“I may be dead, but I’m still pretty,” Buffy replies to the Master, who thought he had already killed her, with the fresh air of confidence and courage in her. The quote from the first season finale episode called “Prophecy Girl” mainly highlights Buffy’s struggle in maneuvering her dual identities as a teenager and a Slayer so far, where she confronts her inevitable death and takes her fate into her own hands for the sake of trying to save humanity.
The episode revolves around Buffy initially resisting a prophecy that she will die facing the Master and ended up killing him afterward, with subplots of the spring prom and high school romance. This episode was Joss Whedon, the series creator’s, directorial debut, was what the BBC reviewed as a “very satisfying conclusion” to the first season in “true cliffhanger style” ("BBC – Cult – Buffy – Episode Guide – Prophecy Girl"). Despite low budgets, “Prophecy Girl” managed to subvert the television trope of spring dance being a huge moment for any teenage girl.
‘Prophecy Girl’ was also the episode where Buffy’s character development was the most prominent, including other characters as well, which reinforce themes of identity crises.
Narrative is defined as the process through which a story is voiced in both fictional and non-fictional media tents. One of the most known theories by Tzvetan Todorov, a French-Bulgarian theorist, states that most storylines or plots follow a similar pattern in five stages: Initial equilibrium, Disruption, Disruption recognized, Attempt to regain equilibrium and New equilibrium (Mckenzie).
The first stage, Initial Equilibrium, is where everything is under control. This is also the stage where the characters are introduced. Thus, to summarise ‘Prophecy Girl’, the first stage begins with normal teenage issues, where Xander is practising his lines to Willow, who has a huge crush on him, to ask Buffy out to the spring dance, and Cordelia is seen making out with her new boyfriend in the car. It also portrays Buffy fighting off the vampires, where the second stage occurs in the form of the earthquake and the Master, the villain, revels in it. This signals the beginning of the main conflict, leading to the third stage, where, Miss Calendar, Giles’ assistant, was telling him about the apocalyptic signs, and the other characters realizing that the Master is coming. Next, the characters attempt to repair the damage. In ‘Prophecy Girl’, Giles is frantically searching ways to reverse the prophecy, even roping Angel, a vampire, to help. Xander and Angel begrudgingly partnered up to save Buffy, who faced her fate and took the challenge to defeat the Master, and Cordelia, Willow and Miss Calendar fights off vampires trying to enter the library. Finally, the problem is resolved, returning back to normal. When Buffy defeated the Master, with the help of the gang, they went to the spring dance, back to the normal teenage routine.
On the surface, Todorov’s theory seems to meet the narrative of Prophecy Girl, however, we can see that there are key elements in the episode that the theory does not take into account, which will be explained more.
As mentioned previously, Todorov’s narrative theory seems short-sighted when it returns back to equilibrium. Thus, it may not be applicable to serialized television shows like Buffy in its simplest forms because it does not explain the multiple subplots that is simultaneously in play with the main plot.
A serialized television show contains narrative arcs in episodic storytelling that is connected by unresolved cliffhangers between each episodes. This is achieved by “intertwining multiple storylines into a complicated web of interdependencies and thematic resonance” (Armbrust 2).
In ‘Prophecy Girl’, the episode portrays the intertwining storylines between the spring dance, high school romance and Buffy confronting the Master. Despite Buffy’s efforts in reversing the prophecy being the main plot, it is dependent on the accompanying subplots to thematically mirror and reinforce the theme of the main plot, which is the identity struggle Buffy faces between being a Slayer and a teenager.
The opening scene show two subplots concurrently occuring; Xander practising various ways to ask Buffy out to the spring dance on Willow, who has a crush on Xander, and Cordelia making out in a car with her new boyfriend, Kevin. At the same time, Buffy is fighting off three vampires, as what Willow refers to as “the usual”.
The juxtaposition between Buffy fulfilling her role as a Slayer while her friends are having a normal teenage life reinforces the importance of Buffy’s role as a Slayer in protecting the world from the evil, but at the cost of Buffy’s own personal desire to be a normal teenager. This thus links to the struggle she faces in trying to find a consensus between these two distinct identities of her, one of the major themes, not only in ‘Prophecy Girl’, but also in the first season.
The short-sightedness in returning back to equilibrium, seems too simplified, where, “solving one instability could come at the expense of another stability” (Mckenzie). This means that even if the issue may be solved, it does not necessarily return to a new equilibrium, rather the creation of a new problem.
In the ending of ‘Prophecy Girl’, when Buffy revived from the dead, she “feels strong [and] different”, and ready to confront the Master once again. The new equilibrium here could be Buffy’s journey of acceptance of adulthood and responsibility of her role as a Slayer, where her revival from death signify her losing her ‘childlikeness’, which ended up in her defeating the Master. However, in the first episode of the second season, ‘When She Was Bad’, she expresses her trauma by attempting to alienate her friends, which portrays her continued struggle with her Slayer self throughout the rest of the second season.
Thus, while Todorov’s narrative theory do provide the basis of the narrative of the series, the complex multi-layered narrative of Buffy is not given the in-depth explanation when solely based on this theory.
Style refers to the different techniques, especially related to the production of the television dramas, such as setting, lighting, videography and editing, to set moods, construct meanings or form narratives related to the television drama. There are many types of television style conventions, however, in this essay we will discuss 4 of the stylistics elements, namely, descriptive stylistics, analytic stylistics (interpretation) and feminist stylistics.
