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:: RESURRECTING BUFFY ::

Buffy's back... There's certainly life after death in the Buffyverse, but how is season six shaping up for its resurrected Slayer? Co-executive producer Marti Noxon tells Ed Gross how it's looking from her side of the camera.

* * * * * * * *

THERE WAS A SLIGHT CLUE. WELL, NOT SO slight, actually, and not really a clue. It was more of a great big flashing neon sign with arrows pointing to the words "She's going to be resurrected." Hardly a spoiler. Y'see, Buffy may have popped her clogs at the end of season five, but the very fact that a sixth season was a dead cert long before her demise was even written pretty much suggests that death would be a temporary inconvenience. So the question was not so much, or even when, but rather how? And with Joss Whedon spreading himself ever thinner over a larger number of projects, would the show be able to maintain its quality threshold? The task of making sure it does has fallen to Marti Noxon, who joined the how early in its second season, and now boasts the title co-executive producer.

"One of the reasons that Joss and I work so well together, and why this partnership has been so fruitful," reckons Noxon, "is that much of the time what he wants is naturally- and not in an ass-kissy way - what I want."

Which is?

"We both want to reflect the tumult of being in your 20s. Even though the show isn't as clearly defined by metaphor as it was when we were back in high school, it's appropriate. The 20s are a much more murky period. I think we both wanted to make sure that it feels very real; that when you get to the age that Buffy and the others are, there's supposed to be this really strong conflict between that desire on one hand to be young and taken care of and irresponsible, and on the other to really take charge of your own life. Those two things pull you in really different directions. For me - and I think for a lot of people I knew at that age - it's kind of a war. Sometimes the grown-up is winning and sometimes the kid is winning. And I think that's what we really wanted to deal with this season."

All this doesn't mean that Joss is now just a mere figurehead, popping into the studios every fourth Thursday to insert a witty line here or change a camera angle there...

"Joss is still very involved," says Noxon. "He's an incredible workaholic, truth be told. If he's in town, he can't ignore Buffy. He simply can't do it! Regardless of anything else he's got going on he has to join in. He's still very involved in breaking stories though I think our goal has been to get him spending less time doing that. I think we've managed that this year. He no longer has to spend days in the script meetings; now it's maybe just hours."

The impact of her new responsibilities means that Noxon finds herself much more involved with the "nuts and bolts, post-production stuff", particularly in terms of music and sound mixing. Additionally, she can often be found on the set, sometimes more than Whedon himself.

"The really great thing for me," she enthuses, "is that I'm working on a show that's been on for almost six years now and the place runs pretty well. People are really good at their jobs and know what they're doing. So in some respects it's been more work for me, but in others it hasn't been as bad as it might have been because there are a lot of people that I can trust to do a great job."

Not being able to write as much as she used to is the main regret. "I've felt a little less connected as a writer this season, because I spend so much time doing other things," she says. "I'm writing three scripts this year as opposed to five or six. When I first started, I was doing a lot more writing and a lot less producing. So I love it when I get to write a script; that's my first first , love. But because you do so much more, you've got to stop once in a while and say, 'Wait a minute, I'm a writer.' I love all this other stuff, but that's what I am first and foremost. I actually spent some time over the weekend working on some of my own stuff, just to kind of get back into the flow. That's the thing - you don't want to get too far away from your primary purpose."

Season six kicked off with the two-part "Bargaining", with the Scoobies trying to adjust to life without Buffy, using the Buffybot to make the demons think that she's still around. Desperate to bring her best friend back from what she considers to be a hell dimension, Willow uses some powerful magic to resurrect Buffy.

"The way she came back," Noxon offers, "was pretty much what people expected. Ultimately, I don't think Joss wanted to waste a tremendous amount of energy in bringing her back. That's not really what people cared about. It's a show called Buffy The Vampire Slayer, so they knew she was going to be back. It wasn't like we went out of our way for the audience to say, 'Wow, we never saw that coming.' At our writers' meeting we simply discussed what would be the most likely thing to have happen now if you were in this fantasy world?"

In other words, since resurrection has happened in the show before there's not much point making too big a deal about whether or not Buffy can be resurrected. The question was rather, at what price?

"Joss was really clear that the resurrection could only come at a cost," says Noxon, "that when she comes back, it's not going to be easy. I think the sort of genius twist on that was that we all assumed she had been in some sort of horrible place, and then we discover that the reason the resurrection is so painful for her is because she wasn't! That was what made it such a great revelation and made Buffy's character a little more interesting. When Angel came back, he was twitchy for a whole different reason. But I do think Joss's philosophy was right: if you're going to defy the laws of nature in that way, you're going to have to pay a real price. It has repercussions through the whole season.

