What, no question on the big Buffy/Riley sex scene? ;)

1. What does the Initiative plan to do with vampires once they chip them?

Dip them?

I always figured the point was the chipping rather than the vampire. Figuring out how to control behaviour, rather than what to do with the guinea pigs afterwards.

2. Whatever their exact plans for Maggie were, they had to be better than what they did with Adam.

3. I really see it more as a slightly icky parental role, not entirely different from Giles' relationship to Buffy. Though there are some overtones of more than that...

4. Uh, hell no?

5. 3. Solid arc episode, but not really my favourite arc.

1. I think the idea was chip-and-release-into-the-wild, like tagging wild animals for further research; they have plenty of lines suggesting the Intiative thinks of the supernatural as wild-animaly.

2. Yes! Particularly with regards to articulating the season's themes.

3. I'm willing to be persuaded but I don't really see it.

4. No! I ticked the third option, because I think the self-reflection thing is more relevant to Willow's story, but definitely no queer person should be criticised for being afraid to come out.

I think the Initiative doesn't have a clue what to do with chipped vamps, they just think it's fun to have such a cool toy and can't wait to use it on random bloodsuckers.

My answer for the Willow question doesn't come from my view on queer people, but from my view on friendship. A friend is a person you can tell things, but you don't have to tell things if you don't want to (though you probably should tell things that concern this person directly and you certainly shouldn't lie). So no, Willow isn't wrong to keep her relationship with Tara from Buffy, but not because she might have some issues with her sexual identity, but because people generally are not obliged to tell their friends things if they don't feel like doing it. But that's me; I often have a problem with the Scoobies scorning Buffy for not telling them things that, in my opinion, were none of their damn business ;).

1. Chipped vamps and demons would be used as cannon-fodder - sent ahead of valuable human troops to trigger minefields, attract snipers and terrify the enemy. After all, they can't hurt even an enemy human, so they would be no practical use in hand-to-hand combat, but very good at damaging enemy morale.

Also, testing chip technology to destruction. Maggie = Mengele but with vampires, so there's no moral question, right?

2. Maggie's death seemed rushed and pointless, and entirely a result of the actress leaving the show, not an organic development in the plot. She would have been a much better villain, because of the moral issues involved. Adam was a cop-out.

3. I think there's a subconscious attraction which she interprets as motherly guidance, but she has no real concept of maternal feelings. She is clearly jealous of Buffy, too.

4. Willow has a right to keep this relationship to herself at this stage. Private and secret are not the same, and she does have a lot to work out for herself.

5.Three stars - it's OK, but doesn't reach the heights of some of the earlier episodes this season. I just don't care enough about some of the individuals connected with the Initiative.

1. I've always thought the Initiative were that project that got Angel and Spike onto the submarine in Why We Fight? I forget the name of it, but it works for me.

Possibly they were hoping to understand enough to eventually brainwash the demons and make them into superweapons; the issue with Maggie was that she was going too far too fast, not that she was doing something the Initiative was actually opposing. Even chipped, that works for me as part demonic arms race and part that they could still be effective weapons that way (maybe they can't attack people, but they can do a lot of damage to infrastructure, which also seems tactically useful).

clearly I have a lot of thoughts about this. S4 is underrated, IMO.

2. I think Adam probably had to kill Maggie eventually in that dark parallel to Buffy's defying the Council, but I wish she'd hung around longer.

1. The whole project, not just the vampires, seemed to be research toward making soldier-slaves. I can't really characterize the demons that are forced to fight as "white hats" though. The citizen-soldier is a hard sell these days. Human canon-fodder is expensive and politically tricky. Nobody really wants to send their kids to die, usually. This all strikes me as the world-with-demons version of the "disposable" robot soldier of various scifi tales.

2. I think the evil that men and women do is more interesting to explore than monsters run amok. Adam is only interesting insofar as he is the result of Maggie's hubris. I would have liked to see her deal with the fallout, though seeing her hoist on her own petard has its poetry. (Question: how and when did Adam commandeer her corpse anyway? Freaky.)

3. I go for the "creepy-parental-mentor". There are undertones of sexual interest in her proprietary attitude, but I don't think she necessarily would have acted on them.

4. Everybody, not just the sexually marginalized, is entitled to privacy. Willow, Buffy, Giles, and Xander to not owe each other a "relationship-report" until they are ready to give one. (Does she really get criticized about this? People really need to step off.) I say that as someone who has been waiting for a loved one to come out for at least a dozen years now. It hurts my feelings that my person doesn't trust me enough to be open and honest — but it's not about me. Sheesh.)

I'm sorely tempted to give this episode five stars for this alone:

"I've patrolled in this halter many times."

But one line does not an episode make...

Oh! Oh! I have a poll for this one, too!

http://fantas-magoria.livejournal.com/235310.html

Edited at 2011-09-20 11:37 pm (UTC)

1. Organizations do a lot of pointless things. Some techie probably thought it sounded like a cool idea.

2. Yes... I suppose. It's hard to say how the season would've gone if she'd survived. Adam was not a very interesting or thematically consistent Big Bad.

