A big, scary pimple, that yields no pus.

Not in a bad way, though. Well, not a very bad way.

Last year, in Buffy’s fifth season, writer Marti Noxon got the chance to direct two of the episodes she wrote, a privilege afforded only two other writers before her. Season Five also saw her Buffy cred get upped to co-executive producer, making her the only story-editor at that time to do so. She broke a lot of new ground that year.

So, thinks the fifth season fan, awaiting the first of these two episodes with baited everything, this episode must be totally phat, and totally not whack. Right?

Thus enters the pimple. You ever get one of those zits that looks big, looks simply ripe for the, forgive the pun, picking? Yet, when you have a go at it, nothing comes out except big pain? It looks like something’s gonna happen, like it should happen, you’re ready for it to happen... but all that happens is nothing. No big burst of pus at all. Big fat nothing.

No, seriously, stick with me here.

That’s sort of what Into the Woods was like. People expected white-slimy-goodness to burst forth from it, yet there was none.

The episode couldn’t live up to expectation. The feeling after it was not as crazy-happy as the feeling before. And the feeling before Marti’s next episode, even less so. There was wariness, and trepidation, and disappointment even.

But, was it warranted?

Did people expect too much of it, or was it a bad episode? Was the style and content just not people’s cup of tea, or was it a bad episode? Was it a bad episode?

Questions with subjective answers for sure, but if we’re going to avoid subjective questions and answers then we might as well pack up our bats and balls and go the hell home. Is that what you want? Didn’t think so.

So, children, let’s put our thinking caps on. Let’s cast our big shiny brains back to Into the Woods, and let’s kick this analysis with a tasty groove.

Was it good, or was it bad?

The Back of Her Hand.

Marti is like the grand old girl of Buffy. If there was a Cecil B deMille Award, for Buffy, given out to people who’d done the most work the longest, and Joss was disqualified for taking steroids or starting fights or something? Marti would totally win it, because she’s been around forever, and she churns the episodes out like they're going outta style. She was especially prolific in the latter half of the second season, when the kids were still growing, still learning how to walk and talk.

So if there’s one thing she knows like the back of her hand, besides the back of her hand, it’s Scooby characterisation.

And yeah, this is an aspect of excellence in Into The Woods. It's a whole assload of fun watching the characters stand or sit around, throwing Marti’s words around like horseshoes.

Horseshoes of COMEDY, for instance:

Dawn: It’s okay, you guys don’t have to make a big deal for me. I’m only sleeping over here so Buffy and Riley can boink.

Xander: Uh, no, that’s not it at all, they just need time to... be tender. Relax.

Anya: He’s not very convincing, is he?

Dawn: [shakes head] Alone time always translates into "Get Dawn out of the house so we can have loud obnoxious sex."

Pause.

Anya: [to Xander] Oh, does that mean we can’t?

Other times, the horseshoes might make you sniffle:

Spike: Sometimes I envy you so much it chokes me. And sometimes I think I got the better deal. To be that close to her, and not have her. To be all alone, even when you’re holding her. Feeling her, feeling her beneath you. Surrounding you. The scent... no, you got the better deal.

And then there are times when the variety of horseshoe is dependent on what kind of person you are:

Buffy: I can’t believe how relaxed I feel. It’s like all the tension’s just left my body.

Riley: Already? ’Cause I had that scheduled for a little later on.

Buffy: Scheduled? Are you planning on seducing me, Mr Finn?

Riley: Always.

You either think that’s sweet, or you vomit all over your coffee table. Two kinds of people in the world.

And Hark! Do I spy the problem?

But notice how much of this sort of stuff, this talking in a group or couple, notice how much time this takes up in Into the Woods.

The episode starts off, and people are sitting around, in a hospital. Fair enough, they’re waiting for Joyce’s doctor to apprise them of the surgery situation. Sitting's what you do in this situation. It's par for course.

But there’s more of the same after that. A lot more. Sitting around the table at Xander’s place. Standing around in Buffy’s room. Standing around the magic shop, standing around in some alley. Always with lots of dialogue.

Marti does this standing around thing a lot, so I start to think that maybe this, or some consequence or by-product of this, is where she loses people. And then I think I have something of an answer.

Marti chunkifies her episodes.

Look at this thing she does with the big throw-down confrontations, where everything is put on hold for a second and the world becomes one big argument. Think about way she takes the characters out of the story for a second and plops them into their very own melodrama, the way she slows the flow of plot down into real time for a minute or two.

