Buffy the Patriarchy Slayer

How to write social justice fiction that doesn’t suck.
By Michael Isenberg.

Girl Power. Lesbianism. Patriarchy.

There’s no doubt that Buffy the Vampire Slayer was one of the most forward thinking shows in television history from a feminist/Progressive/social justice point of view. So how is it that it was one of the best shows ever, instead of goddamn awful like practically every other feminist/Progressive/social justice-y piece of fiction out there?

Over the course of seven seasons Buffy took on such misogynistic villains as Warren, Caleb, and Mayor Wilkins. She faced off against men who didn’t take powerful women seriously, like the werewolf hunter Cain. And she faced off against men who took powerful women so seriously that they lied and schemed to keep them in line, like the Watchers' Council and Tara’s father and brother. Indeed, we learn in the last season that one such group, the Shadow Men, started the whole Slayer line—by chaining a girl and knocking her up with demon dust. The symbolism is palpable.

Of course, by that point in the series, Buffy had long since broken free of the controlling paternalism of the Watchers’ Council; the episode where she finally tells them where to go is one of my favorites. A couple episodes that are less enjoyable, but no less significant, take on the horrific issue of violence against women. BTVS is also one of the first network shows to have major characters who are lesbians (although not the first—Willow and Tara didn’t fall in love until three years after Ellen Degeneres came out of the closet on her own show).

Buffy certainly wasn’t perfect in the SJW department. There was a noticeable absence of minority characters, although this was addressed in Season 7 with the introduction of Principal Wood and the potential slayer Rona. Better late than never. The Thanksgiving episode “Pangs” attempted to be sensitive to the plight of Native Americans at the hands of European settlers. But Buffy ends up fighting a pitched battle against the avenging Chumash spirits anyway, and Spike makes a pretty convincing speech about how he just can’t take “all this mamby-pamby boo-hooing about the bloody Indians.” And the World Culture Dance in the episode “Inca Mummy Girl,” in which the students of Sunnydale High are costumed as their favorite culture—Eskimo, Geisha, Spaghetti Western, and so on—though considered a thoughtful exercise in diversity at the time, would be a cringe-worthy exercise in cultural appropriation by today's standards. Well, both episodes meant well.

Furthermore, since the series completed its run, there have been some unsettling accusations that creator Joss Whedon isn’t quite the feminist in real life that he’d like us to believe, especially with regard to his treatment of actress Charisma Carpenter when she got pregnant during her run on Angel. Still, you’d never know it from watching Buffy.

And yet, despite its social justice cred, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is so much better than Captain Marvel, Batwoman, the Disney Star Wars trilogy, Star Trek:Discovery, and all the other recent SJW dumpster fires out there. To paraphrase Max Bialystock, where did it go right?

To answer that, here then are,

6 Lessons from BTVS on how to write social justice fiction that doesn’t suck

6. No Mary Sues. There seems to be an idea in Hollywood recently that it is somehow sexist for a female protagonist to be anything less than perfect. And so, from Rey, to Captain Marvel, to Maeve on Westworld, we’ve been treated to an interminable parade of Mary Sues. The term comes from Lieutenant Mary Sue, the heroine of a 1973 Star Trek parody, "A Trekkie's Tale". TV Tropes explains the concept as follows:

The prototypical Mary Sue is an original female character in a fanfic who obviously serves as an idealized version of the author mainly for the purpose of Wish Fulfillment. She's exotically beautiful, often having an unusual hair or eye color, and has a similarly cool and exotic name. She's exceptionally talented in an implausibly wide variety of areas, and may possess skills that are rare or nonexistent in the canon setting. She also lacks any realistic, or at least story-relevant, character flaws — either that or her "flaws" are obviously meant to be endearing.

The irony of all this is that many real-life women complain about the excessively high expectations that society has of them—they need to be the perfect career woman, the perfect wife, the perfect mother, always keeping their homes looking perfectly beautiful and themselves perfectly coiffed. The Mary Sue is the exact opposite of the role model they want.

Then there’s Buffy. Yes, exceptional talent comes with the Slayer package. But it doesn’t come for free—she has to train constantly to “hone her skills,” as Giles likes to say. Even when she doesn’t want to—a common occurrence in the early episodes. She’s not always a great student. On rare occasions, she even loses a fight. Win or lose, fighting takes its toll on the coif.

More significantly, Buffy never wanted this Destiny that's been thrust upon her. Many of the early episodes involve the conflict within her, and between her and Giles, as she tries to evade her responsibility to destroy unspeakable evil, in favor of her natural bent for "girly things," often lying to Giles or her mom in the process. Inevitably, the responsibilities always catch up with her.

On top of that, Buffy makes mistakes. Like the time in the Doublemeat Palace, when she becomes convinced (incorrectly) that the burgers were made out of people, and she runs amok through the restaurant, knocking hamburgers out of the hands of stunned diners.

As Buffy gains experience, and her challenges became bigger, so do her mistakes. In one of the last episodes of the series, she leads her army of potential Slayers into a battle they weren't ready for. Several of them get killed and Xander loses an eye.

Not only is Buffy not a Mary Sue, but the series even makes fun of the concept. Or to be precise, it makes fun of the male equivalent, variously called a Gary Sue or a Mary Stu. In the episode “Superstar,” the nerdy, hapless Jonathan cast a spell to make himself the best at everything. It was an entertaining takedown of the trope.

Regardless whether your character is a Mary Sue or a Mary Stu, the problem is the same—the Superman problem. The Man of Steel is so powerful that he can overcome nearly any obstacle without struggling. And that’s bad fiction; it’s boring to watch. Far better to give your character some flaws which not only raise the stakes in the conflict, but give your viewers an emotional investment in watching her overcome them.

5. Create characters who are characters, not political statements. Today’s books, movies, and TV are filled with same-sex couples. But I can’t think of any who are as endearing as Willow and Tara in BTVS. There are two reasons for this. One is the wonderful chemistry between the two actresses, Alyson Hannigan and Amber Benson. The other is that they were brought together by the internal logic of the characters, and not some social justice imperative.

The writers started laying the groundwork almost a year before Tara even appeared:

In addition to this longstanding latent homosexuality, Willow knew she needed help to take her magic abilities to the next level, so she sought out other witches. Which is how she met Tara, whose family had conditioned her to think of herself as a freak. That left her shy, withdrawn, a bit frumpy. As she sang in the Season 6 musical episode,

I saw a world enchanted,
Spirits and charms in the air.
I always took for granted
I was the only one there.

So it was normal that when she found there was someone else there, she’d be drawn to her.

Suddenly I knew
Everything I dreamed was true.

It felt completely natural, not something that was forced on the viewers merely to be progressive.

After Tara died, Willow was asked how long she had been drawn to women. Her reply captures exactly what made that love story work so well. “It wasn’t women. It was woman. Just one…My mom was all proud, like I was making some political statement. And then the statement mojo wore off, and I was just gay.”

