, that was a really hard episode to break because of the complexity of certain storylines. The first cut of that mummy part was terrible, but once we got the pacing right, it was just a riot. And I loved the Buffy/Spike poker game where the demons are playing for kittens. I look at that episode and I say, 'See, season six had funnies!'"
LYING THAT SHE'S GOING TO A HALLOWEEN PARTY, Dawn instead goes cruising with her girlfriends and some boys. But the boys turn out to be vampires who nearly claim the Slayer's sister as one of their victims. Buffy leaves the disciplining of Dawn to Giles, a situation with which he's entirely happy.
Marti Noxon: "That one was interesting, but there were two things wrong with it. The romance between Dawn and the vampire never took off. We'd hoped it would be bittersweet, but they didn't quite make the connection. So in some ways it wasn't quite as resonant as we'd hoped it would be. And the other thing is that Joss felt that we should have shored up Dawn's character more at the beginning. If we'd been into Dawn's space in the beginning, then the rest of it might have played better. I tend to agree. We sort of boned that one a little bit. What I did like about it was that it was sort of old school Buffy. You go out with these guys and, guess what? They're vampires. Not very complicated in the metaphor, but very dead on. So I liked the simplicity of it. If we'd only made a few adjustments, it would have been better."
A DEMON CALLED SWEET, INADVERTENTLY summoned by Xander, more or less makes life a musical for Buffy and the Scoobies, who start breaking into song, choreographed dance movements and reveal their deepest secrets. Most shocking of all is that Buffy, who still feels lost and isolated, shares a kiss with Spike at the conclusion. Additionally, during the course of events, she reveals to her friends that she had been in heaven, much to their shock.
Marti Noxon: "Oh God, what can be said? I had nothing to do with it, so I feel I can praise it. It was unbelievable, and because it was such a work of just Joss on Joss's terms, we can go off about how great it was. He wrote the music over the summer and he just blew people away. It confronted people's expectations that this would be a cheesy musical episode. What Joss was saying from the beginning was that a musical moves the story along in song, and that people sing what they can't say. The whole point of the plot is that in a real musical what happens is that people sing when their emotions get so intense that they can't express themselves any other way. That's what he wanted this to be: that people would burst into song for a reason. It all had to be about intense emotions and high feelings. We talked a lot about that, about how to serve the story in addition to making it an exciting, different episode. It couldn't just be a musical episode. It wasn't going to be a standalone; we wanted it to serve a dramatic purpose. And it gets so emotional. The stuff with Spike at the end just kills me It's so beautiful. Joss is a frighteningly talented guy."
WILLOW'S SPELL TO MAKE BUFFY FORGET HER experience in heaven backfires and results in the whole gang losing their memories. They try to work out who they are from the clues they have available, but come to completely the wrong conclusions, and invent completely new characters for themselves which bear no relation to real life... Plus, Willow and Tara break up.
Marti Noxon: "Again, an effort to kind of lighten the season up. We wanted to do something fun and we were talking about the fact that they were all at this really tender place after 'Once More, With Feeling', and the question was how could we get them to deal with that and not hit them over the head? Joss came up with the idea of this whole memory loss episode that was farcical. And also, we needed something easy, and it turned out really fun. One criticism we received about the episode was the fact that Giles left even after knowing what Buffy had been through. We tried to make it clear that he began to believe that she couldn't take responsibility with him there; we really tried to play up the idea. Plus we really needed him to leave, because Tony had to leave. We were a little bit between a rock and a hard place - he was going and we had to make it work the best we could, given what we had. It was a little bit of a stretch."
WHEN SPIKE AND BUFFY GET INTO A PUNCH-UP, Spike is shocked to discover that his chip doesn't kick in when he hits her... which seems to suggest that she's come back "wrong". Violence between them quickly turns into passionate sex in which they literally bring the roof down in a house they're in. Meanwhile, alone since she and Tara broke up, Willow uses magic to transform Amy from a rat back into human form. The two of them go off on adventures that only fuel Willow's growing addiction to magic.
