Warren Meers: Short drabble, long meta

[beer_good_foamy]

Right, so I'm going to make like Tolstoy and offer up my Warren piece. I've got a 100-word drabble and a 2500-word meta; act now and I'll throw in a bag of knives too.

Polly Shouldn't Be
Timeline: roughly 6 months before “The Long Way Home”

”Happy birthday!”

The candles throw shadows across the cave, but Warren’s slimy fingers pass right through the birthday cake. “Right. Just a glamour.” He bites back a vicious comment. “Well, I guess it’s the thought that counts. But... my birthday’s in January?”

“It’s two years since I raised you from the dead.”

“Wow. Time sure flies when you’re trapped under tons of rock with nothing but crushed übervamps to eat. Thanks, I guess. Again. Hey, how about as a birthday gift, you get us OUT OF THIS EX-HELLMOUTH?”

“Patience, sweetie.” Amy coughs. “The army should find us any month now.”

---

And then, the meta:

Night of the Living Dead Geeks

Last thoughts (yeah right) on the big s8 "retcon". You know which one. I don’t know if this covers any new ground, but I wanted to get it down. It gets longish.

There's an old joke about a guy who goes to the circus, and when he comes back his wife asks him how it was.

- Well, they had the most boring escape artist I ever saw.

- Really? What was boring about him?

- Well, they put him in a straitjacket...

- And then he got out of it?

- Well, no, then they wrapped a chain around him and padlocked it.

- And then he got out?

- Well, no, then they put him in a big steel box and welded it shut.

- And then he got out?

- Well, no, then they dropped the box in a huge tank of water.

- So he's in a straitjacket, in chains, in a sealed box, underwater?

- Yup.

- Wow. And then he got out?

- Hell no. Told you it was boring.

...I was re-reading s8 #1-4 and mulling over the Warren thing, as I have been known to do. Initially, my reaction was pretty much “NO! Warren dead! Joss stupid! This no happen!”, but the more I think about it, it can work without breaking continuity. Let’s see if we can try to clear up exactly what the deal is with the former Mr Meers.

SkinlessWarren’s exact words to Willow are:



Now, if we give Joss some credit and assume that he's not completely forgotten “Villains”, and assuming SkinlessWarren isn’t lying (after all, it's a "No Mr Bond, I expect you to die" scenario), this is interesting. You don’t need a stopwatch to know that a LOT more than four seconds pass between Willow ripping his skin off and… whatever happens when that fire blazes up. By my reckoning, it’s about 15.8 seconds; that means that given the four-second window, there's a very simple solution to how Warren survives.

Much like the escape artist in the joke, he doesn't. He can’t possibly.

Now hang on, hang on; I’m not just going to say “Joss is wrong!”, I’m going someplace with this. SkinlessWarren’s own words confirm that he dies “of shock alone”. Once those four seconds have passed – and coincidentally, we see his body go limp just over four seconds after Willow rips his skin off – he’s not dying, or half-dead, or comatose, or non-semi-pseudo-magically-supernaturally-quasi-un-dead. He’s Tara-dead, Joyce-dead, Kendra-dead, Jenny-dead, dead from natural causes – which, as Joss makes a point of telling us a few pages later, cannot be reversed by just anyone. (Wolfram & Hart do it – maybe – with Connor and Darla, but if Willow can’t do it even by s8, I think it’s a safe assumption that Amy can’t either.)

AMY: The rest of us… we had to work twice as hard to be half as good.
- The Killer in Me

So ironically, SkinlessWarren's explanation of how Amy could have saved him means that she failed to save him. Even if she can "think on her feet", even if she can somehow read Willow’s mind to know at exactly which split second she has to pull Warren’s body out of there and make it look like Willow sets fire to him (which I still have trouble buying), even if she managed to trick Anya (who, just a few seconds earlier, knew that Warren was still alive), even if she somehow manages to teleport Warren’s body to wherever she’s at, and yes, even if she really gives enough of a rat’s (which is to say her own) ass about this Warren guy to go to all the trouble simply to spite Willow… that's all irrelevant; she still fails in keeping him alive. Assuming the TV series is still canon, which I guess is another debate, and unless Amy is secretly Illyria and knows how to travel in time, that four-second window stated in the comics can only mean that she’s about 11.8 seconds too late*, and what she ends up with is a skinless, slightly singed, and utterly, completely, stone dead body (and possibly a ruined carpet). The explanation still jars a bit, but we’re back in continuity; the short and long of it is that Willow still killed Warren, freeing him up for returning as The First in s7.