4. Don’t build up your female characters by tearing down your male characters. Buffy and Willow may have “put the grr in grrl,” but not at the expense of the men in their lives. Giles, Angel, Spike, and, in his own goofy way, Xander, are strong characters in their own right, and even when they are in conflict with Buffy, there is no question that they all care about and love each other.

The relationship between Buffy and Giles stands out in this regard. His role as mentor is a traditionally patriarchal one, a father figure for Buffy, a substitute for her actual father, who grows increasingly distant as the series progresses. And yet, contrary to the usual left-wing narrative about patriarchy, as Buffy's skills and independence grow, Giles doesn’t try to hold her back in order to maintain his control of her. Just the opposite. “It’s becoming quite obvious that Buffy doesn’t need me anymore,” he says in Season 5. “I don’t say that in a self-pitying way; I’m quite proud actually.” By Season 6 he worries that he’s become a crutch to her, and is holding her back; he returns to England in order to allow her to reach her full potential.

What a contrast to more recent movies and TV shows—Captain Marvel and Maleficent for example—where every male character is either a villain, a buffoon, or a servant to the superior female heroine.

3. Don’t preach. At least not overtly.

A lot of the social justice themes I talked about above weren’t apparent to me the first time I watched the series. Or the second or the third. I only became aware of them later on, thanks in part to The Passion of the Nerd’s excellent series of Buffy episode guides, which points them out explicitly. Nevertheless, I was absorbing them on a subconscious level. And there’s a lesson in that. If you got a message you want to get across, get your viewers so invested in your story and your characters that they don’t even notice they’re being preached to.

Besides, overt preaching violates the first rule of storytelling that we all learned in English class: Show, don’t tell.

2. Humor. No one likes the stereotype of the humorless liberal. Captain Marvel and Rey in particular have about as many laughs in them as a case of syphilis. Which is ironic because one episode of BTVS actually got laughs out of a case of syphilis. In Joss’s immortal words, “Make it dark, make it grim, make it tough, but then, for the love of God, tell a joke.”

1. A good social justice story must be, first and foremost, a good story. It might seem strange to cite Rush Limbaugh in post about social justice fiction, but bear with me. From time to time, Rush has been asked how come there’s no liberal Rush Limbaugh. His answer is that it's because everyone who tried went about it the wrong way. They were more interested in pushing a message than in crafting good radio. Which is backwards.

What’s true for radio is also true for television.

Lord knows there have been few TV shows as well-crafted as Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Great characters, clever dialog (the writers are incredibly proud of that), well-choreographed violence, and in the end, good vanquishes evil. Besides, as editor-in-chief of Nerds who Read, I gotta love any show where the heroes, when they face a problem, go to the library and look stuff up in books.

And that's one final lesson that our left-of-center friends can learn from Buffy if they want their fiction not to suck. The library—not to mention Hollywood—is full of great stories and memorable characters. Rather than decolonizing our bookshelves, as a recent article on NPR called for, draw on the best that every culture, race, and religion has to offer. Including a certain blonde high school girl who "alone will stand against the vampires the demons and the forces of darkness. She is the Slayer."

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Please follow Mike on Facebook and Twitter. Subscribe to Nerds who Read.

When you *don't* play the game of thrones...

...you win and you fly.
The GoT Finale—One Year Later.

By Michael Isenberg.

This week marks one year since the controversial series finale of Game of Thrones. It’s a good time to look back and ask whether the final episode, or for that matter, the final two seasons, were really as bad as everyone said.

The short answer: yes. The widespread criticisms were richly deserved—with one big exception.

For eight years, well, six, anyway, we were hooked. Not since the original Star Wars trilogy were we so immersed and united in a shared pop culture experience. We were thrilled by the triumphs of our favorite characters—and we all had our favorites. We shared their frustration in defeat. We laughed at their jokes. We mourned at their deaths—and there were too many of those; it’s been said that author George R. R. Martin was the greatest serial killer in history. We couldn’t believe it when Ned Stark wasn’t rescued from the executioner at the last minute. We admired Olenna Tyrell for facing death with resignation and defiance, the Queen of Thorns’ acid tongue not failing her, even as the poison went to work in her veins. She made a good end.

We delighted in the wonderful one-liners and catch phrases. Some were merely good writing. “I have a tender spot in my heart for cripples, bastards, and broken things.” Some were insightful. “Everything before the word 'but' is horses—t.” “When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die.” Many became part of our daily speech. “You know nothing, Jon Snow.” “Winter is coming.” “Hodor.”

In between seasons, we theorized endlessly. Whatever happened to Rickon Stark? What about Gendry? How will Jon Snow be brought back from the dead, and will it have something to do with the Red Lady showing up at Castle Black? Who are Jon’s real parents? Will he and Dany end up together? And most important of all: who will sit on the Iron Throne in the end?

We nagged our friends who weren’t into it to give it a try for just one episode. And then, when they finally relented, we fretted during the slow and confusing opening scene—surely we were going to lose them. We needn’t have worried. The moment they saw Bran Stark shoved from the tower window, they were as stunned and horrified as we were the first time…and hooked for the duration.

And so it went for six seasons.

Then came Season 7. The source material of the published novels had been exhausted. As George R. R. Martin struggled to finish the next installment (he’s still struggling), the writers of the series ran on ahead. It was an okay season. We had the warm glow of the reunion of the surviving Stark children—not really children anymore after so many long years of separation, adventure, and character arc. And there was the “oh, s—t” moment when the White Walkers started dragging chains into the lake where a dead dragon lay at the bottom, and it became clear what they were going to do.

But something was off. Characters acted out of character. The honorable Brienne of Tarth, for whom the code of chivalry—the code of battle, honor, and loyalty—was everything, turned her back on that for a throwaway joke, “Oh, f—k loyalty.” The brilliant Tyrion “I drink and I know things” Lannister, advisor to kings and queens, was suddenly not so brilliant as his advice repeatedly proved disastrous. And the writers seemed to have lost sight of the geography of the Land of Westeros. Where once a character might spend an entire season traveling from one part of the country to another, now entire armies crossed the land as easily as if they were just popping over to the neighboring castle for a quick siege and some looting.

The downward spiral accelerated in Season 8. Armies practically teleported, and miraculously repopulated their ranks after being decimated in battle. The trickle of out of character incidents became a flood. Arya goes off to discover America for absolutely no reason. The cunning spymaster Varys, so often compared to a spider lying in wait, attempts a coup against Daenerys that is so clumsy, it's hard to believe this is the same guy who knew absolutely everything going on in Westeros and beyond, and patiently waited decades for revenge on the man who castrated him. Jaime Lannister, who tried to murder a child in the series premiere to cover up his incestuous and toxic love for his sister Cersei, was inspired by the noble Brienne to embark on an eight-year journey of redemption. He was taken prisoner, lost a hand, and mourned the deaths of every one of his children. And just when he finally reached the pinnacle of love and honor, he was like, “Sorry. Changed my mind. I’m going back to Cersei.” A painstakingly well-developed character arc wiped out in an instant.

