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Buffy The Vampire Slayer
Tabula Rasa
Airdate 11-13-01As witches go, Willow sure makes a sloppy drunk.
Sure, she could stop at any time. And after Tara's confession that she knows Willow manipulated her memories, our girl Will vows to do go cold turkey. Like any addict, she brags about her resolve, promising that she can go a month without using magic. A sad and far too wise Tara cuts it down to a week.
Unfortunately for the rest of the gang, Tara has not shared with them her fears about Willow's mystical abuse. All everyone else knows is that Willow and Tara keep having little lovers' quarrels that no one wants to see. You might call it the elephant in the room, but with Willow's growing magic dependence, there might soon literally be one.
Willow's heart may be in the right place. As Tara points out, she just wants to make things right for everybody. (And oh, if only DC had realized this about Hal Jordan and made it a believable growing flaw…but that's another area of the website…) Episode writer Rebecca Rand Kirshner weaves this idea in nicely. It's been building since last season, making Willow's shift ominous but not shocking.
At some point, Willow has to get over her messiah complex (though, after all, she has brought her best friend back from the dead). But for now, she cannot even get through a day of her promise. Purposely running late for a meeting at The Magic Box, she uses her time alone to cast a better memory spell, one that will keep Tara and make Buffy forget that she was ever in heaven.
In her zeal, Willow leaves her fire unattended, and too much of her forgetfulness herb burns. Even as Giles announces that he will be leaving Sunnydale indefinitely, the entire Scooby gang falls under Willow's spell, passing out for hours.
And when they wake up, nothing will ever be the same.
Each member has to figure out who they are and how they relate, allowing for some clever jibes at their identities. Buffy and Dawn quickly figure out that they're sisters because of how they naturally bicker. Giles and Spike assume a father-son relationship (echoing Buffy's dream of two seasons ago), though Spike is bitter to realize that he must be British.
As they sort this out wrong, Spike's loan shark comes to call, and everyone finds a side to themselves they may not have known they had. (Xander makes a much better vampire fighter when he doesn't know he isn't.) Along the way Kirshner and director David Grossman continue playing with the separation from Angel, as Spike describes himself as a WB press release.
After last week's brilliant episode, we all had to be asking the Scooby Gang's musical question, where do they go from here? Folks, it's going to get dark. Willow is obviously out of control. Tara cannot stay. Dawn cannot understand, and Giles…Giles is gone. Just gone. But at least he didn't do it Duchovny-style.
The only weak point to Tabula Rasa comes in the form of Spike's loan shark. Envisioned as literally a shark, his Halloween mask of a head both looks silly and seems out of sync with every other demon we've ever seen. (Last week's henchmen, at least, were supposed to look theatrical.) The magic of this show is how it has made even the stupidest concepts somehow believable to us. I miss the raindeer demon.
But it's a niggling point to make about one of the best shows on television. Where do they go from here? To continuing surprises.
To see a photo of Anthony Stewart Head's farewell from the show, click here.