Marti Noxon: "This was the beginning of the most divisive story we've ever had, which was Buffy and Spike boning. Really, I've never seen such a strong reaction on both sides. People either love it or hate it. To this day, people either truly believe that Spike is completely redeemed and should be treated a lot better, or they truly believe that Buffy is a fool for trusting someone who's been so evil and how can she be so unheroic as to allow herself to be caught up in this really sordid romance? So you get the total Buffy/Spikeshippers, or you get the attitude, 'I just don't respect Buffy any more.' It's fascinating to see. The thing I keep saying is that it's not black and white. I'd love it to be, but it's not. To me, this is much more real. If these two crazy kids can make it work, it will be a lot more interesting than a kind of perfect romance with obstacles thrown in. To me, this is real life; this is people making their own problems. If they can get it together, that would be amazing. But it was never going to be easy. That's why Spike did something radical at the end of the year. Joss came up with the idea of the house coming down around them while they made love. It was perfect, because we needed something catastrophic to go along with this huge, dangerous union."
WILLOW'S OBSESSION WITH MAGIC GROWS TO dangerous levels as she finds herself seduced by a warlock named Rack. Eventually things get so out of control that she accidentally crashes a car she's been driving magically, injuring Dawn, much to Buffy's horror.
Marti Noxon: "The beginning of what we knew was going to be the major arc of the latter part of the season. It seems like it's sort of a resolution of the Willow story, but instead it's really only the beginning. We all knew that. Some criticism kicked in here that we were being too literal about Willow's addiction and comparing it to alcoholism. It is, in fact, sort of literal in the sense that we're trying to set up that she doesn't have any control; she's really fucked. We also knew that this wasn't the end of the storyline. Even though people were, like, 'This isn't satisfying, it's just so Touched By A Marti.' It was kind of frustrating because people were reacting like that and we wanted to say, 'You don't understand, it hasn't even begun.' It seemed like a pat ending to what we had been developing and people were reacting to that. But there were elements I really liked. I thought the Rack stuff was really cool and the hallucinations were trippy and fun."
WHILE BUFFY TRIES TO PROVE HER FITNESS AS A "parent" she must also deal with the nerds of doom who have developed an invisibility ray which is inadvertently used on the Slayer. Turning a potential negative into a positive, the now invisible Buffy performs some interesting sexual acts on a freaked-out Spike.
Marti Noxon: "Again, an effort to lighten things up and have some fun Buffy in the midst of all the darkness. The whole idea was that if Buffy was invisible, she might feel less burdened, so she's free to do different things, like having raucous bed sex and stuff like that.
"The bit when Spike seems to be by himself when, in fact, he was having sex with the invisible Buffy was something that Joss and David Fury got all excited about, whereas I was like, 'Ewww!' It was disturbing to me; it still is. It just shows you that even I have my limits.
"We also got some criticism that the trio wasn't threatening enough, but I wasn't really hip to that. We just thought they were so funny. Maybe they amused us more than they did others, but we thought their motivation was so interesting. I think what people were objecting to was that there wasn't the particular momentum that season, like, 'Here it comes; here comes the Big Bad.' Maybe we were being a little more experimental. I just think we were tired of running the same scenario, because you can only say, 'It's the worst thing ever' so many times before you start feeling like the biggest liar in the world. So the whole season was structured differently from anything we'd done, and I enjoyed that."
BUFFY FINALLY FINDS WORK AT A FAST FOOD restaurant called Doublemeat Palace, but becomes suspicious that customers are being recycled as food for the restaurant. Meanwhile, Amy tempts Willow to start using her magic again while an old demon friend, Halfrek, fills Anya with doubts about her impending wedding with Xander.
Marti Noxon: "One of the craziest episodes we've ever done. It's just insane. And the monster looks like a penis - we know that! Talk about the academic papers that are going to be written about that one! The castration fantasy made large. We were like, 'Oh my God, it looks like a giant penis. What are we going to do?' We had to paint it, because originally it was penis-coloured. It wasn't even a metaphor, it was just a big, giant penis. So we painted it brown and it looked like a brown penis. But we kind of went with it, because the whole episode was so crazy. It was so weird. I personally really like it; I just think it's really out there. Again, it was just an attempt to have a little fun in a crazy season. It just got baroque, though. This was just a weird, off-kilter, Coen Brothers kind of episode."
THE NERDY TRIO (WITH WARREN AS PRIME motivator and Jonathan as the most reluctant) decide to use their latest invention to turn Warren's ex-girlfriend, Katrina, into their sex slave. However, things go disastrously wrong and Katrina is accidentally killed. Jonathan is horrified but Warren, who shows little (if any) remorse, turns Katrina's death to their advantage with a plan that results in Buffy thinking she has killed the girl.