And speaking of character arcs, there’s the dragon in the room: Daenerys Targaryan. She came a long way from the mousy teenage girl who submitted to an arranged marriage in order to further the ambitions of her brother, a brother who routinely quashed any attempt she made to assert herself by threatening to unleash his temper. “You don't want to wake the dragon, do you?”

From those inauspicious beginnings, she pulled herself up by her bootstraps, overcame every obstacle, and transformed herself into a ruler and a liberator. Her whole story is captured in her string of titles: “Daenerys of the House Targaryen, the First of Her Name, The Unburnt, Queen of the Andals, the Rhoynar, and the First Men, Queen of Meereen, Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, Protector of the Realm, Lady Regent of the Seven Kingdoms, Breaker of Chains, and Mother of Dragons.” She was so beloved, and her story so captured our imaginations, that hundreds of parents in the United States named their daughters Daenerys and Khaleesi.

A choice which they regretted when, with one episode to go, Daenerys turned irredeemably evil. Using the firepower of her dragon, she set King’s Landing aflame—after the city had already surrendered to her. Thousands died a horrific and painful death. Burning is a bad way to go. For Daenerys, there was no coming back.

Viewers hated it.

And this is where I part company with most viewers. I thought it was a brilliant arc for the character, one that was well-developed over the course of the series. We knew from the beginning that insanity ran in Daenerys’s family. Her father, the “Mad King,” was assassinated when he was on the verge of incinerating King’s Landing himself. There were signs of Dani’s ruthlessness as early as Season 3, when she bought the slave army, the Unsullied, from the “Good Master” Kraznyz. The price she agreed to in exchange was Drogon, one of her dragons. The transaction complete and the Unsullied under her command, she reneged on the bargain and ordered Drogon to burn Kraznys alive. Kraznys was an evil man, a slave trader after all, and couldn’t control Drogon anyway, which is perhaps why we didn’t notice the evil that was growing inside Dani. But evil it was and by Season 7 it couldn’t be ignored. “Bend the knee” became her new catchphrase as she demanded submission from everyone she encountered. Season 8 brought her slow burn over Jon’s growing popularity; she couldn't stand it that he was better liked than she was. Unlike Jaime Lannister, Daenerys didn’t subvert her character arc in the final episodes. She fulfilled it.

Not only is it a well-crafted storyline, it’s profoundly philosophical. As Lord Acton warned us, “Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Dani was a sweet girl at first, and when she first tasted power, she used it for good—she postponed her own ambition of taking the Iron Throne in order to liberate slaves across the Narrow Sea. But as her armies swelled, and her enemies fell before the might of her dragons, the power went to her head. As it inevitably will when even those with the best of motives—which she had—are able to act with impunity. It’s a valuable lesson. To those of you who say that it's only a TV show, that the burning of King's Landing was a fictional atrocity, I remind you that recent history is littered with real ones: the Armenian Genocide, the Nazi Holocaust, the Gulags of Soviet Russia and Red China, the ISIS Caliphate, to name but a few. A hundred million people and then some were murdered by dictatorships of one form or another. Not in some distant, less enlightened past, but as recently as the lifetimes of our grandparents, if not our own. If we learn anything from Game of Thrones, it should be to keep a close eye on our public servants and stand up against any effort on their parts to accumulate power. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

In the end, with Daenerys dead and the Iron Throne melted, the nobles of Westeros were wise to make Bran Stark their new king. Not for the reason that Tyrion gave, “There’s nothing in the world more powerful than a good story…Who has a better story than Bran the Broken?” That was pathetic. It reminded me of the bookmobile guy from South Park. “Hello kids! I see you’re discovering the maaaaaagic of reeeeeeading.” Rather, Bran is the best choice because he has no interest in power. There’s something to be said for a king who tells his Small Council to “carry on” and leaves to incarnate the three-eye raven.

When you don't play the game of thrones, you win and you fly.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Please follow Mike on Facebook and Twitter. Subscribe to Nerds who Read. Photo credit(s): nme.com

This is our homeland. Isn’t it?

The Plot against America, Episode 1.
TV Review by Kerey McKenna.

The new HBO mini-series, The Plot Against America, has a refreshingly simple, though evocative, opening credits sequence that does a great job of setting what I hope will be the tone and methodology of the series as a work of alternate history:

The images are all, to my knowledge, real black and white footage from the ‘20s through the ‘40s. In quick succession we see aviator Charles Lindbergh’s fateful transatlantic flight, the jubilation of the roaring ‘20s, the dire poverty of the Great Depression, and the hope of the New Deal. After a bit of googling I found the jaunty song, “The Road is Open Again,” is an actual song of the period, written as boosterism for the National Recovery Act. However the images of an ascendent America become interspersed with the post-war rise of another nation...Nazi Germany: Hitler’s rise to power, persecution of the Jews, and the Blitzkrieg across Europe. Throw in snippets from American Nazi rallies and a last scene of goose-stepping troops and it instills a great deal of unease. Is the road now open for America, or for her enemies, foreign and domestic?

Contrast this with the opening credits for another recent series about fascism in America, The Man in the High Castle:

It contains so many clichés and tropes of the “What if the Nazis won?” school of alternate history. Starting with the “Map at the Beginning of the Book” convention of sci-fi/fantasy literature (not as on the nose as Game of Thrones, but it does establish the geography of this universe), and the somewhat off version of "Edelweiss," it is clear we are going to be dropped into a world where the Nazis have already defeated and occupied the US. Oh, and there's a zeppelin in the sky. Because zeppelins are to alternate history what dragons are to fantasy; in alternate history, expect to see at least one zeppelin in the sky.

I mention this up front because I think it is important to understand The Plot Against America is going for a very different kind of alternate history. This is not an alternate history where the characters are already living in a world that has become a drastic inverse of our own (In the Presence of Mine Enemies and Fatherland, to name a couple examples in addition to MITHC). Instead this is the story of characters living in a world that is very close to our own past and following the lives of the characters as their world changes around them. Furthermore, the point of divergence from history is seemingly played relatively straight at first. There are no Nazi wonder weapons or interference from time travelers and dimension hoppers. The historical figures are acting, so far, in character. The small change is simply that the American isolationist movement finds a champion in famed aviator Charles Lindbergh to challenge Franklin Roosevelt’s 1940 bid for a third term, instead of the actual dark horse candidate, the interventionist Wendell Willkie. That even today Lindbergh is a household name while Willkie is an extra hard trivia answer speaks volumes about the strength of Lindbergh's celebrity and name recognition.