3. No. But man, that scene of her watching them is creepy as hell.

4. I'm not sure they're in a relationship yet. A lot of fandom seems to assume they had sex in this episode, but I doubt it. Either way, Willow's not doing anything wrong.

5. 3 stars.

#4 - I say this as a straight person, so please forgive any accidental ignorance on my part in this answer. But personally, I don't feel like Willow owed the Scoobies or Buffy any kind of explanation before she was ready. I agree that someone should only come out when they're ready, *if* they're ready, to the greater extent. However, I feel like maybe she was a little bit unfair to Tara to hide her away like some kind of "dirty little secret". If she wasn't ready to come out, she could have introduced her as her friend, and let Tara know she wasn't ready, so Tara wouldn't have had to feel like Willow didn't care about her as much or was ashamed of her.

Again, it's totally understandable, but I do feel like she could have done better by Tara than she did.

3. I accidentally read a fic one time in which they were having a sooper seekrit affair, and now I can't wash my brain of the idea.

1. I thought they either killed them eventually or kind of let them go without thinking or caring about how they were gonna feed.

2. Maggie as the Big Bad with Adam as her muscle. She had that mad scientist thing going so it felt really odd to have her die so abruptly.

3. Yep. She watched Riley having sex with Buffy. I didn't get the feeling she did that with all her soldiers. And I always got the 'sexual competition' vibe with the way Maggie dealt with and talked to Buffy.

4. Self reflection over her orientation needs some privacy. But I still felt bad for Tara - you could tell she wanted to be a bigger part of Willow's life.

5. three stars. A good episode but nothing to jump up and down about.

I think the chipped demons were intended to become controllable weapons aimed at enemy humans. (Yeah, the prototype chip made them incapable of attacking humans, but prototypes can evolve...)

Edited at 2011-09-21 01:58 am (UTC)

My idea about the demons is that chipping them so they couldn't harm humans was Stage One of the plan. Once they'd got that aspect of the technology working without any glitches, Stage Two would be to make the demons able to harm specific designated humans, on a command from their controller.

"The Initiative represented the Government's interests in not only controlling the otherworldly menace, but harnessing its power for our own military purposes."
- the General in 'Primeval'

1. Study them and the other demons...play with them, a la Mengele. The Initiative always really made me sick for this reason.
2. She would have made such a chilling Big Bad.
3. I don't think so. I think her interest/voyeurism of him is much more to do with her thirst for power and control. Keeping tabs on someone that intimately as well as the other things she was doing with the soldiers, like the drugging, is much more about having control over people (and demons!). Now, she might get off on that, but I don't think it's to do with Riley himself.
4. I like both of the "No"s. Well put :)

Definitely a plotful ep if nothing else!

1) This was a tough one. I used to think that they did it simply to remove him as a potential threat to the soldiers while doing other experiments, but then I had to consider that the Initiative didn't know that it was Spike that they'd chipped, him as opposed to some newbie that was driven mostly on bloodlust. Given that... oh Hell, I have no idea why except it was a new gizmo that the scientist guys came up with that they just had to try out. That's my answer: because they could. Seems the only logical reason why they put a floppy drive in Adam's chest but gave him that crazy nuclear power source.

2) Her arc was over, and her death served to further tear Riley in half by making him upset that he left the way he did.

3) He was her good little soldier that did everything that she asked without asking any questions. Perhaps she saw him as her equal amongst the soldiers, but I say no to any sexual interest.

4) First, Willow is going through stuff and probably isn't in a place that she can even say it out loud much less say it to Buffy or eek Xander... Add to that the fact that Buffy's attention is clearly elsewhere. I always saw this as a throw back to Willow's original fears as she might be thinking that Buffy might not even hear her say it, making her repeat it and causing her greater anxiety.

5) This is an okay episode until the end where Riley sees Buffy in the monitor behind Dr. Walsh after hearing her lies. Definitely a 4 for 'you really don't know what a slayer is'.

1. Turn them into cheap labor on other military projects - uranian mines, etc.

2-3. I think that initially Walsh was supposed to be the metaphor of mother-in-law from hell - so, who knows, it could be interesting.

4. Willow - as well as any other person - has the right to keep her private life private. There is nothing wrong with it.

Just a quick last-minute thought on your question 4: of course Willow is under no moral obligation to share details of her lovelife with any third parties. But there *is* a point where she becomes wrong for keeping it a secret: and that's when she herself starts to feel guilty about the secrecy. Part of her self-image is that she's Buffy's best friend (but not her sidekick!) and they share everything. We will see, in 'Primeval', that it actually hurt Willow to know that she hadn't told Buffy about Tara sooner. She didn't, because she was "so scared" (her words) and "going through something huge" (Buffy's words), but I think Willow herself, after the event, would say she was wrong not to tell Buffy.

I also do think that Tara was hurt by Willow keeping her existence a secret, even though she did her best to hide it; but that's more for the 'Who Are You?' discussion post.

