Buffy: The Wish

"Slaying's a rough gig. Too much alone time is unhealthy."
-Buffy, earning herself this season's Medal of Foreshadowing

Season 3 episode 9

I skipped "Lover's Walk." What you need to know is that 1) it's where that image of Spike in his car, rocking out to "My Way," which will be used in the Season 4 and 5 credits, comes from.  2) it's the one where Xander and Willow's thing for each other is revealed to everyone.  Cordy suddenly becomes "Xander Harris's castoff."

Faith is not in the episode. Willow says they should hang out with her more often. That's really good advice, Will. I mean, if she goes through a moral crisis in the near future, she's going to need friends, right?  (Alas, in the next episode, "Amends," Buffy invites Faith over for Christmas dinner... and then bails on her to go hang out with Angel. Jealous, Faith?)

On to the point of giving this one a full review: I don't believe it's an accident that this episode came in this season.  There's a massive bait-and-switch about Cordy maybe learning something, and then turning into an episode about what Buffy would be without friends (oh, hey, see the preceding paragraph).

Now, I don't really know whether the plan was to bring Anya back in the future, or whether this was a one-off.  But it honestly seems like this episode belongs in this season more than "Doppelgangland" does. Because this episode ties in directly to the question Faith asks Wesley in "Five by Five": Was she always destined to be the "fallen" Slayer? Or could Buffy have been her if things have been different?


After Buffy (indirectly) ruins Cordelia's dress, Cordy comes to the conclusion that everything that has ever happened to her is Buffy's fault. So when Anya starts doing that incredibly obvious "don't you just wish" routine, (come on, the first time she did it, you knew where this was going - at least as long as you knew what the episode's title was) Cordy wishes that Buffy had never come to Sunnydale.

Immediately everyone is wearing crosses and dark clothing, but this isn't really highlighted to begin with. This is part of what I like to call the "cohesiveness of the setting." (Play Half-Life 2, you will see exactly what I mean. Every single thing in that game tells you this is a science-fiction-y dystopia, and the game never really explains the setting to the player because it doesn't have to.)

Anyway, Cordy discovers that Xander and Willow are dead, and between that and learning that students aren't allowed to drive cars in this reality, or that the Bronze is closed, she decides that maybe this world sucks. So when she runs across Xander, she insists that she needs to find Buffy. And then...

"Bored now."

There was a time when those weren't the most terrifying two words in the Buffyverse. Y'know, back in the halcyon days before Season Six existed.

Anyway, Vamp!Xander and Vamp!Willow attack Cordelia, but are driven off by "the White Hats," which consists of Oz, Larry (the guy they thought might be a werewolf but who turned out to just be gay in 2.15 "Phases") and a version of Giles who is somewhere between his Season 4 persona and Wesley's Angel Season 3 persona.

Xander and Willow report to the Master, who rose because Buffy never showed up to stop him. By the way, you know what this episode did better than Doctor Who's "Turn Left?" They didn't turn it into freaking continuity porn by having every minor villain show up and wreak havoc. (Notice that the Anointed One is nowhere to be seen, just for an example.)

Cordy wakes up in the library, tells Giles that he was supposed to be Buffy's watcher, and then gets the Ned Stark treatment. No, not the "head on a spike bit," the "we thought you were the protagonist and now you're just a corpse" bit.  Giles notices the necklace she was wearing, which Anya gave her when she made the wish. 

Back in the Master's lair, Willow gets to play with "the puppy." Who is Angel, chained up and tortured. And Willow is dressed as a dominatrix. And yes, Marti Noxon wrote this one. Why do you ask? 

I have a question: in both this, the break between Buffy seasons 2 and 3, and the break between Angel seasons 3 and 4, Angel is imprisoned and presumably denied access to a razor blade. Now, we know from "Amends" that vampire hair continues growing even though they're dead, so...

Meanwhile, Giles has realized that "the entire world sucks because some dead ditz made a wish," in Larry's words.  He puts a call in to Buffy's watcher and heads home to investigate further. And even in the Wishverse his car sucks.  He pulls over to try to stop some vampires from kidnapping some teenagers, but they kick his ass.  Then Buffy shows up and kicks their asses.

Now, Wishverse!Buffy is not Faith. She's single-minded and determined, and frankly more Kendra than Faith. You can use the term "free spirit" to describe Faith, but neither Kendra nor Wishverse!Buffy. (Besides, compare SMG's performance her to her go in "Who Are You" (4.16), and note than in the latter episode she amps up the party girl. There's none of that here.) What there is, though, is very much a sense of superiority, and there's no denying Faith has that.

Buffy goes to the Bronze and finds Angel. Even though he's a vampire, she frees him because he tells her he wants revenge.  (Again, difference: Faith would kill him on the spot. See 3.07, "Revelations.")

All right. The way this plays out is the usual "Fight A, Magic B" resolution that eventually gets tiresome: a fight goes down in one location while the plot is actually resolved by a magic spell cast somewhere else. This being an alternate universe, we get to play with the rules a bit (read:  Wishverse!Angel, Vamp!Xander, Vamp!Willow, and Wishverse!Buffy all bite the dust*) before Giles undoes the wish simply on the belief that whatever the other world is, it has to be better than this one.

*Yup, puns intended

Note that the Master doesn't do Buffy in with hypnosis, the way he had to in "Prophecy Girl" or the way Dru took out Kendra in "Becoming."  He just stuns her with a facepunch and then breaks her neck.

Now, having explained all the myriad ways Wishverse!Buffy isn't Faith, allow me to backtrack a little bit. It's implied later on that the reason Buffy doesn't have the Slayer Death Wish(tm) is because she has so many things keeping her tied to this world. Neither Faith nor Wishverse!Buffy has that complication. As if to drive that home, the final shot of the episode is of "our" Buffy doing something her Wishverse counterpart never did: smiling and hanging out with friends.

All right.  This weekend I'll stop tiptoeing around the issue and get down to one of my favorite episodes in the entire show: the Slayer-as-Ubermensch study that is "Bad Girls."

As for "The Wish," the only thing it's missing is the "Yesterday's Enterprise" twist, that one of the people alive in the Wishverse is dead in the real world, but hey, that's been done before. And to round out my mentioning-of-other-alternate-universe-episodes-in-other-franchises, I'd like to point out that just as Fascist!England was a day ahead in drilling to the center of the Earth in Doctor Who's "Inferno," here the one positive thing about the Wishverse is that crappy factory that Spike and Dru were hanging out in last year either never fell into disrepair or got a shiny new overhaul.

8 out of 10. You know it's not going to stick, but it's fun to see the cast be not-themselves for half an hour.