In keeping with the spirit of the novel, this is the story of the Jewish American family as they experience the run up to, and then life in an isolationist America under a Charles Lindbergh presidency. Unlike the novel, where the family is named Roth after author Philip Roth’s own family, here the family name has been changed to Levin. We meet them living in their little slice of post-Depression, pre-war America, the idyllic suburb of Newark NJ. The opening tableau plays out similar to stories my mother tells me about growing up on Staten Island, save that this is a Jewish neighborhood so the weekend begins with a Sabbath dinner. Before sundown a man comes to the door asking for donations to support the Jewish homeland, which family patriarch Herman Levin (Morgan Spector) happily agrees to. The youngest Levin boy, Philip (Azhy Robertson), asks isn’t America their homeland, to which the father replies that of course America is their homeland, it’s just that the Jews of Europe need to escape to Palestine. But by the end of the episode he and the audience will be wondering just how safe the Levins and the Jews of America really are.

Expanding from the scope of the novel, which was told just from the perspective of the author’s younger self, the series follows all the Levin family: father Herman, mother Bess (Zoe Kazan), aunt Evelyn (Winona Ryder), older brother Sandy (Caleb Malis), and cousin Alvin (Anthony Boyle) as point of view characters. While the Levins are on an upward trajectory, being Jewish they can’t help but keep a close eye the Nazi Blitzkrieg across Europe, the plight of the Jews left on the continent, and the ever-present background radiation of anti-Semitism at home.

Most of the through-line of the first episode concerns the Levins potentially moving out of their Jewish suburb to nearby Union, should Herman get a promotion at his insurance agency. I was impressed by the way the plot illustrates the different life experiences of Herman and Bess, how their ideals and fears overlap and differ. At first it is Bess who is hesitant about the move based on her experience growing up in the only Jewish family in a gentile neighborhood. As she puts it, it was not that her peers actively harassed her, it was that they actively ignored her. This also explains her insistence on trying to get her son Philip to be friends with the dweeby Seldon, as she probably relates to being the child that was always left out at the school yard. Meanwhile Herman, natural salesman that he is, is more confident that the family can strike out on their own and overcome a bit of social awkwardness among the gentiles. However he is very aware of overt anti-Semitism, anxiously watching the news reels from overseas, following the rise of Lindbergh, and he ultimately shuts down the planned move when he sees that the neighborhood bar is a kitschy German beer hall with members of the German American Bund openly carousing and doing everything short of staging their own un-ironic production of Springtime for Hitler.

There are tertiary plot lines involving the cousin and the aunt. Alvin (who I do not recall from the book) is a bright young man who is unfortunately taking some bad turns in life under the influence of his wanna-be gangster friend “Shush.” The aunt’s story line seems rather innocuous at first as her heart is broken by a lover when it becomes apparent he intends to keep her as a mistress instead of taking her as a wife. By episode's end her prospects are looking a tad better when she is introduced to the influential Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf (John Turturro). As I said, a rather innocuous subplot but considering the actors that they’ve cast, not to mention what’s in the trailers, their relationship is going to play a big part in events as the series unfolds.

Now to address the elephant in the room.

As Nerds who Read Senior Editor Michael Isenberg pointed out in his review of the original novel, this story about a Republican celebrity with no prior political experience winning the presidency using dog whistles to bigots and allegedly to aid the ambitions of a foreign despot, was published in 2004, and any resemblance to the Trump Administration is clearly coincidental. As for the intentions of the creators of the HBO series, I can only report on what made it to the screen. In the first episode, from what we see and hear from Charles Lindbergh he is a lucid, charming, and well-dressed man. So therefore I can honestly say he does not read as a caricature of President Trump at all 😉.

Seriously, though, there are no attempts to drop in anachronistic slogans or gestures to make him appear more “Trumpy.” His speech on the radio about the FDR Democrats, the English, and the Jews trying to pull America into another world war is based on an actual speech Lindbergh gave at an America First event in September of 1941, and follows his accent and rhetorical style closely. (Here’s an excerpt from the real thing.)

Where any parallels to modern politics/culture really lie are in the regular people of the story. Of course there are no smart phones or Facebook, but as presented here, mass media still plays a crucial role in the characters’ lives. They don’t have newsfeeds on their phones but they have newsies belting out the headlines and selling papers on the streets. They have newsreels before every movie (and the subjects of the newsreels even rate space on the theater marquee). And off course the media that ruled the day, radio, is in the Levin's home and car. After listening to their favorite news pundit, people rush to the “comments section,” i.e., the sidewalk, to talk and debate with their neighbors about the events of the day. Even with people speaking face-to-face, there is still the echo chamber, so familiar to us in 2020; after all, everybody on the Levins’ street is Jewish and from the tri-state area.

After a scathing editorial from Walter Winchell berating Lindbergh for his isolationism, defeatism, and possible Nazi sympathies (again using turns of phrase used by the actual Winchell against the actual Lindbergh), Herman’s spirits are briefly bolstered and he is sure Lindbergh’s campaign can’t sustain such ridicule. Sadly, he is about to learn that a dressing down from East Coast media personalities doesn’t necessarily “play in Peoria.” It may not even play under his own roof as his eldest son and budding artist Sandy is compelled to sketch his portraits of “The Lone Eagle” Lindbergh, based on newspaper clippings, in secret. If the Lindbergh cult of personality has worked its way into the Levin household, what is going on in the rest of the country?

I front loaded this review with a comparison to The Man in the High Castle and a mention of some alternate historical fiction tropes because I really feel it is important to stress how much this book, and so far theis series, have steered away from the science fiction and military fiction that have come to characterize the genre. What sprung to mind while watching the series were not Dieselpunk nightmares of Nazis with Jet Packs or extrapolation for armchair military historians about what would have happened if Rommel hadn’t been forced to choose early retirement by way of a Luger.

Instead, what came to mind were other stories of the Jewish American experience and anti-Semitism on the homefront, like The Chosen and Focus. So all and all, The Plot against America seems to be a work not so much exploring a drastically different historical outcome but, instead ruminating on just how close we came to taking that darker path.

Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival in Waltham MA, currently scheduled for May 9, 2020. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.

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Photo source(s): Google, EW

Flippant Entertainment

Is Hunters’ irreverent portrayal of the Holocaust kosher?
by Michael Isenberg.

Last week, Nerds who Read posted Kerey McKenna's review of Hunters, the new Amazon Prime series about Holocaust survivors seeking vengeance against Nazis who escaped to the United States. In it, he raised some questions about whether some aspects of the series were appropriate for a subject as tragic and grim as the Holocaust. “Not just set in 1970s America as a period piece,” he wrote, “Hunters also takes over-the-top steps to callback to 1970s action movies like fantasy sequences resembling 1970s era game shows, PSAs, and Grindhouse movie trailers…the jarring gear shifts between a reflection on historical atrocities to cartoon shoot-em-up against cartoon villainy was a bit hard to reconcile.” He concluded by wondering if “all that ham and cheese is ‘Kosher’ for such subjects.”