* Does this sound like an insignificant detail? Well, why doesn't Joss simply have him say "20 seconds" and give himself a clear margin? Hey, Tara had a second or two to step away from the window when Warren started firing; she didn’t, and any plot line arising from the idea that she might have will be irrevocably AU. Same diff.

GUNN: Dead! So dead! So very, very dead. Just how dead are you, huh?
- Billy

That was the first point. So if Warren's dead, what is that thing allegedly lobotomizing Willow in “The Long Way Home”? Well, hey, this is the Buffyverse; think "Some Assembly Required", "The Zeppo", "The Thin Dead Line". With basic magic knowledge, the right ingredients and a monkey wrench, anyone can bring naturally dead people back – not to life, but to unlife. That’s an important distinction; we’ll get back to that in a minute. Suffice to say Warren seems to be aware of this:



So what is he now? A zombie? That’s a matter of definition, I guess. Most zombie movies make up their own rules, and the Buffyverse being the postmodern hodgepodge it is, just about anything goes. Besides, no self-respecting zombie story uses that word anyway.

ED: Any zombies out there?
SHAUN: Don't say that!
ED: What?
SHAUN: That!
ED: What?
SHAUN: The Z word. Don't say it!
ED: Why not?
SHAUN: Because it's ridiculous!
ED: Alright... are there any out there though?
- Shaun of the Dead

So let’s just call SkinlessWarren a reanimated corpse. He’s dead, but thanks to Amy, he's still jumping around. Most of his brain functions seem intact, and despite the lack of skin he's nimble enough to at least hold a scalpel (exactly what he does with it will probably remain a mystery), so let's say Amy used the same spell that Jack did when he raised his buddies in "The Zeppo", or something very similar. It would even explain why he looks exactly as he did when he died (well, minus the bullet wound, but let's file that with Willow's red flashback hair).

Problem solved? Nnnot quite. Because now we get to the WHY SkinlessWarren is back – not from Amy’s perspective, but rather from Joss’, and this is the reason the escape-artist epiphany (OK, it’s not that revelatory, but humour me) still makes me think this is a bad idea: there’s a hell of a difference, plotwise, between a live Warren (which might have been interesting, but impossible) and an undead one (which is what we’ve got). Many readers have remarked that it should be interesting for Willow to have to face Warren - after all, she has never shown all that much remorse over killing him; quite a lot over almost killing everyone else, and for being the kind of person who would kill someone, but not for Warren being dead. Considering what he did that’s hardly surprising, but still:

WILLOW: I killed him for a reason!
- The Killer In Me

True, that would be interesting, expecially considering that Willow in s8 seems to show an unhealthy tendency to be a little too self-complacent... but IMO, there’s a couple of things here that will make it difficult for Joss to tell that story using Warren:

Past wrongdoings coming back to haunt you is nothing new to the Jossverse, of course, it’s a matter that’s been covered thoroughly (especially on Angel), from “Lie To Me” right up until “Why We Fight”, not to mention that great cloud scene in Serenity. (Arguably, Willow herself faced a metaphor of it when Gnarl tried to kill her by stripping her skin off.) If you create a monster, it will come back and bite you in the ass. Or neck. But Warren, in life, was a self-made man (literally - are there any Warren/Warrenbot shippers out there?). He showed worrying signs of sociopathic behaviour in his very first appearance on the show, he then spiraled (heh) throughout s6, and by the time Willow took up the hunt he already had several attempted murders, two successful ones, attempted rape and various petty crime under his belt. Not to mention a sense of entitlement and lust for revenge a mile wide. When offered a last chance at remorse, his exact words were:

WARREN: I'm gonna walk away from this - and when I do, you're gonna beg to go join your little girlfriend. (...) Because you deserved it, bitch!
- Villains

Does this make him a monster that deserves being tortured to death? I guess it depends on your view of what is justice; personally I tend to think that if this were the real world, he should be in jail making special friends with Roscoe the weightlifter for 50 years or so. On a cool-calm-and-collected level, Buffy’s speech holds up:

BUFFY: So the human world has its own rules for dealing with people like him-
XANDER: Yeah, we all know how well those rules work.
BUFFY: Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don't. We can't control the universe.
- Villains

