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Note: I am aware of the recent allegations against Joss Whedon, creator, and showrunner of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I stand with those who have spoken out. I will briefly discuss the allegations later in this article.
The cult television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer follows Buffy Summers, an ordinary California teenager chosen to fight the forces of darkness, with some help from her friends, known as the “Scooby gang.” The sixth season of the show is by far the most divisive — understandably so. This season is darker and more grueling than previous ones, showing main characters the audience has grown to love hitting rock bottom, one after another, after another. After watching our heroes battle vampires, gods, and an extremely large snake, a significant segment of the fandom felt that Buffy season six’s main villains, a trio of inept men, were underwhelming or “lame.” They’re right, and that’s exactly the point.
Underwhelming Villains
Before examining season six of Buffy, it is important to take a look back at the events of season five. In this larger-than-life epic of a season, the Scooby gang battled a flamboyant hell-god named Glory. The emotional stakes of the show had rarely been higher, as Glory was determined to kill Buffy’s younger sister, Dawn. In its dramatic, almost operatic ending, Buffy sacrificed her own life to save Dawn’s.
After its opening episodes in which Buffy is resurrected by her friends, season six is far less spectacular. Buffy has money troubles. She is suffering from nearly crippling depression, which her friends don’t seem to realize. And rather than fighting a glorious god, she is being annoyed by three bumbling men she went to high school with.
The Trio: Buffy’s Arch-Nemeses-es-es…
The “Trio,” as they call themselves, is made up of Warren Mears, who once created a robot girlfriend and then abandoned her, Jonathan Levinson, a sometime friend, sometime adversary of the Scoobies, and Andrew Wells, whose previous “evil plot” didn’t even make it into the show. In other words, these are characters whom the Scoobies were able to defeat in prior seasons. And yet, this time around, Buffy can’t quite seem to shake them.
Their schemes are more irritating than anything else. They send a demon to mess up a construction job Buffy tries to get, they briefly mess with her perception of time, and they put her into a time loop, forcing her to repeat an interaction with a customer at the store she is working at over and over again. But in the eleventh episode, “Gone,” they accidentally shoot Buffy with an invisibility ray.
While Buffy first feels freed by her new power, she soon learns that the blast will eventually cause her to disintegrate unless it is reversed. Jonathan and Andrew are anxious to reverse the blast and save Buffy’s life, but Warren is ready to kill her, and only by wrestling the invisibility ray away from him does Buffy save herself. Despite Warren’s murderous behavior, the Trio are still treated as a silly nuisance by both the show and the Scoobies at this point.
“Dead Things” And The Turning Point
The thirteenth episode of the season, entitled “Dead Things,” is where the Trio’s arc takes a significant turn. Warren, Andrew, and Jonathan have created a magical object that will allow them to hypnotize women and use them for sex. The episode retains a lighthearted tone even while the Trio discusses making women their “willing sex slaves.” In doing so, Buffy makes the viewer feel almost complicit in the Trio’s actions, as though they are entertaining us. This humorous tone is maintained even while Warren hypnotizes his ex-girlfriend, Katrina, and puts her in a maid costume. The illusion of humor is broken when, before Warren has the chance to take advantage of her, Katrina wakes up from her hypnosis. Horrified, she gives the men’s action its proper name, shouting, “It’s not a game…it’s rape.” She tries to leave, and Warren kills her while attempting to stop her.
The shift in tone is immediate and tangible. It is as though a veil has been lifted on the Trio’s previous behavior, much of which included making jokes about spying on nude women and objectifying girls. While Warren, Andrew, and Jonathan were alone, accountable to no one but each other, such jokes went unnoticed and unchecked. But with Katrina’s violation and murder, the real-world consequences of such casual misogyny become evident.
For the rest of the series, the Trio remain a severe threat, and Warren’s misogyny, in particular, becomes increasingly overt. Near the end of the season, he shoots and injures Buffy because of his inability to handle the fact that a woman foiled one of his schemes, and while shooting at her, he kills one of her friends, also a woman. So what is it about these seemingly disappointing villains that lead to such devastating consequences for the main characters, and why is that so important for season six of Buffy?
What The Trio Show
The Trio’s villainy is of a nature hitherto unseen on Buffy. Most of the Scoobies’ enemies are monsters of some kind, committing evil because it is in their nature to do so. But Warren, Jonathan, and Andrew are humans with souls who choose to commit increasingly horrific crimes. In fact, Jonathan is a character many viewers have grown to like by the time we see him join the Trio. And yet we see him willing to commit rape and become complicit in murder, all through his own choices.
Banality of Evil
When so many villains are alluring vampires or glamourous gods, it is jarring to see evil portrayed so mundanely. Warren, Andrew, and Jonathan are not charming, nor funny, nor particularly talented at trying to be “bad.” They are simply ordinary people who make worse and worse choices and ultimately prove themselves to be as evil as any vampire Buffy slays. In this way, they are the most realistic villains on the show. In reality, most “villains” are neither gorgeous nor monstrous to look at. Most don’t wear fancy outfits or have foreboding lairs. They are regular people who have made choices.
Because of this, the Trio are the most realistic, and therefore the most frightening villains on Buffy. They are people any one of us could, and almost certainly do, encounter every day on the street, in the grocery store, or at the movies, rather than demons we only ever meet in our nightmares. And the most frightening thing about them is the very thing Buffy viewers tend to criticize most: their apparent “lameness.” Warren, Andrew, and Jonathan are supposed to be underwhelming, particularly compared to season five’s Glory. We, the viewers, are supposed to look at them and think, “Really? These losers are our antagonists for this season?” We are supposed to roll our eyes at their invisibility rays, their erroneous belief that they are powerful “supervillains,” and even at their jokes about spying on and hypnotizing women.
