First some spoiler space. After all, every episode is somebody’s first…
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I have been re-listening to season two of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” recently. As you might recall, Buffy’s vampire-with-a-soul boyfriend Angel lost his soul and return to super-villainy and tight leather pants midway through the season. Evil!Angel Murders the one person who knows how to undo that process and, he thinks, destroys all records of the spell. But, being a 250 year old pseudo-Irishman, he doesn’t understand how computers work and merely trashes the monitor rather than looking for the file. Eventually, Buffy’s far more winsome BFF, Willow Rosenberg, discovers the documentation for the spell. She suggests that Giles try to perform it, but he warns her that magic of that level will have unpredictable consequences for the person channeling it. Eventually Willow does perform the spell. As she does so, she is visibly taken over by some outside force, and over the next few years dabbles more and more in the darker side of witchcraft until she goes all murdery when grieving for her even more winsome girlfriend Tara.
If Willow had not been the one to cast the spell restoring Angel’s soul,would she have gone all Dark Phoenix later? or was her corruption more the fault of the character flaws she had previously demonstrated?
I would post a poll the way I used to, but those were all just excuses to get opinions on recipes anyway, and it’s too much trouble doing that now.
It all depends on what Joe’s Whedon wanted to do. There are multiple ways for Willow to become evil later without her performing that particular spell. It’s even possible Whedon decided on evil Willow’s arc long after that episode and used that as the excuse (she definitely turned down the chance to be evil when the story called for it).
The Author Is Dead. I killed him myself. He insulted my apple turnovers. The question is what do you take the meaning of the completed dramatic work to be, not authorial intent.
(The above does not apply to Marti Noxon. While she too may have mocked my baking skills at one point, I do not harm chicks.)
I do not think that Willow’s brief possession by powerful forces while resouling Angel had anything to do with her later turn to evil. I always thought that Willow was possessed by the spirit of Jenny Calendar, who had wanted to restore Angel’s soul but had been killed before she could do so.
Willow’s turn to evil was inherent in her nature - her insecurity about her status among her friends led her to look for shortcuts, magical or not. For example, when she and Xander cheated with each other (on Oz and Cordelia), Willow tried to make it up to Oz by sleeping with him. When Willow gained magical powers, she turned to magic for her shortcuts - performing a delusting spell on her and Xander to solve the problem of temptation, erasing Tara’s memory to solve the problem of arguments, etc., etc. - gradually becoming less and less worried about the consequences of her actions, and turning to evil