"Once Joss found his hook in the story - that she had been in a good place - he was really committed to the idea that she would not be all cheery when she got back. It's funny, because although the show is not theological in that way, we finally ran out of excuses. Joss has often said that there is no 'heaven' as such in the Buffyverse. But if there's a bad place, there has to be a good place. Maybe it's not exactly heaven but there are counter forces to all other forces, and Joss was finally willing to accept that. A recurring theme in Joss' work and both shows is that life is hard and it's peoples' actions and relationships with each other that make it liveable. He's never said it was a pretty world view."

There was some concern over the episode's climax, when Buffy returns to the tower where she died and it collapses. "It was shot and finished before the World Trade Centre happened," she says. "Suddenly the thing with the tower collapsing was a lot more upsetting. Fortunately it wasn't so close to the real image that it was insulting or insensitive. It was one of those things where you kind of felt like Joss was being prescient and this world that was nightmarish was suddenly all too true. It felt really timely, though not necessarily in a good way."

Although" Afterlife" continued to deal with themes of Buffy's resurrection, it also chronicled the Scoobies' efforts to battle a demon that apparently tagged along for a ride from the grave. Additionally, the episode concludes with Buffy confessing to Spike that she believes she had been in heaven. Or somewhere a bit like it, anyway.

"We wanted to do something good and spooky," says Noxon. "It was about following the repercussions of what they'd done. There had to be continuing repercussions from what had happened. Obviously that one has the great scene at the end with the revelation that she had been in a nice place. It was a continuation of that same idea, that you don't get to come back from the dead without some heavy tariffs."

Buffy tries to get used to her new lease on life in "Flooded", dealing with broken pipes, flooded basements and mounting bills. Additionally, the Dorky Trio (Jonathan, Warren and Andrew) make their debut.

Enthuses Noxon, "One cool thing about that episode was that [writer/producer] Daniel Petrie made his directorial debut. That was actually kind of a nightmare script to get finished. It was one of those where we worked on it and worked on it, and finally it clicked. It was one of those where you say, 'God, that was rough.' The ultimate script was great, but it was one of those that didn't come easy. I think part of the reason we were struggling with the script was we were introducing the three guys and were trying to lighten the tone a little bit. How do we get into a groove? What is Buffy's character like? Is she okay now? We don't want her to be whiny. Basically we don't want every episode to be so depressing that you want to kill yourself."

In "Life Serial" Buffy goes through numerous attempts to find a job, while suddenly finding herself a victim of the Dorky Trio's mischief, reliving the same sequence of events again and again a la Groundhog Day - including a very funny bit involving a disembodied mummy's hand.

"Just a fun episode because we broke from the normal format," reckons Noxon. "We had separate acts that had their own little structure, which was really fun. It was definitely more challenging to write because you didn't have a beginning, a middle and an end in the same way that we usually do. Each act was so distinct. The fun thing about that was auditioning hand actors to play the severed hand puppeteers and mimes and people Who would come in and make their hand dance all over the table. That was an unusual experience. We also tried to get a lot of humour in there, because we don't want Buffy to be the most depressing show on television. We have to mix things up; we have to find episodes where there is a lot of humour, but at the same time it still comes from her situation."

"All The Way" is a Dawn episode, looking at the troubled teen and her unhealthy involvement with a boy who turns out to be a vampire. There is also a really cool twist in the episode involving an old man who is obviously a killer, but ends up a victim.

Notes Noxon, "A wonderfully written episode, but at the same time I don't think it resonated the way Joss and I had hoped because I don't think the audience was quite with Dawn from the beginning. We were spending time with other characters. What I loved about the episode was that it was classic Buffy, where you could do some cool metaphors with Dawn because she's younger. I love the high school stories and the clear-cut metaphor that boys just want one thing. At one point Joss said, 'Do you think we should cut the line where the vampire gets staked and says, "Dude, that sucks"?' I said, 'That's old school Buffy. Don't cut it.' This was definitely an episode we might have shot in our first or second season."

"Once More, With Feeling" was, of course, the Whedon-written and directed musical extravaganza in which a demon causes everyone to sing their innermost feelings. An instant classic, it moved the season's storyline so far forward in terms of the characters that it would have taken five or six regular episodes to cover the same ground.