This is something she’s done a lot of. I Only Have Eyes For You, New Moon Rising, Dead Man’s Party, all these episodes feature arguments in starring roles. It’s Marti's thing, she’s Argument Girl. It’s sort of how she ties everything together. The argument, in which she lays everything on the table for resolution, is the high point of the episode. That's when we climax.

And the only way this trick of hers varies in Into the Woods is she does it a LOT. A. Whole. Helluva. Lot.

Rather than isolate one moment as the defining moment of the episode, which is the norm, she applies that importance to a bunch of moments. She maintains several plot points as distinct from each other, rather than making them connect. This is where she, putting it crudely, stuffs it, because they need to connect, the structure of the plot of the show needs to be more complex than a series of speeches. She doesn’t weave the stories enough. She presents certain facts, motivations, and they remain in the state in which they’re first introduced throughout the episode.

Take the army guys (Graham and his Sergeant Rock/Nick Fury wannabe boyfriend) for example. They come on the scene, all big and army-like, and five seconds into their existence we know what they want. Six seconds later, we cut to a different scene. From then on it’s the waiting game until their subplot is resolved, and they either get want they want, or they don’t. It’s that simple. It’s too simple.

It’s not all that exciting, either. Like that guy on that show said that one time, waiting game sucks.

"We should go get Riley, sarge.""What for, Billy?""It's uh, it's Graham, sarge. And because he’s real big.""Sure?""Yeah, sarge.""Okay then. Where is he?""I dunno. I guess, around somewhere.""Okie dokie. Let’s stay put until we become relevant to the plot again." "Affirmative! Hoo ha!"

What would’ve been cool, if we're going by my "you must weave" rule, would be if the army guys were in Sunnydale on a mission like a hunt for poison monkeys or suchlike, and they inadvertently ran into Riley and his big heap of frustrated emotional baggage. They'd say, "Hey, wanna hook up?" And he’s like, "Well, first, let me just see about my lady... ah what the hell, let’s go."

In that case, the eventual end to the plot would have been masked by the possibility of other ends, such as poison monkeys killing Riley and Graham. Just as an example.

Chunkified

But, as it is, the army guys were chunkified. Their existence was static. One dimensional. And that sucks. They had their goal defined early on and it was just a matter of time until they either failed or succeeded. Their destiny was only ever gonna lie in one of two places, either Riley was going with them or he wasn't. And we could totally predict what was going to happen to them and Riley because everything they were involved in was so linear. Riley left? Gee, didn't see that coming.

And that’s also true of Riley’s little emotional arc, rather than actual arc, this episode. He was either gonna be happy with Buffy, or he wasn’t. Those were the outcomes. But even that wasn’t left to the imagination, because we knew Riley was gonna go all weird with the Vamphooker, we already knew he wasn’t Happy Iowa Boy. It was a safe bet, what with the, y'know, prostitution and all, that this thing wasn't gonna end pretty. It just played out, the story and the audience just went through the motions.

And, elsewhere, while Riley is fussing and a-fueding with his feelings, we get a snippet of a scene with Joyce and Buffy. This scene basically establishes that Buffy is completely oblivious to her and Riley having issues (because we didn’t know that already, because we’re all blind and speak only Hebrew), amid the pretence of Buffy and Joyce trying to get things back on track in both their lives.

This scene was chunked out of the rest of the episode. It was its own mini-world, and it didn't even need to be an argument. Yet more instances of Marti's (bad) habit of oversectionalising stuff. And it happens again with Spike and Riley, chattin' it up in Spike's crypt. The episode becomes something like a sequence of scenes, which I guess is what TV normally is, but this time it was more segmented, too neatly sequenced. Each scene had too much of its own identity. Might we try and reason why? We might. Odds are pretty good on us reasoning.

I don’t wanna be all, I’ve-read-five-lines-of-Noxon’s-bio-so-I-HAVE-THE-ANSWER, but this feeling seems like something you'd be more likely to find in a play, Marti's apparent medium of choice before she won over the TV world with her morose, witty, wry writing style. In a play, roughly speaking, a scene comes on, delivers its thesis, goes off, and on comes the next scene. They’re held together by something of a thread, but mostly they are their own thing, each with its own essence.

Whereas, with TV, usually you’re able to establish a tighter link between scenes to create more of a seamless flow of action.