Indeed, Kerey was not the only one put off by the comic book vibe of the series, not to mention some historical inaccuracies. TV Critic Daniel Fienberg, writing in The Hollywood Reporter, called it “Jewsploitation,” in analogy to the Blaxploitation films of the 1970s; they were hyper-stereotyped and hyper-violent, and yet groundbreaking in portraying blacks as action heroes, instead of servants or comic relief, as had been the norm in prior decades.

The BBC reported that “Karen Pollock, chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust, told the BBC such portrayals risked fuelling Holocaust denial, and lent a tone of ‘flippant entertainment’ to the programme. ‘We have a real responsibility to protect the truth of the Holocaust,’ said Mrs Pollock, ‘particularly as we're moving away from living history, the survivors are few and frailer.’”

The inclusion of a human chess game at Auschwitz—in which the “pieces” get murdered upon being captured—was a particular point of criticism. There is no record of any such atrocity in the annals of the Holocaust. The Auschwitz Memorial, which according to its Twitter profile, “preserves the site of the former German Nazi Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp,” tweeted, “Auschwitz was full of horrible pain & suffering documented in the accounts of survivors. Inventing a fake game of human chess for @huntersonprime is not only dangerous foolishness & caricature. It also welcomes future deniers. We honor the victims by preserving factual accuracy.”

In my humble opinion, there is nothing wrong per se with a comic book-style series about the Holocaust, or including fictional incidents, or even injecting humor into a tragic subject. Any problems with Hunters is not because of what they set out to do. Whether they did it well is another matter.

Certainly comic book heroes confronting Nazism in general and the Holocaust in particular has a long and honorable history. From the March 1941 debut of Captain America, with its now-viral cover art of Cap punching Hitler in the face, to the more tortured portrayal of Holocaust survivor Magneto in the X-Men comics and movies, Nazism has been grist for the superhero mill almost as long as there have been Nazis.

Many reviewers have noted that Hunters was very obviously trying to capture the magic of another comic book-style movie about "killing Nah-tsees": Quentin Tarantino’s simultaneously gruesome and tongue-in-cheek Inglourious Basterds. In this, Hunters bit off more than it could chew. But then, it would be difficult for anyone who isn’t Tarantino to reproduce the dramatic intensity of Basterds’ opening scene, in which a Nazi "Jew Catcher" chats calmly with a farmer over a glass of milk while the Jews he’s looking for are hiding under the floorboards. Or the manic insanity of Shosanna’s fiery revenge against Hitler and his despicable crew in the climax.

Of course, Basterds departed from the history books in a major way, and indeed authors of historical fiction (a category which includes me!) have no obligation to confine themselves to actual events. It is not their job merely to chronicle real life. Historians do that quite well, thank you very much. The job of historical fiction is to entertain, to make the reader empathize with the characters, to explore the human psyche, and to show what life could be, not merely what it is. History can be a starting point. It need not be the ending point. The key word in the phrase “creative writing” is, after all, creative. Or as series creator David Weil put it, Hunters “is not documentary. And it was never purported to be…this show takes the point of view that symbolic representations provide individuals access to an emotional and symbolic reality that allows us to better understand the experiences of the Shoah and provide it with meaning that can address our urgent present.”

Weil had another reason for relying on fictionalized atrocities. As the grandson of a Holocaust survivor himself, he thought it would be disrespectful, in a piece of Holocaust fiction, to appropriate the stories of its real victims. This was the same reason “that all of the concentration camp prisoners (and survivors) in the series would be given tattoos above the number 202,499. 202,499 is the highest recorded number given to a prisoner at Auschwitz. I didn’t want one of our characters to have the number of a real victim or a real survivor.” One may disagree with Weil’s reasoning in this. One certainly can’t deny that his heart is in the right place.

Certainly there may be, as Auschwitz Memorial warns, some Holocaust deniers who idiotically think that the existence of a fictional incident in a fictional TV show somehow proves a cover-up. But there will no doubt be many more people who will be inspired by the series to learn more about the true history of the Holocaust. I know in my own case, vast swaths of the history I know was the result of seeing or reading some piece of historical fiction, 1976’s I, Claudius, for example, and then doing some research to find out which parts were true. Indeed, in the case of Hunters, it seems to be working. For instance, Google Trends showed a 17-fold increase in interest in “human chess” after the series was released.*

But it is perhaps the inclusion of humor in the series that is the most controversial aspect of Hunters in this age of political correctness and perpetually offended snowflakes. As with comic book treatments, people have been making fun of Nazis since the beginning: P.G. Wodehouse created the knee-obsessed would-be Fuehrer of Britain Roderick Spode in 1938. Charlie Chaplin mimicked Hitler in The Great Dictator (1940). The Donald Duck cartoon Der Fuehrer’s Face (1943) and the Spike Jones cover of its title song were two of the greatest pieces of war propaganda ever made.

After the war, there was Mel Brooks’s The Producers (1967) with its comically inept pro-Nazi musical, “Springtime for Hitler.”

TV’s Hogan’s Heroes (1965-1971) was particularly controversial in its day because of the inappropriate setting for a comedy: a prisoner-of-war camp. So it’s interesting that all four of the main German characters were played by Jewish actors—three of whom—Werner Klemperer (Col. Klink), John Banner (Sgt. Schultz), and Leon Askin (Gen. Burkhalter) had been born in Germany or Austria and had been fortunate to escape in time (The fourth, Howard Caine [Maj. Hochstetter], was an American Jew). Another Jewish cast member, Robert Clary, who played the French P.O.W. Le Beau, had actually been imprisoned at Buchenwald.

Klemperer once told The Houston Chronicle, “I had one qualification when I took the job. If they ever wrote a segment whereby Colonel Klink would come out the hero, I would leave the show.” Clearly, this was personal for him, as I’m sure it was for all the Jewish actors. I believe that was the reason the show was so wickedly funny. And if actual victims of the Nazis don’t have an issue with the humor, it seems foolish for the rest of us to object.

These examples all made fun of Nazism in general, but stopped short of jokes about the Holocaust. In recent years, even that taboo has been shattered. The 2004 South Park episode “The Passion of the Jew” is a particular favorite of a Millennial I know.

Laughter in the face of tragedy does serve a purpose. It helps us fragile humans deal. It's been said that the most oppressed peoples have the best senses of humor. This is believed to be especially true of Jews, who have faced more than their share of tragedy during their thousands of years of history. A 1978 Time Magazine article explored the question, noting that “Although Jews constitute only 3% of the U.S. population, 80% of the nation's professional comedians are Jewish.” “Why such domination of American humor?” it asked. “New York City Psychologist Samuel Janus, who once did a yearlong stint as a stand-up comic, thinks that he has the answer: Jewish humor is born of depression and alienation from the general culture. For Jewish comedians, he told the recent annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, ‘comedy is a defense mechanism to ward off the aggression and hostility of others.’”