Semiotics explains descriptive stylistics in detail (Butler 4). Semiotics is defined as the study of signs and symbols and its purpose in many forms. He “divides television’s stylistic codes into ‘technical codes’ governing television’s image and sound techniques and ‘social codes’, sets of conventions of dress, hair style and the like that belong to the host culture” (Butler 4). Both of these codes, however, are important in relating to the construction of the meanings of the episode, or the cultural significance of the series as a whole.
Analytic stylistics “depend upon explicit or implicit assumptions about style’s purpose and function in the [episode]” (Butler 11). Explicit assumptions are completely revealed without ambiguity whereas implicit assumptions are not conveyed and could go unseen. In relation to television style, one must analyse the patterns of these assumptions and interpret the relationships between these patterns to link to the construction of the intended meanings of the episode.
Feminist stylistics relates to what and how “gender concerns are linguistically encoded in texts” (Montoro). Especially in this age, ‘gender concerns’ now has a variety of meanings, and as such, the notion of gender becomes more abstract and non-binary.
We will see how the above stylistics are applicable to ‘Prophecy Girl’, and the series as a whole.
As mentioned in the introduction, ‘Prophecy Girl’ portrays character developments mostly in Buffy, but also in other characters to portray the identity struggles of Buffy and other characters.
Buffy’s growth as a character is the most prominent in this episode. As mentioned, Buffy’s character development is seen through her trying to navigate her conflicting identities of being a teenage girl and a Slayer. For example, when Buffy overhears a conversation between Angel and Giles, who were discussing about Buffy’s fate, Buffy replied in the most heartbreaking and emotional way, saying, “Giles, I'm sixteen years old. I don't wanna die”. This scene becomes one of the major highlights of this episode, where it dawns on the viewers, after the previous 11 episodes, that, behind her fierce demeanour, there lies a young girl who has yet to enjoy her teenage years to its fullest and is fearful in having to deal with her biggest challenge yet, alone. The fact that she has to choose either sacrificing her life in service to the world or achieving her own personal desire to be a normal teenage girl allows audiences, especially teenage girls, to sympathise and relate to their own personal struggles. Here, we can use descriptive stylistics through the form of melodrama. Buffy effectively exhibits all the five stages of grief in this particular scene; where she denies what she overheard by using humour, followed by her anger towards Giles on why she did not know earlier and why he does not seem to be helping her avoid the prophecy, which leads to her bargaining by choosing to quit, which of course as a Slayer, it is not as simple as that, and thus her being depressed about it when she realises there is no way out of this. Although her accepting her fate and responsibility as a Slayer comes later after Willow’s emotional breakdown, Gellar’s performance of Buffy through her exaggerated hand gestures and her controlled tone enhances Buffy’s struggle in choosing between her public duty and her personal desire. The technical aspect of this scene is where the visualization of her emotions is done through the “creation of dead space in the compositions of those medium one-shots”, while the intensity of the moment is captured in the “gradually tightening framing of the close-ups” (Wilcox et al, 38). Here, the analytics stylistics seen in the dead space, or negative space, which helps focus our attention on Buffy’s struggle in choosing either one of her two conflicting identities and the tightened close-ups, to exaggerate Buffy’s emotions by drawing the audience into Buffy’s personal space to feel emotionally connected and sympathetic to Buffy’s struggle makes the scene even more emotionally impactful.
Giles is also portrayed in going through an identity struggle, where he is conflicted between his dual roles as a Watcher, which also includes him being the librarian, and Buffy’s surrogate father figure. In Buffy’s melodramatic scene above, Giles’ answers towards Buffy is constantly cut short by Buffy’s outburst. This shows Giles’s hesitance in answering Buffy’s anger towards Giles who did not inform her about her Slayer heritage, as seen by Buffy’s rage towards Giles and throwing books at him, yelling, “Read me the signs! Tell me my fortune! You’re so useful, sitting here with all of your books. You’re really a lot of help!”. Giles’s hesitance in being completely truthful towards Buffy regarding her Slayer heritage stems “from his fatherly affection for her” (Williams 62). We can analyse this through the juxtaposition between his inability to finish his sentences and his purpose to translate old texts to new ones to help Buffy fight the master relates to his own personal anxieties in the struggle he faces when it comes to either protecting Buffy or fulfilling his role as a Watcher.
Buffy reviving from the dead, ready to fight the Master once more, dressed in a white gown, that looks similar to a wedding dress, is a classic representation of Buffy subverting the “traditional gender binaries of the horror and action genres” (De Vido 1) where usually, the blond damsel-in-distress needs to be saved by a man. Buffy being in this ‘wedding’ dress look-alike signifies her ‘marriage’ to Slayerhood, where we can use descriptive stylistics to explain that as a result of this commitment to the job, she has to sacrifice the normalcy of her own life (Married to the Job), which adds to the identity struggle she faces as a teenager and a Slayer, a recurring theme throughout the series.
Buffy fighting the Master in a wedding dress is an apt example of the use of feminist stylistics. She is ‘owning’ these two identities, one of her being a teenage girl getting ready to go to prom, another is of her ready to defeat the Master. Buffy is “frequently underestimated by her opponents because of her feminine clothing, which do not concur with the combat gear-clad body that conventionally signifies a character's heroic, powerful status” (De Vido 4). In this particular scene, Buffy destabilises both of her two conflicting identities and emcompasses both. Her newly formed identity is stable to a certain extent as there are instances where her surroundings are not accepting to this and thus chooses to undermine her to solely fit into one identity.
Buffy is a prime example of genre television in the early 2000s, where Whedon effectively uses arc television drama to contrast the teenage identity struggles with vampires and demons. ‘Prophecy Girl’ became a hit due to the episode transcending the boundaries between contrasting genres and crossed meanings which produces cliffhangers, making the episode a good ending to the first season.