What YA Shows Can Teach Us About Dealing With Fear.

Buffy Season One’s episode Nightmares is sometimes overlooked when people bring up great episodes of Buffy the vampire Slayer. It’s like that with a lot of season one actually. People dismiss it for following a different monster every week formula instead of the “arcs” we’re used to in TV shows now. But there’s more to these episodes than you might think. If you want to know what I mean, you have to look at what’s happening in Nightmares:

The characters are all trapped in the dream of a 10 year old named Billy, who’s been put in a coma by his kid hockey coach. While he sleeps, strange things begin to happen to the main characters; their nightmares start to become a reality.

I find it interesting, each of the characters fears foreshadow what’s going to happen to them in later seasons of the show. As The Master says in the beginning:

“We are defined by the things we fear”

So how does fear define each of the heroes in Buffy?

Xander

Xander is attacked by a violent clown he’s feared since he was six years old. It appears to giggle, sound like Xander and wield a knife. The arrival of the clown tells us something about Xander’s character:

He is afraid that deep down all he is seen as is a clown, a funny guy there for comic amusement. What’s worse, he’s a clown who can hurt people. For all his jokes, Xander cuts his friends down with jokes, and uses humour to attack others.

Something about the clown emerging when he was six years old tells us about a troubled upbringing too. We never really see Xander’s relatives until season 6, but when we do, they’re horrible people.

As a character, Xander is always trying to escape a family that is just plain nasty. So the slasher clown is a perfect vision of who he’s afraid he really is.

Willow

Willow’s nightmare has two parts in it. She’s afraid of being put on stage without knowing what to do. In the entire Buffy TV show there’s three instances where Willow doesn’t know her lines. One in The Puppet Show, one in Restless, and one in Nightmares. You could also use the example that in Season 6’s Once More With Feeling, she’s the only character that doesn’t get a song.

As someone who uses knowledge to get ahead, Willow is scared of being in a situation where her knowledge can’t help her.

There’s another aspect too. Willow is dressed in traditional garb, to play the part of a the female voice in an opera, where someone dressed almost farcically as a Pavorotti type character is looking at her to act her part in the male/ female musical piece. Note how he strokes her chin and she expresses terror.

You can read this as her not being able to express herself around men like Xander; but it’s is also foreshadowing her changing sexuality in later seasons of Buffy.

Buffy

Buffy’s nightmare is the most interesting.

Above I have combined a still from season 6’s Bargaining and season 1’s Nightmares.

It’s as if they planned to do with Buffy from season one everything that happens to her later. In Nightmare’s she is killed by the master and buried alive by him, then turned into a vampire. This is setting the scene for the that season’s finale Prophesy Girl.

But far beyond that episode; Buffy will die a second time, and in season 6 she will actually find herself buried alive. When she crawls out of the grave, she does in fact think for some time she is a monster. She came back wrong.

She also learns as the show goes on, that the slayer has aspects of something monstrous to it as a thing she’s empowered with. This is probably the strangest bit of foreshadowing in Nightmares.

Giles

I almost forgot Giles. His worst fear here is apparently being lost in stacks of books, and being unable to leave the library. It might seem like he got off easy compared to the other members of the gang, but the thing with Giles is he’s always in danger of getting so absorbed in his books that he might miss out on life. He loves books, and tells Jenny Calendar as much at one point;

But just a few episodes from now, he says:

I’ve waded about in these old books so long I’ve forgotten what the real world looks like.

In season 5s restless, we see him put himself out there as a singer, trying to shake off the librarian in him. But ultimately, Giles does lose some of his connection with the other characters. Especially in season 7, where he becomes so rigid over doing the right thing, he starts making mistakes.

And we won’t even bother to talk about Ripper, who is so repressed he doesn’t even make an appearance here.

So that’s some what’s going on as you peel back the layers and look at the writing in Nightmares. How much of it was intentional is up to others to interpret, but for my own theory, we might consider how much writing a story requires the skill of mediumship.

You can’t always consciously predict the future of your own characters, because they grow, but as you continue to define them, you are predicting their outcomes too, through the realm of the unconscious.

It’s also a tale about growing up, and how the kernels of our true selves are their all along as young adults, before we eventually realise our true potential.

I could look at how the writers actually meant to do this consciously in later episode of Buffy: Restless. But maybe that’s one for the future.