Marti Noxon: "I thought this was one of our more chilling, frightening episodes of the season, actually. To me it had some classic Buffy good stuff, which was playing the whole joke of turning Katrina into a sex slave and then that turning out to be no joke at all. It's not funny to make girls your sex slave. In the Buffy universe, that's not a big joke. But to play it for comedy and then turn it on its head was, I thought, really inspired. Again, it was a Joss pitch. It got so dark and so intense, and even darker still when Buffy beats the hell out of Spike. Some people had a real hard time with that, and I understand where they're coming from. We just went to a real dark place, and I think this is where people started to feel, 'Okay, like the episode, like the show, but what is going on?' I wouldn't say that we were floundering at all, but at that point in the relationship we didn't know where it was going. All we had was her raw emotion and that's what got expressed. It was just complete confusion and the fact that she started to take her pain out on him and he would take it."
FRIGHTENED OF BEING ABANDONED, DAWN MAKES a wish that will guarantee she's not left alone. That wish becomes reality when Buffy throws a party to celebrate her 21st birthday, and everyone discovers that it's impossible to leave the house. A visiting Tara tries to help, but inadvertently unleashes a demon. So now they're all trapped in a house with a mystical killer!
Marti Noxon: "An effort to deal with Dawn, her state of mind and what was going on with her. How abandoned she had been feeling. We were trying to do a good haunted house story. Again, maybe not our best demon in the world. We were trying to wrap up the whole Dawn mini-arc - get it out on the table and get it out of the way. We did want to deal with it, and at that point it was pretty much over.
"A kind of a lapse was that Buffy and Spike were okay with each other after the events of the week before. That was one where we shot it and we were like, 'Oh, shit!' See, let me point out our own failings. You don't have to do it for me."
RILEY FINN RETURNS TO SUNNYDALE WITH HIS new demon-hunting wife in tow to seek Buffy's help in apprehending a particular demon they've been tracking. The impact of this visit is powerful as Buffy sees a true relationship at work. Realising that she's using Spike - a fact that disgusts her - she breaks up with him. (It doesn't help that he's been illicitly dealing in demon eggs.)
Marti Noxon: "Again, we needed to show that Buffy needed to make some changes in her life. And we wanted this to be a big actiony-adventurey romp with some buddy comedy stuff. For the most part, I think that episode is pretty successful. I think we also wanted to freak people out that Riley was coming back, though he wasn't."
XANDER AND ANYA'S WEDDING DAY ARRIVES AND things don't go according to plan. First off, Xander's dysfunctional family gets into constant arguments with everyone else, then a visit from Xander's future self convinces him that all of his apprehensions about the future are going to come true. In the end, he leaves Anya at the altar.
Marti Noxon: "One of my favourite episodes from last season. It has a sweetness to it and a sadness, obviously. And some really weird comedy. We knew that people probably expected that Xander was not going to make it to the altar, but we wanted to play it out as long as possible. And the idea of him being faked out by someone Anya had cursed seemed like a good structure for that. It was lovely also to see it from Anya's point of view and feel how into it she was, and feel her pain."
SUFFERING FROM THE EFFECTS OF A POISONOUS demon, Buffy comes to believe that she's actually an inmate in a mental asylum who has imagined her whole life in Sunnydale as a Slayer. She keeps flitting from one world to the other, and soon begins to wonder "Which reality is real?"
Marti Noxon: "It was always something we saw as a sort of standalone that could fit in almost any season. The idea was really strong and I thought the episode turned out kind of nice and moody and intriguing. The question that seemed to bother people was whether we were acrually saying the whole series was in her mind. I think we were teasing that, but we weren't coming out and saying, 'Don't believe it, it's all fake.' We remembered the similar ending between this and the finale of St Elsewhere, and we made lots of jokes about the snow globe."
ANYA, HAVING ACCEYTED AN OFFER TO BECOME A vengeance demon again, nearly curses Xander, but can't bring herself to do it. Meanwhile, Dawn wants Buffy to take her out on patrol, Spike and Anya find comfort with each other and the Scoobies discover the lair of the dorky trio. They also discover the nerds' secret surveillance equipment, and while checking it out, they get a glance at what Anya and Spike are up to in the Magic Box - bonking for all it's worth.
Marti Noxon: "My main comment about this one is that the Spike-Anya thing really worked. Those two characters have a real chemistry together and it's fun to say, 'Oh, that works.' Also, we were just trying to put the knife in a little bit deeper."
