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Date Posted: 21:51:51 10/31/05 Mon
Author: Finn Mac Cool
Subject: Pay attention to tone and not logistics
In reply to: Sunshine 's message, "The amulet" on 15:01:48 10/31/05 Mon

When rewatching "Chosen" after the first viewing I made special care to pay attention to that scene, and guess what? When the amulet activates, the Slayers don't seem to be losing. It starts to go all sparkly about the same time we see Buffy get up, knock back five Turok-Han, and proceed to kick butt with the rest of the Slayers. The amulet's activation didn't come at a moment when things looked hopeless; it came at a moment of rising music, images of young girls taking down hordes of Turok-Han, and a tone of impending victory. You can argue there's no way they could have won, but that argument is based largely off of the first appearance of a Turok-Han in "Bring on the Night" and "Showtime." There's certainly an argument to be made that it was lazy writing or poorly done, but the Turok-Han army in the season finale was either much weaker than the first Turok-Han, the whole cast were much better fighters by the end of the season, or Buffy was a lot more off her game then we originally thought she was back in "Bring on the Night." However you look at it, the fight in "Chosen" clearly showed the good guys doing pretty well against the Turok-Han. Anya of all people managed to kill more than one of the suckers, and she was one of the least skilled fighters in the entire cast. If she can take down a few Turok-Han with only Andrew as backup, then it seems entirely possible that two or three dozen Slayers could take on the force we saw. Yes, the majority of the Turok-Han army was destroyed by Spike with the amulet, but what we had been shown in "Chosen" and the tone of the scene when the amulet activates implies the Slayer army would have defeated the evil vampires. The amulet served three purposes, none of which where allowing the Scooby Gang to win. Purpose 1 - It sealed up the Hellmouth for good so that, even though the First Evil is eternal, it wouldn't be able to just try to do this all over again after its army was killed. Purpose 2 - It gave Spike a martyr's death, complete with great imagery and last words (it's hard to give a vampire dying words, since almost anything that kills them does so in a matter of seconds). Purpose 3 - It ended the battle quickly; while the Slayers could have killed the entire vampire army, it would have taken a long time to show every single vamp being killed; the amulet solved that pacing problem.

As far as Dana goes, I do think it is a case of the ends justifying the means. Yes, the victims' families might not see it that way, but that's why people related to the victim of a crime aren't allowed to be members of the jury: they're naturally going to be more emotional and quick to blame then other people. Let's say that, of all the Slayers created, a hundred decide to use their powers to do good (judging by the fact that a dozen Slayers we had never seen before were sent to retrieve Dana, I'm guessing that's a fair estimate). Let's say that the Slayers average fifty vampire slayings each in their entire lives (a low estimate even when you consider how overworked Buffy was due to the Hellmouth and being the only one), and that each vampire they kill would have otherwise gone on to kill, on average, three people (a very low estimate). That means, by performing that spell, 15,000 lives were saved, and that's not even counting future generations affected by this spell. Would you really be willing to give that up because a few people like Dana use their powers for homicidal purposes before being stopped? I get the uneasy feeling I'm drawing a gun ownership metaphor, and I'd like to say that my feelings on that issue are more ambivalent, mainly because the ability to kill becomes less important when there are police to deal with the big problems and more morally ambiguous when there are only other people to kill rather than demonic entities from beyond the grave.

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