Humor also allows us to explore difficult subjects which might otherwise make us too uncomfortable to confront. And when directed at our enemies, it makes them seem weaker and easier to defeat.

In short, laughing at Nazis is healthy.

Nevertheless, I had issues with the humorous elements of Hunters, which mostly took the form of Family Guy-style cutaways. They just were not well done. It’s difficult to put my finger on exactly where they went wrong, how they differed from Spike Jones, Hogan’s Heroes, and the rest. Part of the problem was most of the show was fairly serious, so when it hit one of the comedic sequences it was, in Kerey’s word, “jarring.” In any case, whatever the reason, they weren’t funny. In particular, a fake game show in Episode 8, “Why Does Everyone Hate the Jews?,” had me sitting in icy and uncomfortable silence as contestants yelled out negative Jewish stereotypes as if they were on Family Feud. As my father used to say, “Laugh? I never thought I’d start.”

Still, even though the series failed to rise to Tarantino-level heights, and the humor fell flat, I recommend it. Flippant entertainment has its place, and it is thoroughly satisfying to see the Jewish characters deal rough justice to the Nazis who once tormented them.

Furthermore, we live in a time of historically high levels of anti-Semitism. When white supremacists march through the streets of Charlottesville chanting “Hebes will not divide us.”** When too many Americans—especially the young—are woefully ignorant of the Holocaust. According to a Pew survey, 43% of American teens could not correctly identify the 20 year period in which it happened, 62% did not know the approximate number of Jews who died, and 67% did not know that Hitler became chancellor of Germany via a democratic process. Any TV series that raises Holocaust awareness, and sends its viewers to Google to find out more about the tragedy, is performing a valuable public service—especially if it’s the sort of irreverent series that might resonate with a generation brought up on South Park and Family Guy.

My cousin Louis lived through the Nazi occupation of Belgium. When the Germans invaded, they ordered all the Jews in his town to register with the authorities. Louis’s father was a tailor and one of his clients, who was the mayor of the town, told him to just not register. And so, when the Nazis rounded up the Jews to ship them off to the concentration camps, they missed Louis and his family (Other family members have told me that Louis’s father was going to register but never got around to it, so procrastination literally saved their lives). Louis’s brother Jacques went to Paris at one point where he got picked up by the Gestapo. “We never saw him again,” Louis told me. But Louis survived the war.

Sadly, Louis is no longer with us. He died last summer at the age of 91, after a long and happy post-war life. When I found out his daughter had watched Hunters, I asked her what her father would have thought of it. “Every Holocaust movie or series would upset my father,” she told me. “But he couldn’t turn away...he had to watch it. I think he would watch this and cheer for every murder of a Nazi.”

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Please follow Mike on Facebook and Twitter. Subscribe to Nerds who Read. Photo credit(s): Marvel Comics, Google, Historia Obscurum

*--I also checked Google trends for searches on "holocaust," and it is at an elevated level, but it was not clear whether that was the result of Hunters, or a residual effect from the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz a couple weeks before.

**--Contrary to popular opinion, I do not believe that the Charlottesville assholes chanted, “Jews will not replace us.” I listened to the video a number of times, and it sounded to me like “You will not replace us.” But, as I indicated above, they clearly chanted “Hebes will not divide us.”

The Best Revenge…

Hunters on Amazon Prime.
TV Review by Kerey McKenna.

Amazon’s new original streaming series, Hunters, is a historical fiction pulp tale about a shadow war between Jews and Nazis in 1970s America. Odd that Amazon is going back to the Nazis in America angle so soon after putting their previous series The Man in the High Castle to bed, but hey, at least in this series we didn’t have to wait four seasons for those goose stepping goons to get their comeuppance.

I turned on the first episode on a whim and wound up binging the entire 10 episode season on its premiere weekend. During the binge I was captivated by the series and kept on hitting the next episode button. However once I reached the end I wondered if what I had just had was enjoyable but perhaps not good for me or even made for me. Like when I used to party crash at Hillel parties in college just to binge on latkes.

Not just set in 1970s America as a period piece, Hunters also takes over-the-top steps to callback to 1970s action movies like fantasy sequences resembling 1970s era game shows, PSAs, and Grindhouse movie trailers. In fact the whole project probably owes as much to the pulpy B-movies and sensational pulp fare like Madmen of Mandoras and The Damned as it does to more “serious” Nazi hunting classics like The Boys from Brazil and The Odessa File.

The audience point of view character, Jonah Heidelbaum (Logan Lerman), is a mild-mannered comic book nerd just trying to survive “The Summer of Sam,” hang out with his nerdy friends, and scrape together enough money for college and to help his only living relative, his Holocaust survivor grandmother Ruth (Jeannie Berlin), who raised him. Unfortunately his world is torn apart when his grandmother is murdered one night by a mysterious stranger at their door. Jonah would be the first to point out that he is just a few details removed from being Peter Parker. At the shiva, he is approached by wealthy pillar of the New York Jewish community, Meyer Offerman (Al Pacino). Offerman reveals to Jonah that Ruth, who like him was a survivor of a Nazi death camp, was killed by a Nazi war criminal they both knew from the camps. Not only that but for the past year Offerman and Ruth had been working on their own, independent of the US authorities, Mossad, or even The Simon Wiesenthal Center to track down escaped Nazi war criminals and dispense justice. Simon Wiesenthal himself (Judd Hirsch) at one point even makes an appearance to wag his finger and say that he does not approve of Meyer’s methods and definition of justice, chiefly executing the Nazis or arranging for “accidents” and death traps that mirror the atrocities they committed. Like in the first episode, when we see a former Nazi chemist (now a NASA scientist) discovering in her final moments that her shower has been rigged to dispense the same gas she developed for the death camps.

Of course, thirty years after the Holocaust, Meyer and Ruth were a bit long in the tooth, so they recruited a cadre of interested parties and mercenaries, “The Hunters,” to assist in the location and then the execution of the Nazis. Joining them on their crusade are B-list actor Leonard “Lonny Flash” Flazhenstien (Josh Radnor), Vietnam Veteran Joe Mizushima (Louise Ozawa), nun and (former?) MI6 agent Sister Harriet (Kate Mulvany), kick ass hood girl Roxy Jones (Tiffany Boon channeling classic Pam Grier), and fellow camp survivors Murray and Mindy Markowitz (Saul Rubinek and Carol Kane). Interesting fact: Jewish actor Saul Rubinek was actually born in a post-war refugee camp after his parents had successfully hidden for over two years in Nazi-occupied Poland.

While these are the titular “Hunters,” it would be fair to argue that the show is actually about three groups of hunters. The main conceit of the series is that not only did far too many Nazi war criminals escape the hangman’s noose, sometimes with the aid of the US government (as they did in real life), but that some of these Nazis are working together in secret to bring about a new Fourth Reich. So the Jews and the Nazis are hunting each other.