When Warren, behind Andrew and Jonathan’s backs and against their objections, quickly gives an angry demon Buffy’s home address and says, “You wanna kill her? Make it so,” it is done in such a way that we are supposed to laugh at his blasé manner and shake our heads at his incompetence. Because when things turn dark, it allows us to realize that by not taking their previous behavior seriously, we ignored the signs that these men were capable of true evil, just like Buffy did. By appearing to be powerless, ineffectual, and good for nothing more than cheap jokes, the Trio were able to stay off Buffy’s radar long enough to do great damage to her, her friends, and Katrina. Seen as a nuisance, they became something much greater, something their words made clear they wanted to become all along.
Most of the time, evil is not glamorous. Evil is not exciting. Evil is not a fashionista hell-god or a town mayor who wants to become a giant snake. Evil is often nothing more than an angry man with a gun and those who go along with him, and Buffy captures this brilliantly through the Trio.
Casual Misogyny And The Prescience of Season Six
Warren, Andrew, and Jonathan each display joking, overt misogyny that at the beginning is played for laughs when nobody is watching them. Hypnotizing Katrina for sex is the culmination of what they initially wanted to do to Buffy herself in the fourth episode of the season. In that episode, a statement about making a woman their “sex bunny” was only a one-off joke. In “Dead Things,” it becomes a horrifying reality, and the insidious poison of casual misogyny is made clear.
Buffy has always been a show about female power. The Trio, Warren, in particular, are actively threatened by that power, as evidenced by their choice to target Buffy, the embodiment of female power, relentlessly with pranks and attacks, despite her never having harmed them and having actually helped both Warren and Jonathan in the past. The humorous comments about hurting Buffy and other women mask a devastatingly serious hatred towards women and desire for power over them. For this reason, season six of Buffy is quite prescient. In today’s age, we are more aware of the huge problem that is rape culture, and we see the danger in men who believe they are entitled to “have” women. When season six aired in 2001-2002, this same awareness was not nearly as prevalent, though the problem certainly existed.
I will note here that, unfortunately, recent statements by members of the cast of Buffy and its spin-off, Angel, suggest that the problem existed on the set itself. Charisma Carpenter, who played Cordelia Chase on both shows, has spoken out for years about the alleged abuse she endured, especially while pregnant, from Joss Whedon, creator, and showrunner. Other women from Buffy have made statements alleging on-set abuse and toxicity in recent weeks. While I do believe in separating the art from the artist, and that Buffy stands on its own as a brilliant work of television created by many people, it seems relevant to note that Warren, Andrew, and Jonathan show that misogyny is misogyny, whether it goes no farther than jokes or whether it culminates in crime.
Casual misogyny is just that: a casual and open expression of disdain and disrespect for women. But such attitudes going unchecked can both mask and feed a much more sinister, much more violent hatred of women. This is certainly not to say that every man who makes an off-color joke is evil or a misogynist. But the patterns of behavior the Trio display make their true feelings quite clear, and they exemplify casual misogyny in a way that is stunningly apt for the early 2000s.
The Perfect Season Six Villains
For all the reasons discussed above, I must respectfully disagree with those who claim that the Trio is one of season six’s failings. Yes, they are more obnoxious than scary or interesting, at least at the beginning. Yes, they are inept, especially compared to previous villains. And yes, Buffy has easily handled them before and should be able to do so again. That’s why they, and the message they carry, are perfect for season six.
Distraction And Disillusionment
In season six, each of our main characters is spiraling out of control. Buffy herself is trying to recover from her experience of dying and being resurrected and enters a toxic and abusive relationship with a vampire. Willow, one of her friends, is battling a dangerous addiction to magic and violates her girlfriend’s mind in doing so. Giles, the father figure who generally provides a sense of stability, has left for England. Season six shows the grueling, mundane aspects of life, as when Buffy has to get a job slinging burgers to pay the bills or when a social worker threatens to take her sister away. The Trio, as mentioned earlier, portrays the realistic and mundane side of evil. Not only this, but they are able to go unchecked for so long and ultimately cause so much damage in large part because the Scoobies are so consumed with the problems in their own lives and thus don’t quite realize how severe of a threat the Trio pose until it is too late.
In the episode “Normal Again,” the Trio set a demon on Buffy whose poison makes her believe her whole life is a delusion and that she is really in a mental hospital. The doctor at the mental hospital she imagines tells her something that encapsulates what many people see as the problem with the Trio and what is actually their greatest narrative strength: “Buffy, you used to create these grand villains to battle against, and now what is it? Just ordinary students you went to high school with. No gods or monsters. Just three pathetic little men who like playing with toys.” This quote not only shows that the writers knew exactly what kind of reaction the Trio would garner but that they wanted that reaction.
Mundane Horror And Commonplace Evil
It wouldn’t have worked as well for season six to try to top season five in terms of grandeur. It had to show the fallout, to emphasize that sometimes, life isn’t spectacular. Most pertinently, it showed that when everybody is looking in another direction, “pathetic little men” who are “playing with toys” can become dangerous. While the Trio are the “Big Bads” with the lowest overall body count by far, they are the ones who do the most damage to Buffy and the Scoobies themselves. Warren, Andrew, and Jonathan are the ideal villains for a season focused on the messy realities of life with magical metaphors while still remaining a show about a female hero.
They are blandly evil, blithely misogynistic, and above all, not extraordinary. But very little of season six is extraordinary (the season’s end and the famed musical episode being the exceptions). Season six is about accepting the traumas and tragedies of everyday life and moving forward anyway. It is a story that wouldn’t hit quite as hard if the villains were vampires, or demons, or anything other than fellow humans causing those tragedies. The Trio’s arc is a realistic lesson in taking evil seriously, no matter what form it comes in or how laughable it may initially seem.