"What can you say about old Genius Head?" laughs Noxon, referring to Whedon. "There was a tremendous amount of work and love put into that episode. Joss is a huge musical fan. He spent the majority of the summer writing the music and figuring out exactly how it was going to work. It took a lot more time and a lot more production value than a usual episode, but well worth it, methinks. It was almost like a vacation for everybody. Joss obviously conceived and was the mastermind behind all of it creatively, but all of us got into the act one way or the other. Some of us quite literally [Noxon plays the woman singing to the cop about a parking ticket]. Around here everybody felt reenergised by it, because they got to do different things and the actors were all really excited, people were going to music lessons, rehearsals and it was like putting on a Show in the barn - only this was a really big barn and there was a $2 million budget. We were all awestruck by the end results. It was a culmination of years and years of stuff that Joss has wanted to do. He's very lucky that he gets to make it happen, and we're very lucky we get to see the end result. Most musical episodes on television are a little more gimmicky than this and don't necessarily move the story forward in a huge way. But this was so important in terms of the season. If you weren't watching, you missed a lot."

Reeling from the knowledge that she had inadvertently sucked Buffy back to Earth from heaven, Willow casts a memory spell in "Tabula Rasa" to make her forget the experience. But the spell backfires and the entire Scooby gang forget who they are. "There was so much heavy stuff we had to deal with," says Noxon. "All of the revelations from the musical episode, the question of what people were going to do with all of this information and how we could do a fun episode without getting into the heavy again. It was Joss' notion that they all lose their memory. We thought that was brilliant, because we could have a fun, light-hearted episode, though in the end reality comes crashing back. That was the goal there. We knew there would be repercussions, but at first we thought it would be so serious and sad, but with big Genius Head's help, it worked."

With "Smashed" the Willow/Tara relationship comes to an end because of Willow's over-use of magic. Meanwhile, Spike believes that his chip is malfunctioning after he's able to hit Buffy and he doesn't feel any pain. Eventually he learns that the problem isn't with his chip, but is, instead, with Buffy, who apparently came back from the grave "wrong". At episode's end, he and Buffy end up making love, literally bringing an abandoned house down around their ears.

"Lots of discussion of how we could get Buffy and Spike to the next phase of their relationship," Noxon says. "We had talked about lots of realistic ways it could happen, and Joss was like, 'It just has to be epic. It can't be a little thing.' The whole notion there was that it was going to come out of the dramatic dynamic they had, which is as much about violence as it is about anything else." Which, again, caused the production team some consternation about possible accusations of post 11 September tastelessness.

"We struggled a little bit because that imagery at the end was something we were eager to hold on to, but we didn't want to be tasteless. Given the fact that there was a lot of bad stuff going on in the real world, we wondered if they should be in a house. Should it fall down? Fortunately, I don't think it played badly."

One big question mark about the episode was Spike's willingness to put the bite on a woman - with only a moment's hesitation - when he thinks his chip wasn't working. Hadn't he evolved beyond that? Audiences had seen Spike transform since the end of season five into a more heroic figure...

"I wonder if the perspective is different when you're watching the show to when you're working on it," muses Noxon. "Maybe our perspective is a little different and we need to sort of catch up with the way people are actually viewing it. In my mind, Spike is always self-centred in his goodness. It's always about his wants and needs. He's not a moral guy and he is good when it serves him to be good. But I don't know if we've put enough emphasis on that this year. He's been a little less ambiguous and a little bit more he's this hero. But he's not a hero.

"People have come to think of him as this softer, more righteous guy," she elaborates, "but at least in my mind he would have eaten that girl; he would have bit her. It wouldn't have been easy and he probably would have had guilt about it after all this time of relating to humans and not thinking of them as snacks. But at his core, he does not have a soul. We still think of him as a sociopath in the sense that he acts the way he thinks people want him to act in order to get what he wants. But, again, maybe we need to shore that up a little bit. Everything's about Buffy and he's made it clear he would hurt people if he could. But I get why people are starting to feel the way they are about him and I think that's why some people feel, 'Why shouldn't Buffy be with him?'

"But if you've lived in the Buffy universe for years, the dude is just bad. It's the chip that keeps him from being really bad. It's an interesting question and certainly one that we have talked about and are aware of. Just because I remember Spike from before so well, I'm kind of like, 'This is dangerous territory. This guy should not be trusted.' You can trust him on one level, but if I were Buffy I would trust him with anything related to me, but I wouldn't trust him in the big scheme of things."

As to the rest of the season... Noxon's not talking. Suffice to say, though, that the duo have certainly mapped out the final direction the season will ultimately take.

"In terms of the villain and the kind of character arc for the year, we felt that we couldn't do another sort of apocalypse threat. There is a 'big bad' and things are going to get a lot badder in terms of villainy, but at the same time I think it's a little more organic this season. It doesn't play the same way our villains have in the past. That's just because how many times can they go, 'It's the end of the world as we know it?' So we tried to do something a little different. We had to come up with a different way to create a threat, and I think so far this season our characters are generating as many of their own problems as we're seeing imposed upon them from the outside." SFX

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