Ghost In The Machine: Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season 9 #9 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: Into every generation a spoiler is born: one in all the world, a chosen one. 

The kid in me says: “You’ve been willing to accept the concept of a robot Buffy since at least season five. when the Buffybot was introduced. And then, you accepted that a Buffybot was built well enough to fool even close friends, and anatomically correct enough to satisfy Spike’s carnal desires, despite the inevitable sheet metal barbs always found in home robot construction. Why is it so unbelievable, should Buffy’s consciousness be placed into a Buffybot, that she wouldn’t notice the difference between the robot and her body?”

But then the grown-up in me says: “Even if I were unaware that my consciousness had been transferred into a robot, as a human being older than seven, I would notice if I hadn’t taken a dump for several weeks.”

Buffy Season 9 started out damned strong, pulling back from the impersonal feelings of Season 8 to focus on more personal, affecting stories of the Scooby Gang, and showing a willingness to hit on universal themes of young adulthood, like bad choices, binge drinking to point of memory-obscuring blackouts, and I forget the rest.

Season 9 quickly drove us into an area where the TV show excelled – putting us face to face with very serious issues related to being young (Examples: the death of a parent in Season 5’s The Body , or date rape in Season 6’s Seeing Red) – by implying that Buffy was pregnant and struggling to figure out what to do about it. That struggle goes on for two issues of soul-searching, pain and difficult decisions… only to be punted at the eleventh hour of issue 8 by revealing that “Buffy” is actually a Buffybot, meaning that the 47 previous pages of angst, agony and soul-searching wound up being as meaningful as your average Creed record. It was a copout that made Spider-Man’s One More Day look like Faust; this story looked less like Faust and more like The Devil In Miss Jones.

So here we are in issue 9, trying to justify a deus ex machina to get out of a controversial, yet human and affecting, story that makes “and then I woke up” look positively groundbreaking. And that explanation is that Andrew found a way to implant a living consciousness from a person into a robot. Now, I recognize that this is the Buffyverse, in which I have seen body switching, astral projection, and lesbian cunnilingus while singing showtunes. And I have been willing to accept all that as canon because it was magic, and therefore could follow whatever internal logic that the writers saw fit to put – or not put, as the case usually was – on top of it. But we’re talking robots here. And to be utterly indelicate: robots don’t shit.

Andrew can dither about all he wants that he “thought [he] figured out how to make the bot process food,” but robots are machines, not magic. Which means that they need to follow basic mechanical rules. So unless the Buffybot was designed to contain a silent blender, food press and a internal brown dye injector, at best she has been grunting half-masticated salads straight into the bowl every morning… or more likely, based on her complaining about being “barfy,” she has been yacking up chewed (but otherwise completely undigested) meals without ever taking an actual shit. And let’s step away from the bathroom analogies I love so much: a Buffybot’s teeth are artificial, and we have never seen Buffy take a dental mold to get the teeth right (because Warren built the Buffybot secretly). Imagine waking up one morning and finding that your teeth aren’t in the same spot, with the same feeling, in which you went to bed? Or that when you masturbate, it smells like Wesson Oil (Sorry; I can’t stay above the waist for that long)?

My point is, the idea that you can be shoved into an artificial body without knowing simply rings false. It feels like what it is: a rotten copout device to allow Buffy to have had a storyline about deciding about abortion without putting any actual character stakes behind it. It feels like a Goddamned cheat, like writer Andrew Chambliss wanted to play with the big boys, but was afraid to do it without a God Mode cheat. On a good day, he Mulliganed when the press heat got to be too much. On a bad day, he pussied out and decided that a young woman struggling with an unwanted pregnancy was a less compelling story than a robot trying to decide if it was human like Deckard in Blade Runner… which seems unlikely because he fucking misspelled “Deckard”.

The art by Cliff Richards serves the story well, even though it starts on its back foot by being in a series illustrated at times respectively by Georges Jeanty and Karl Moline. The most important thing to do in an adaptation – particularly an adaptation that is possibly the only comic book bought by hardcore Buffy and Angel fans – is to make the characters resemble their real-world actors, which Richards generally does… except in the case of Andrew. But that’s okay; I defy you to picture Andrew without referring to the Internet or your season six DVDs. Richards’s faces are expressive, if alternating between simple and 90s-style crosshatched where they don’t need to be, and his figures are realistic, which is saying something considering he has to draw some bug people on Spike’s spaceship (something I still can’t believe I need to write). This is not art that you will ever lose in an eBay auction, but you will know that Buffy is Buffy, Spike is Spike, and Andrew is some form of human being in a Mr. Spock shirt.

Buffy Season 9 started out with a ton of courage, telling human stories about Buffy that were of the type that made the TV series a genre classic and very soon out of the gate, telling stories that felt maybe even too big to have ever been told on a network show. The last issue copped out of the most powerful of those stories by making Buffy a robot, and this issue faced the unenviable task of making that reprehensible punt make some kind of Goddamned sense… and it does it badly. Bottom line: it does it in a way that forces me to think about whether or not Buffy The Vampire Slayer looks into a toilet after she shits… or has the self-awareness to even know whether she craps or not. And all so the writers can tell a serious story with an implied, “Backsies!”

Wait for the trade. Because the longer story has to get better than this.