Fear, Itself

I really disliked “Fear, Itself” and therefore have had trouble writing a blog post for it (I also got confused as to which episodes we were supposed to blog about). I’m not entirely sure why I’ve had so much trouble sitting down to write about it, I suppose part of it is that I don’t find the plot of this episode as witty as some of Joss Whedon’s other work. He uses a quintessential haunted house as the setting for an episode, which has a very anticlimactic ending, that he obviously did on purpose, but I still dislike it. In many ways, this is the closest that Whedon comes to critiquing Gothic tradition because he creates a the most stereotypical setting of all time and adds the most stereotypical antagonist of all: fear. Gothic tradition is based on the confrontation of fears and the fear of the unknown, which is precisely what this episode is about. Buffy, Willow, Xander, and Oz are forced into confronting their worst fears, but the end result isn’t that they actually dealt with their fears, rather they kill a little monster. Although it is clear that Whedon made the demon so small in order to demonstrate how inconsequential their fears are, the characters don’t actually deal with them or truly realize the implications of the episode. I don’t remember exactly how the rest of the season progresses from that point, but I don’t think that Buffy ever loses her fear of not succeeding.