One such nasty Nazi was even able to completely reinvent himself as red-blooded American and Washington insider “Biff Simpson” (Dylan Baker) and turns out not only to be an adept master of disguise, but as dangerous as a rabid animal when cornered. When we first meet him his brilliant solution for preserving his cover after being outed at a family BBQ by a Holocaust survivor, is to gun her down, and his guests, and his own family.

While Biff has problems with impulse control, that is not so for the Nazis’ ringleader, the mysterious SS She Wolf known only as “The Colonel” (Lena Olin). As the terrorist mastermind behind the efforts to build a new Aryan America, she is not only keeping the old guard in line but raising new generations of blond-haired blue-eyed operatives, and radicalizing them with a twisted ideology in which Nazis are portrayed as the real persecuted minority.

The final point of this Axis of Evil is one of these young neo-Nazis, Travis Leich (Greg Austin). In a character arc that is a malicious mirror of the arc of the heroic Jonah, Travis struggles to prove himself among the more seasoned veterans of his faction. He always seems to be taking crap from the other Hitler youth, probably either because he likes contemporary musicals instead of the traditional Wagner, or because the Teutonic Tossers just don’t recognize a self-radicalized American as a true peer. Huh, I guess even OG Fascists hate Illinois Nazis.

Finally trying to make sense of the trail of murder and mayhem left behind by both groups is FBI agent Millie Morris (Jerrika Hinton). Poor Morris has the thankless task of being the Inspector Javert of the piece and having to do so as a “triple threat” minority in 1970s law enforcement.

Eventually the cat and mouse game leads to a grand shootout not just to find escaped Nazi war criminals, but to thwart their doomsday plot to ensure a Fourth Reich on American soil. Once the dust settles, and after setting up an “adventure continues” plot hook for the second season, the show reveals one hell of a final twist. Well it was clearly trying to set up two incredible twists for the finale but you can see the second one coming a mile away as soon as the caption “Argentina 1977” pops up.

As I said, I was captivated by the show as I watched it and I think its heart is in the right place, but sometimes the jarring gear shifts between a reflection on historical atrocities to cartoon shoot-em-up against cartoon villainy was a bit hard to reconcile. But maybe there is something in that. Late in the season the show’s soundtrack uses a song that had been running through my head since I heard the premise of the series: Tom Lehrer’s “tribute” to former Nazi rocket scientist, turned head NASA rocket scientist Wernher von Braun.

I had known the song for years (I had a hipster “classic” music satire phase as a teen). Yet by that point in the series, I was reflecting truly how dark the satire was. That maybe we should be more embarrassed that Von Braun built the space program. Frankly I was a little unsettled when I realized that von Braun had personally narrated a piece about space travel for Disney that I had enjoyed when I was young. Which ultimately is the point of good satire, not just to make us laugh but to challenge us.

As for the final verdict on Hunters? I enjoyed it. The maudlin parts were done well and I think I read its campy sensibilities as intended. But then again maybe I’m not the best person to decide of all that ham and cheese is “Kosher” for such subjects (Check out our follow-up post, "Flippant Entertainment," in which Nerds who Read Senior Editor Michael Isenberg weighs in on exactly that issue.).

Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival, coming to Waltham MA May 9, 2020. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.

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Dirty Work Afoot—in Space!

Picard, Episodes 1 and 2.
TV Review by Michael Isenberg.

A young woman celebrating with her boyfriend: she got the job!

Side by side on the sofa, they toast her success to the strains of mellow tunes. It all seems perfectly normal.

Then assassins attack.

Three of them in black masks and body armor. They murder the boyfriend with a dagger hurled from across the room. Right in the center of the chest. But when they turn to the young woman, and try to kidnap her, she fights back. A few Kung Fu kicks and flips, some disrupter blasts, and all three attackers are disarmed and unconscious, perhaps dead, in a matter of seconds.

She has no idea how she knew how to do those things. Nor does she know why, finding herself in danger, she feels compelled to seek out Jean-Luc Picard, one time captain of the Starship Enterprise.

Picard, which premiered on CBS All Access last week, finds its title character retired from Starfleet—his departure wasn’t exactly amicable—and living out his golden years on the family vineyard. And while he’s in far better health than Patrick Stewart’s Professor X character in 2017’s Logan, he’s definitely slowing down and dealing with issues of old age. Not the least of which are disturbing nightmares about playing poker with his old colleague Commander Data.

But peaceful retirement is not in the cards for Jean-Luc. Dirty work is afoot. The mystery of the young woman who shows up at his doorstep is just the tip of the iceberg. Docile android workers suddenly snap for no apparent reason and destroy the Mars colony. A cybernetic engineer, who was apparently working on illegally building a copy of Commander Data, has disappeared. And a shady Romulan order, even more secretive than the Tal Shiar, and hitherto thought to be imaginary, has infiltrated the highest levels of Starfleet. Picard is determined to travel the galaxy once again, and get to the bottom of it all. If only he can get a ship.

I have a confession to make. There’s been very little I’ve wanted to see on the streaming services lately. So little that I’ve just been signing up for free trials, binge watching what interested me, and then cancelling before the subscription fees kick in. But I got to say, I’m liking this series. Patrick Stewart puts in a stellar performance as usual, the cinematography of space stations and French countryside is spectacular, and the various mysteries intrigue me. I’m eager to see how all the threads come together.

I may just let my subscription to CBS All Access ride for a while.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Please follow Mike on Facebook and Twitter. Subscribe to Nerds who Read via email. The subscription box is in the right hand column, near the top.

7 Things that Still Bug Me about Buffy the Vampire Slayer

And The One Most Awesome Scene Ever.
by Michael Isenberg.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer was my favorite show of all time. A perfect storm of good storylines, quality violence, a great cast, and amazing dialogue (to hear what the writers have to say about the last item—they’re incredibly proud of it, and rightly so—see this segment “Buffy Speak” from the Season 3 DVDs). The show was known for innovative episodes like "Hush" which had no dialog for twenty-seven minutes and "The Body" which captured the numbness of those first hours after a loved one dies with remarkable realism. Buffy was also breakthrough television in the portrayal of lesbian characters. And as editor of Nerds who Read, I got to love any show where the heroes, when they have a problem, go to the library to research it.

Perhaps it was because Buffy was such great television that the handful of things about it that bugged me continue to bug me twenty years later. Here, then, are…

7 Things that Still Bug Me About Buffy the Vampire Slayer

7. Robots. The Buffy TV show was born amidst the “irrational exuberance” of the dot com era, so it no doubt seemed natural at the time to work some high tech into it. But in a show that was mainly about the supernatural, and where the main villains were vampires and demons, robots never really seem to belong. They just came across as silly.

Bonus challenge: Name all the robots that appeared in the series. Leave answers in the comments.