Bursty White Goodness

But enough of the bad. I've had enough of the bad, I feel dirty, like I've just admitted to liking thatTake, for an example of good handling of plot, the visit to the Vampbrothel. That could’ve gone anywhere. How was Buffy going to react, to both Riley and Spike?
She could’ve gone all scrag, yelled out, “Bastard! Bitch!” and started beating both of the transgressors with her shoe. She could’ve started crying right there in front of them. We might’ve guessed she’d just run out like she did, but still it wasn’t the sure thing that the chunkified arcs were. And that’s because stuff was weaved. Stuff, like Spike’s thing for Buffy, Spike’s struggle between being good and bad, Buffy’s ignorance of her bad relationship, Riley’s general retardation of the mind, and vampires vampires vampires! See all the weaving? See how a bunch of stuff from different worlds of the narrative come together and moosh to create big BURSTY WHITE goodness? This is why, when Buffy gives Spike that look, there’s so much weight behind it. All the pent up consequence and excitement of the minutes and events beforehand were behind that stare which hit Spike like a ton of bricks. And we felt it. All because of weaving and unchunkiness.

What sucks is that was pretty much a one-off, the only one of those in the episode. Pretty much, I said? Scratch that. It was the only one. The rest were a bunch of speeches and dialogues, which, sure, were pretty and everything, but they kept the episode from flowing. Which, if nothing else, is muy different from the Buffy we’re used to, and as such, it jars, like Jar Jar, who is a jarring piece of crap indeed.

What’s Up, Yo?

This, I contend, is What Was Wrong With Into The Woods. But y’know, she almost gets away with it.

Now we get to the praise part of the analysis. If you don’t still have your thinking cap on, get your act together, you’re not coming along on this fantastic trip without it. I mean that. You think I’m not serious? I’m so serious, you don’t wanna know.

Anyway, there is almost enough good in that episode for this stuff not to matter. Like I said before, Marti nails characterisation. If Characterisation were a topic in Trivial Pursuit, she’d get that piece of pie so fast, you’d smile in wonder then you’d want to kill her. Then she’d get the bit of pie for Funny real quick too, and you actually would kill her:

Anya: That’s very amorous, Make fun of the ex-demon. Heh. I can just hear you in private. “I dislike that Anya. She’s newly human, and strangely literal.”

Willow: I don’t say that. No-one says that. No-one talks that way.

Anya: There’s nothing wrong with my idea, anyway. I’ve been very good for this store. If it wasn’t for me, Giles would be a terrified old man, staring at a quarterly tax statement and wetting himself.

Giles: I say, that’s an exaggeration. [eyes dart around to see if they bought it]

The speeches, while they could’ve been pruned back a bit, delved deeply and definitively into the dark depths of… something beginning with D. We get some really vivid and truthful insight into our characters and what moves them. And goddamn if the violence in this episode isn’t some of the coolest violence ever seen in the history of TV violence. Marti, as a director, has a unique perspective that she brings to Buffy. It’s something very fluid, and graceful, and FACEful… because she does a lot of close-ups of faces! Uh huh. Yeah. She sure does.

Cough.

This is the good stuff.

She has mobile shots that follow the actors around and that move around the actors. She mixes these up with static frames that the actors move in and out of. She has a very fine ability to find the camera distance and angle best suited to bringing the necessary feeling out of the scene. The scene this most applied to is Spike and Riley’s showdown-cum-bonding scene. She zooms in when she wants things to be angry, she pulls out a bit when she wants Spike to be sympathetic, and she can pick a very specific, very effective angle when she wants to visually interpret the nature of her characters’ relationships with each other.

Final Diagnosis

Strangely enough, or maybe not so strangely, this method of slow-now-fast-later story-telling mirrors Marti’s story. Often times slick and fast (but not often enough) and other times intense and intimate (too much, hence choking). Final diagnosis: was it a bad episode? Nah. But, ultimately, a decent story and fairly innovative directorial skills, and top notch (nowhere near bottom notch) couldn’t shine like they should’ve amidst all the talking. In this case, Marti played to her strengths a little too much. Or maybe a lot too much. It’s awfully condescending, but it should be pointed out that actions, in fiction as well as in life, speak louder than words, and generally they’re more interesting to listen to. That’s a bit of a horrible thing to say to someone who obviously likes her words a lot – but since I’m not saying this to Marti, it doesn’t much matter, does it?

Hey Marti! You suck!

Okay, no you don’t.

I’m sorry.

I love you.

Okay, no I don’t.

But you don’t suck either.

And neither do you, reader, if you read all this. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that you roll in addition to you rocking the Casbah. Stay tuned to BDU in the coming weeks for the follow up article for the follow up episode, Forever. Boo yeah!

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