So even if Willow’s actions can be understood, they are unmistakably wrong, by our rules and by the Buffyverse’s. Perhaps she's never paid the full price for what she did – and yes, I'm aware of the fact that the whole atonement thing aside, Willow's death count is equal to Warren's, and that some people have reported that Roz the weightliftress is lonely for a cell mate now that Faith's out. (Sidebar: Willow's activation of all the potentials could be seen as either her ultimate atonement or, depending on how the s8 storyline goes, a snafu that makes flaying Warren look like crushing a mosquito.) But here’s the kicker: she’s responsible for Warren’s death, but unlike what Angelus did to William, Penn and that unnamed girl who became Drusilla, unlike what Ripper and Ethan ended up doing to Jenny in “The Dark Age”, or unlike what Walter Kindall in "Damage" did to Dana, Willow can’t be held responsible for Warren’s actions. She made him a messy, icky corpse, but she didn’t make him a vindictive killer, and if he’s now an undead monster running around lobotomizing cartoons, that’s Amy’s doing. Willow is not facing something she’s created, but a rerun of something she’s faced (and given its face) before. Only this time, with the moral ambiguity mostly removed.

Because sure, meeting Warren again could be either a wake-up call or a signal for descent into darkness for Willow (hopefully the latter, as it’s very ambiguous whether Willow has a problem to wake up to right now) but the impact of it is very much weakened by the distinction I mentioned earlier: this is not Warren. It’s Warren’s reanimated undead corpse. Which means that, to quote another Willow fan, “time’s up. Rules change”.

BUFFY: C'mon, we fight monsters. This is what we do. They show up, they scare us, I beat 'em up and they go away. This isn't any different!
- The Dark Age

Slayage can be funny (Xander dispatching zombies in “The Zeppo” using mailboxes and coke machines), angsty (Buffy staking Billy Fordham, Dawn stopping ZombieJoyce), or just another day on the job (every redshirt Sunnydale resident who gets vamped). But with (very) few exceptions, if you’re an evil monster, it’s what’s for dinner. Angel feels remorse for what he did to Lawson in "Why We Fight", but there’s never any question about staking him.

The great thing about Warren as a villain was this:

XANDER: I'm just saying - he's just as bad as any vampire you've sent to Dustville.
BUFFY: Being a slayer doesn't give me a license to kill. Warren's human.

In a season all about dealing with the realities of life, he was perfect; non-metaphorical, non-slayable, outside the scoobies’ jurisdiction. Buffy could no more stop him than she could Willow –

ANYA: You can't. Something else Giles said. No magic or supernatural force can stop her.
BUFFY: What does that mean?
ANYA: I don't know. He said "the Slayer can't stop her."
- Grave

- since that’s not the Slayer’s job. The Slayer stops monsters – metaphorical ones – but once you strip away the metaphor and make it real, she’s as powerless as any of us. Buffy can fight manifestations of life and death; she can’t fight life and death itself (remember the last scene of “The Body”?), she can't fight grief, and she can’t fight ordinary stupidity and cruelty. There’s a reason she never kicked principal Snyder’s ass.

But by making Warren just another monster, that delicious little problem is solved in one Gordian swoop. For SkinlessWarren's reappearance to truly make Willow re-examine her actions, there has to be a conflict – do I kill him, do I forgive him, do I heal him… But the explanation Joss gives us leaves no other option: he’s dead. He doesn’t have a soul, he can't be fixed and he’s harming others: if you wake Buffy at 3AM (assuming she’s asleep and not out slaying vampires) and quiz her on whether SkinlessWarren meets the slay-on-sight criteria, her response would be a crystal clear “uh-huh”. If Willow was wrong in killing him the first time, all those pesky grey areas have now been removed, should she or anyone else get a second chance. All that remains is tracking him down and killing him, which frankly doesn’t make for very good drama. This doesn't mean that Willow is "whitewashed" in any way; her previous actions remain exactly the same. The problem is that the available future actions are simply business as usual.

And it’s at this point that I have to confess that after prattling on for five pages in Word, I don’t have a conclusion. I still don’t get it. It seems like a lot of hassle to bring Warren back, have him escape with his unlife, only to put him out of his misery later. I could have bought it if Willow or Buffy (or Satsu – give her some character development) had slayed (or is it slewn?) him right there at the end of 8.04 and angsted a bit about it, but not to stretch it out over several episodes; except to us fans, there's no conflict in Warren's existence, and his arc died with him. Warren is a reminder, a mirror image yada yada yada, but what exactly is he supposed to DO? If he’s going to keep popping up now and then with nothing more to add than “Mwahaha! I’m evOl!”, too psycho to come up with any real plans, and offering no harder decision for the scoobies than exactly what kind of sword to kill him with, then colour me…



(Though, for a view on s8 which brings up the good sides – of which there are certainly a few, and the harder you look the better they are, check out stormwreath's latest meta.)