6. The Zeppo. The title of this Season 3 episode refers to Xander, practically the only member of the Scooby Gang who never had any supernatural powers. The comparison is to Zeppo Marx, the colorless Marx Brother. Unlike the mustachioed, wisecracking Groucho, the silent, manic Harpo, and the faux-Italian Chico, Zeppo was just a guy in a suit. The straight man. In this episode, Buffy and her friends decide that the threat of the week was just too dangerous for Xander, so they cut him out. He goes off on his own adventure while the rest of the gang stops the Apocalypse in the background. As if that's not bad enough, much of Xander’s adventure involves being unable to get away from some tiresome people he really doesn’t want to be with. As an introvert, I identify. And while things do work out for Xander in the end—he even loses his virginity—it still bugs me that his friends were mean to him.

5. Season 5. In this season, Buffy faces off against Glory, a slinky, glamorous hell god whose only wish is to go back to hell. Unfortunately, opening a portal to that alternate dimension will require killing Buffy’s sister, Dawn. Clare Kramer puts in a wonderful performance as Glory—she really captures the combination of ancient evil and modern humor that’s the hallmark of a Buffy villain. But I really don’t see the conflict here. Glory wants out of this dimension. Buffy wants Glory out of this dimension. Why are they fighting instead of working together?! I mean, seriously, THEY WANT THE SAME THING!!! With the resources of the Scooby Gang, surely they could have found some non-lethal way to send Glory home. It’s not as if they had never sent anyone to alternate dimensions before.

4. Season 6. A low point for the series, and for Buffy personally, who is working fast food to pay the bills, having sex with a vampire who makes her feel ashamed of herself, and struggling to be a single mother to little sis Dawn. To add insult to injury, just as she approaches bottom, her ex, Riley, comes to visit and he’s doing great. It’s painful to watch, but not as painful as two scenes of horrific violence against women that appear in this season.

From a dramatic point of view, the season is flawed in that “The Big Bad”—the three nerds Warren, Jonathan, and Andrew (Tucker’s brother)—just aren’t that bad. Even some of the Scooby Gang think the Trio’s schemes “seem really lame.” (I can just hear the Cinema Sins guy saying, “Comment in the writer’s room somehow made it into the script.”) The Trio aren’t worthy of Buffy talents. In fact, they were such weak villains that they’re not even the main antagonists in the season finale. That honor goes to Willow, who has temporarily turned evil. And then Buffy doesn’t even play much of a role in defeating her. She spends most of the last episode trapped in a hole.

Even the comic relief doesn’t work in Season 6. Kitten poker? In Buffy’s words, that’s “stupid currency.”

Just an awful season.

And yet, there are a few bright spots, in particular the musical episode “Once More with Feeling.” Frankly, most musical episodes of TV shows aren’t very good, but this one is an exception. It’s fun, the songs are great, and it blends seamlessly with the arc of the season. There’s just one thing about it that bugs me…

3. No consequences for Xander. The premise of “Once More with Feeling” is that citizens of Buffy’s town of Sunnydale just start singing and dancing, like in a musical, and Buffy must find out why. It’s rather lighthearted at first, but then there is new urgency as some of these people dance themselves to death. We eventually find out that a demon caused it all. A demon that was summoned by Xander. “I didn’t know what was going to happen,” he says in his defense. “I just thought there was going to be dances and songs.” He totally should have known what was going to happen. It’s fricking season six, you’re not new at this. Or did you forget what happened when you messed around with the Dark Arts in “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered?” Not only did he summon the demon in “Once More with Feeling,” but then he just sat there and watched his friends struggle to figure out what was going on. He even misdirected them at one point. Not to mention that people died.

And yet, there were no consequences for him at all. This was unusual in a series that, to its credit, takes personal responsibility seriously. When characters screw up, there are consequences. There was even an episode called “Consequences.” If it’s a serious screw up, there might be a long journey of redemption, spanning multiple seasons. But in this case, nothing. No day of reckoning for Xander at all. DID I MENTION THAT PEOPLE DIED???!!!

2. The Willow Hostage Exchange. As the title of the Season 3 episode “Choices” implies, Buffy and her friends faced some difficult decisions that week. They knew that the mayor of the town planned to transform himself into a giant snake demon and kill a whole bunch of people. But in order to accomplish this, he needed a mystical box full of killer spiders known as the “Box of Gavrok.” The Scooby Gang steals the box from him, but during the operation, one of them, Willow, gets captured.

The choice they face is whether to keep the box, and thereby stop the mayor’s “Ascension.” It could save thousands of lives, but Willow would be killed. Or they could offer the mayor an exchange—the box for Willow—and keep their fingers crossed that they can find some other way to stop the Ascension.

Of course they went for the exchange—Willow’s a main character—but I often wonder how the rest of the series would have played out if they had sacrificed her instead. Yes, Willow would have been dead, but a heck of a lot of other people would have been alive—starting with the ones that died in the Ascension that didn’t get stopped. Subsequent to that, Willow repeatedly put other people in danger by her misuse of magic—at first because she was still learning, and later because she was addicted to it. None of it would have happened had she died in “Choices.”

Buffy herself died in the Season 5 finale, and Willow mojoed her back to life. Had Willow not been there to do that, a Buffy-less and Willow-less Season 6 would have played out very differently and we certainly wouldn’t have seen Willow turn to the Dark Side and nearly destroy the world in the season finale. And since the Big Bad in Season 7 was unleashed by the unintended consequences of bringing Buffy back to life, that whole season wouldn’t have happened at all. The numerous potential Slayers who died would never have been in danger.

Also, had Willow died in Season 3, she never would have met Tara. And although that would have meant that she wouldn’t have been there to bring the shy Tara out of her shell, it also would have meant that Tara wouldn’t have been in the path of a stray bullet meant for Buffy. Which brings me to the number one thing that still bugs me about Buffy the Vampire Slayer...

The Death of Tara

Tara was one of my favorite characters. She had such a good heart, and such a unique way of looking at things—making up her own names for the constellations because the real ones didn’t make sense, or avoiding the Internet because everyone’s spelling was so bad. Unlike Willow, she was able to use magic without being consumed by it. I even loved the way she decorated her room (I wish I could get a copy of that poster!). I was very sad to see her go, especially since series creator Joss Whedon played with our heads a bit. He put Tara in the opening credits for the first time in the episode in which she died. I went into the episode thinking how nice it was that her place on the show was finally secure.

Thanks for bearing with my rant. I would like to end on a positive note, though. So here then, as promised, is...

The One Most Awesome Scene Ever:

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Riley Punches Parker Abrams in the Face:

How can anyone not love Riley after that?

Got any pet peeves about BTVS that I missed? Please feel free to comment. Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Please follow Mike on Facebook and Twitter. Photo credit(s): Hello Giggles, The Uncanny Fans, buffy.fandom.com, fanpop.com, Lost Again, YouTube, Persephone Magazine, DigitalSpy.com, Entertainment Weekly