"Together they face grand, overblown conflicts against an assortment of monsters both imaginary and rooted in actual myth."

Turn of the Screw was my favorite story we read so far,  and “Normal Again,” which shares it’s ambiguity and instability to an extent—leading clearly to multiple interpretations—is one of my favorite episodes.

In “Normal Again” and “Gingerbread House” Whedon is able to address issues of …normality… that are inherent in—probably intrinsic to—“Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” From the first episode we are asked to suspend a large portion of our disbelief, in this world of the not-usually-well-hidden supernatural that is often unseen by the general populace, even through countless deaths.

In “Gingerbread House”, as we discussed in class, we are shocked to step outside of the Buffy world to inhabit a more normal world, which then becomes the abnormal world (JAS’s words from class, not mine.) The Supernatural is seen and discussed by normal laypeople, who finally react to it as we might expect, which makes for several twistings of the Buffy screw*—even if at the end, in normal Buffy fashion (she does try to dress fashionably… oh wait, wrong use of the word) the laypeople all promptly forget about it.

            *(informally: 1^st “Someone with a Soul did this?” 2^nd Nope, it’s really a demon without a soul [2.5: Fairy Tales are Real …ish], 3^rd but because of that demon, people with souls did as bad/worse as the original crime thought to be done by an en-souled being… and this bit, it seems, is fairly overlooked by the Scooby Gang, just as the “laypeople” overlook the supernatural crimes. Also—what’s the titular gingerbread house, with connotation of being eaten? Perhaps the Buffy reality.)

“Normal Again” is even more insidious.

In “Normal Again” we are presented with two different realities; each relying on the unstable device of hallucination—either “Buffy” is in a mental institution or in Sunnydale, hallucinating she’s in whichever one she’s not. At first, it seems clear that the mental institution is the hallucination, but by the end we are unsure if the last scene depicts Buffy slipping into a final hallucination of the mental institution, or reality which Buffy slips away from—and twisted-ly, this latter seems more logical, at least aesthetically (as unstable of a reason as it is), as the episode ends with this universe.

By bringing criticisms up of the reality of Sunnydale (as was also done in “Gingerbread House” in an in-universe context) in the Mental Institution world, Whedon is able to bring the criticisms into the Sunnydale world by having Buffy voice them. Once brought in to the normal Buffy reality, they are allowed to become and dissipate. Ultimately, as subsequent episodes are in the Sunnydale universe, we as viewers except that that is either the reality of the whole show, or as good as, and thus the only thing left over is the reinforcement of reality brought by addressing the criticisms within the Buffy universe. Ultimately, this is the same effect “Gingerbread House” had, but stronger because the framing of the Mental Institution allows the Buffy universe to remain intact during its reality check examination.

In this way, “Normal Again,” is different than The Turn of the Screw in which we end up with zero or even negative information about what actually happened, because, even though in the single episode we end up with around zero information, in the context of the whole series, it gives us positive information—which seems to be a subtle part of it’s intent— by reinforcing the suspension of disbelief so integral to the series.