Comments

[beer-good-foamy.livejournal.com]

Via elisi, although I’m thinking I should friend you anyway.

Go right ahead if you want, I'll be happy to friend you back (my flist is getting a little unmanageable, so I hope that doesn't sound like bartering...)

(although even Xander can revitalise the merely clinically dead).

Sure, so did Pamela Anderson in Baywatch every week. :-) But the point is, he doesn't say that she had 4 seconds before he went into shock, but before he died of shock. Then he's NOT merely clinically dead, but... well, dead. I can come up with 3 or 4 reasons why the Slayer mechanism would work with clinical death (lack of modern medicine at the shadowmen's time, Slayers being more efficient the younger they are, the need for the shadowmen to control the Slayer, etc) but if you shoot someone and then rip their skin off, we're not talking about a mere case of respiratory arrest anymore.

Finding that the one positive thing Willow thought she’d achieved (removing the threat Warren posed to future Taras) was an illusion makes things more complicated not less for her.

Which is a good point, though I'm not sure Willow was thinking about future Taras so much as about Taras past when she killed Warren. She may have rationalized it that way later. But how does the "don't kill humans" rule work with that? Is it OK to kill humans if they pose a threat?

As for Amy being the significant villain, I'm not much more enthusiastic about that one, frankly. At least Warren had an arc once; Amy was never more than a trickster who showed up whenever they needed some black magic (not completely unlike Ethan Rayne). Though unlike Ethan, Amy tended to shift personality and ability to fit the story, and I really don't see her carrying a whole (or part of a whole) season. She used to be fun in small doses, but Spike/Dru/Angelus she ain't.

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

Hmm...barter, interesting. No, boring. But did it anyway.

Some times I wish I wasn't a biologist. Died of shock, I would assume, means goes into cardiac arrest (ie clinical death) as a result of reduced blood flow. Within the ~4 seconds Amy has to to do the equivalent of getting Warren to suck her witchy blood so that when he dies he undies. Either way he's dead, the First can appear as him and Buffy can slay him with impunity. He can however taunt her with her own lack of humanity and thus add his 2 cents to the drip, drip, drip of seasonal self-doubt.

I do rather like the idea of Amy finally getting an arc (Warren was a one-shot robot plot supplier once). Like stormweath argues she's a good mirror for Willow and both her mother and her identity issues give her relevance to Buffy's too.

[beer-good-foamy.livejournal.com]

Died of shock, I would assume, means goes into cardiac arrest (ie clinical death) as a result of reduced blood flow.

Heh. As a non-biologist - as, I expect, most of Joss' readers (and Joss himself) are - I tend to read it as, well, "dying of shock". And then I do the obvious thing and look up "dying of shock" on wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_%28medical%29):

At this stage, the vital organs have failed and the shock can no longer be reversed. Brain damage and cell death have occurred. Death will occur imminently.

Granted, that's the final stage, but I expect in a case like this a body could go all four stages in very quick succession (much like, I believe, gunshot victims can do). Feel free to correct me on that; like I said, I'm not an expert.

Though in a way, your explanation - that she does something unexplained and undetectable (even to two very might creatures such as Willow and Anya) within those four seconds, not to save Warren's life but to prepare him for resurrection (which would be the first time we've heard of anything like that being necessary - it wasn't in "The Zeppo" - but I can ignore that) puts an even darker spin on what Amy does to him. That's not a bad thing. But in the end, it comes down to the same thing: Warren's dead as a dodo. A dodo who's been shot and skinned. Whether Amy resurrects him "from scratch" afterwards or starts it in the seconds before he dies doesn't matter; it's still a natural - irreversible - death.

[elisi]

Is it OK to kill humans if they pose a threat?
And again we're back in 'Angel' territory... just see Lindsey. Lindsey wasn't killed for vengeance or because he was a monster - Angel got rid of him for crimes he *might* commit. Much like the way the General wants to wipe out the Slayers for the threat they might pose...