As to chipping vamps, well I think It was established in what we saw in both Buffy and Ats what various governments were after.

From the end of 'Primeval'

WARD:

"This was an experiment. The
Initiative represented the government's
interest in not only controlling the
Otherworldly Menace, but in
harnessing its power for our
own military purposes. It is
the considered opinion of this
council that the experiment has failed."

And after what we saw in the Nazi sub in AtS that I think Spike was right about them trying to get together a vampire slave army that they could use against their enemies.

And that ino what made them such a chilling big bad.

*eta* I've looked at your comment above and I'm afraid that I also didn't realise that when you asked it you weren't being serious. :)


Edited at 2011-09-21 11:19 am (UTC)

On #4, I think there's an important distinction between Willow concealing the potentially romantic nature of her relationship with Tara and concealing Tara's existence.

I don't have a problem with the first, especially since I don't think Willow has consciously recognized the relationship as a romantic one yet.

Concealing Tara's existence, on the other hand, is a bad idea. Understandable but still a bad idea.

The one argument I can kind of see about #4 is that it's a bit damaging to Tara for Willow to keep Tara from Willow's friends -- we know that Tara feels uncomfortable with it (from Who Are You, e.g.), and the dynamic wherein Willow has a social support network and Tara *doesn't* creates a bit of a power imbalance wherein Willow has more power than Tara, which is particularly uncomfortable given later developments. I think it hurts Tara a lot to be Willow's secret, in the same way it eventually hurts Spike to be Buffy's secret (lots of parallels between those relationships, though the reason Buffy and Willow keep these secrets are of course radically different).

But ultimately -- it's not Willow's fault that Tara doesn't have a social support network, and nor is it Willow's responsibility to create that for her. Willow doesn't *owe* Tara her friends. And Tara recognizes this. I also really don't want to diminish how difficult it would be for Willow to come out to her friends (and the further recognition that that is not something Willow should have to go through for Tara's sake rather than her own).

Conversely, Willow *definitely* doesn't owe Buffy et al. knowledge about Tara.

1)Hm, not really White-Hat demon fighters, more like cannon fodder that you have no moral obligation towards whatsoever. I'm thinking Star Wars clones. Just expendable.

2) The story would've been so much better with the moral implications of behaviour modification of sentient beings and playing Modern Prometheus via genetic experimentation and plain-old jigsaw puzzling. Instead, we got a GuyDemonBot.

3) I see her as a monstrous mother figure (both straightforward with Adam and more subdued with Riley), so it's more controlling impulse than sexual desire that lies behind her jealousy of Buffy. There is something to be said about the power of the subconscious, though.

4) Went with the self-reflectoin bit, but generally, no one needs to come out about anything personal if they don't want to (not just pertaining to queerness). As someone who never confides in anyone (think S7 Buffy taken to the Nth degree), I really don't understand why anyone would be obligated to be open about such deeply personal things with their friends. To me, friendship means love and support, even more so when it's instinctual, when you don't know why you should give it, but you give it anyway because you feel that's what's needed.

5) Don't really remember much of this episode. Gave it a two because of the Buffy-Riley sex, which is kinda ew.

What does the Initiative plan to do with vampires once they chip them?

Clearly, the Initiative is an early version of the Committee for the Liberation and Integration of Terrifying Organisms and their Rehabilitation Into Society. :)

/nerd

Why is no one talking about the Initiative's plan for vampire sex slaves?! I mean, CLEARY that's where it was going. All that fanfic can't be wrong! Plus, the first use of new technology somehow always ends up being adapted for sex/porn in some way!

1. Slaves. Mostly for demon fighting but probably would have evolved to human fighting eventually. Or sex. Or housekeeping.

2. I'm actually one of the few who was okay with the whole Adam thing. It probably would have been better to have Maggie along but I was cool with it.

3. Yeah the watching him and Buffy have sex, then trying to kill Buffy, I think she was into him in a totally creepy sexual way.

4. Nobodys business except Willows.

5. I hated the Buffy Riley sex scene. But I gave it an extra point because if this was the scene that Spike had to have the scoobies dig the tracker out of him that whole scene was awesome. Pretty, shirtless and tipsy Spike on the table, the electric field hair, and the flushing of the tracker were all pretty much excellent.

I always thought that they cheapened the season by having a patchwork demon as the big bad, when the story would have been all the more richer had it been Maggie alone, wanting to make her own army of demons or whatever the hell her plan was. It would have emphasized the fact that it's more than just "demon bad; human good/soul good; unsouled bad" thing as opposed to just running away from it. It was lightly touched on with the Mayor and Faith, but maybe they thought it was too risky to do in s4 for some reason I can't fathom. I think I probably would have watched the season in its entirety the first time around if they had made Maggie the villain.

2. I always thought that Maggie Walsh's death was one of Joss' attempts at a shocker death, kinda like Tara's or Wash's, without the emotional punch.

Also, since it didn't make it into the poll, I'll just say that I'm always surprised at how hot the Riley/Buffy scene is, especially since Briley otherwise makes my skin crawl.