WHILE WILLOW AND TARA HAVE REDISCOVERED their love for each other, Buffy must deal with the dorky trio. Warren is using mystical orbs to endow him with super powers, but when it seems he might kill Buffy, Jonathan - who never wanted to hurt the Slayer - tells her how to stop him. She does so, but Warren escapes via jetpack. Jonathan and Andrew are arrested, while later, Warren shows up at the Summers home and starts firing off a gun. He wounds Buffy and kills Tara.
Marti Noxon: "Obviously that one had the shocking ending with Tara's death. That was something Joss had up his sleeve the whole time and we were driving toward it. We were hopeful that people would not see it coming in the least. We really wanted to make it pretty brutal and scary. I think the whole episode makes you feel like things are going in one direction and then, kablooey, they go in another. It's also the episode that probably drew the biggest firestorm we've ever had, which was about killing Tara. We're still paying for that one. I really understand what a lot of people's issues with it are, but at the same time it was, I think, dramatically the right choice.
"It was enlightening to see how iconic and important this character had become to the gay community, and how painful it was to see one of our characters executed like that. Some people saw it as a statement, because the girls were all naked and loving on each other, and the next thing you know one of them is brutally killed. We had to say, 'Well, look at the way this series has unfolded. We're clearly not homophobic or antigay. You just have to trust that it wasn't a comment.' We did have thoughts of bringing Tara back in some way. In our minds it wasn't necessarily the end, but it was interesting to see how heated and passionate a reaction it got."
WHEN TARA DIES IN HER ARMS, WILLOW GIVES IN to her addiction to magic as she seeks vengeance against Warren. Utilising black magic, she sets off, despite Buffy's best efforts to stop her. Ultimately she uses the ghost of Katrina to frighten him, and then skins Warren alive.
Marti Noxon: "This is the pay off for the big arc. This is big, bad-ass Willow. By this point people were either loving or hating it. I thought the episode worked really well. There are a lot of cool events and heavy-duty injury. It was an interesting dilemma for our friends to be in and different from our standard apocalypse storylines, which I really enjoyed. The skinning of Warren was something Joss wanted. We pitched it to the network, and the network said, 'As long as you only see it for 2.5 seconds, go for it.'"
WITH EVIL WillOW HELL BENT ON REVENGE AGAINST the relatively innocent Jonathan and Andrew, Buffy finds herself in the position of having to protect them. Buffy and Anya slow Willow down, but their efforts to do so are only temporary. Eventually knocking both of them out of her way, Willow is surprised to be confronted by Giles, who has returned from England to take her on. Elsewhere, Spike is undergoing some sort of test with an African demon; if he passes, the demon promises to give Spike what he desires the most.
GILES, WHO HAS BEEN ENDOWED WITH MAGIC BY A coven of witches in England, takes on Willow, who absorbs his power, but at the same time is touched by his heart. Giles' emotion fills the all-powerful Willow with extreme compassion for those suffering in the world. To end their pain, she decides to destroy the world. Only Xander, and his uncompromising love for her, is able to get through to Willow, ultimately draining her of her power and saving the planet at the last possible moment. (If you're wondering what Buffy's been doing, she's been stuck down a hole with her sister and some demons, but hey, it means they get to bond, so that's okay!) Meanwhile, Spike has completed his tests and the African demon touches his chest, announcing that he is giving Spike back his soul.
Marti Noxon: "All I can say is that it was meant to be a big honker pay-off to what had been a very long wind-up. We hoped that people would be satisfied by it, and go along for the ride. It was the first season climax that Joss did not write and direct. There were some production problems. I was massively pregnant at that point and a little slow on my feet, so it wasn't as easy-going as some episodes that we've done. But all in all, I think they turned out pretty well. I love the fact that Xander stops the end of the world with his mouth.
"In retrospect, looking at the season as a whole, there are some things I might have done differently if I could, but at the same time, overall I felt like it was still compelling. It was never less than compelling. It may have made you mad or itchy or nervous or frustrated, but it was always interesting. I loved the whole Spike-Buffy thing and the whole Willow thing. Those two storylines really worked for me. I don't know how we could have done another, 'Here comes the Big Bad' without repeating ourselves. We'd done it so many times and very successfully. I felt that we had to shake it up, and that was probably what was going on. Joss wanted to try some new stuff and we were all up for it." SFX