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

Chronologically speaking, they addressed the issue earlier on BtVS with the whole "what do you do with an boy like Ben?" question that came up in The Gift. Buffy answered it one way, Giles another. Willow, I suspect, would side with Giles now and completely agree that, at least with respect to Warren, that it would be a case of post hoc rationalisation. Still, Willow is a rational person and in this case her analytical ends may justify her means.

[elisi]

Hmmmm. Ben was a victim of Glory (I know it's more complicated than that, but...). Lindsey was a self-made man with pretty non-existant morals and a willingness to use and sacrifice others in pursuit of his own goals. Give him super powers and multiply him, and he is what General Voll fears.

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

Ben was killed for what he *might* do as Glory (or spared by Buffy in spite of that risk). I thought that was the original point, killing humans who pose a threat.

Voll isn't claiming that Buffy and her slayers are *amoral* monsters with super powers but too moral (for values of morality that humanity has yet to agree on) and/or unable to control their inner Glorys.

[elisi]

Ben was killed for what he *might* do as Glory
No, Glory was a different person. Ben was collateral damage.

The Slayer problem is different. Glory was an insane, megalomaniac Hell God. Every Slayer is a human with enhanced abilities and the ability to cause a huge amount of damage if they go down the wrong path. They each have the potential to be either Darth Vader or Luke Skywalker. Is it worth the risk to hope that most of them will turn out to be Luke?

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

You mean Ben *isn't* Glory?

In any case killing Ben killed Glory so for practical purpose they were the same.

Personally I think the whole idea of Slayers having a dark side due to the demonic origins of their supernatural strength and not their human hearts and minds is a bunch of hog hooey but the idea that their being part demon is in itself cause for concern is not dismissed so casually on the show (insert recent set of 'darkness quotes). General Voll's speech very much suggests that he's concerned about about all the monstrous Slayer spawn not just individuals who turn to the dark side of the force and that:

the demon in them will say one thing. "Slay."

I and others in his organisation may disagree with him about the nature of the Slayer problem (if there is a problem) but all we have on paper is those words.

[beer-good-foamy.livejournal.com]

Personally I think the whole idea of Slayers having a dark side due to the demonic origins of their supernatural strength and not their human hearts and minds is a bunch of hog hooey

Exactly. That's a running theme throughout both series.

ANGEL: It's not the demon in me that needs killing, Buffy. It's the man.

It's about power; not where the power comes from, but how you use it. Buffy's greatest mistakes stem not from her superpowers, but from her human insecurities. Willow's problems don't start with her learning magic. This doesn't mean that the power - the temptation to use it for less than good purposes or in less than good ways - can't be a problem; but it's more complicated than Twilight (assuming Voll speaks for them) seem to believe.

[beer-good-foamy.livejournal.com]

Lindsey wasn't killed for vengeance or because he was a monster - Angel got rid of him for crimes he *might* commit.

Sidebar: the don't-kill-humans rule is really restricted to BtVS; Angel kills humans now and then if it's necessary. Does that make it right? Probably not. (Viz his speech to Illyria in "Shells" being interrupted by Wesley's execution of Knox.) What's the phrase, "serve no master but your own ambition"?

But yeah, the sidebar. The monsters in BtVS are (or at least started as) metaphors. Hence they can be killed. Humans cannot, since they are "real". Which just supports my point: if Warren is there as a mirror image for Buffy-the-monster rather than Buffy-the-human, then he's a metaphor and he can be killed.

I'll just say metaphor a few more times, so I get to sound like a broken record. :-)

[stormwreath.livejournal.com]

As for Amy being the significant villain, I'm not much more enthusiastic about that one, frankly (...) and I really don't see her carrying a whole (or part of a whole) season.

To be honest, I don't think she's supposed to. It's Twilight who are the Big Bad this season (of course from their perspective they're the heroes and Buffy is the Big Bad). However, they're unfamiliar new characters; plus as a secretive behind-the-scenes conspiracy, there's not much the writers can do to personalise them and make them come alive for the reader, or seem like a clear and present danger to Buffy instead of a long-term threat. So instead, Joss brought in Amy and Warren to act as their hired strike team; a familiar face (and lack of face) among the strangeness.

Amy is no more the Big Bad of this season than Mr Trick was of season 3, in my opinion.

[elisi]

Amy is no more the Big Bad of this season than Mr Trick was of season 3, in my opinion.
Going with *that* parallel I want someone to kill Amy to save Buffy's life.

That might almost make the storyline worth it. Bring the angst, please!