Intervention

"Intervention" is the eighteenth episode in the fifth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Plot synopsis

Buffy and the BuffyBot

At the Summers's home after dinner, Buffy confesses to Giles that she's worried about her ability to love. Giles suggests he and Buffy go to a sacred location in the desert so that she can undergo a vision quest. When they arrive, Giles performs a ritual to create Buffy's guide. A mountain lion appears and directs Buffy into an open desert that reminds her of her dream from "Restless."

Glory orders her minions to watch the Slayer and see who is new and special in her life, as that person is likely to be the Key. That night, one of the minions watches the group through a window; Dawn secretly takes Anya's earrings from a table.

Spike receives his Buffybot from Warren, commissioned in "I Was Made to Love You". Spike and his Buffybot pretend to fight, which inevitably leads to sex. While Spike is sleeping it off, the Buffybot heads out to patrol for vampires. She runs into Xander and Anya in a graveyard and successfully masquerades as Buffy. Later, Xander and Anya oversee Spike and the Buffybot having sex in the cemetery, and shocked, Xander goes to confront them. However, Glory's minions assume Spike is the Key, and knock Xander unconscious and take Spike. Glory is upset when she sees Spike, as she knows a vampire cannot be the Key. Nevertheless, she decides to torture him in hopes that he knows where the Key is.

Buffy wakes to find the First Slayer on the opposite side of a large fire. The First Slayer advises Buffy that love is at the center of all Slayers and that love will bring Buffy to her gift. When Buffy asks "What gift?", the First Slayer tells her death is her gift.

Worried about Spike, the Buffybot leaves Xander unconscious at the crypt and goes to the Summers' residence for help. Willow sternly talks to the Buffybot (whom she mistakes for Buffy) about her sexual relationship with Spike, until realizing Glory has a captive who knows that Dawn is the Key, and the gang prepares to kill Spike before he can reveal Dawn's secret. When the Buffybot goes upstairs to change, the real Buffy enters, which clears up all the confusion. Meanwhile, Glory is brutally torturing Spike, who refuses to tell her the Key's location and subjects Glory to a symphony of verbal abuse. Spike manages to escape through the elevator, where he finds the Scooby Gang waiting, and they fight off Glory's minions and leave the mansion.

At the Magic Box, Willow examines the Buffybot. Spike rests in his crypt, beaten and bloody. Pretending to be the robot, Buffy enters the crypt and curiously asks Spike why he didn't give Glory the information she wanted. Spike says he could never hurt the real Buffy, and she kisses him. Spike pulls back as he realizes it is actually Buffy; she says she'll never forget what he did for her and Dawn.

Acting

Starring

• Sarah Michelle Gellar as Buffy Summers/Buffybot
• Nicholas Brendon as Xander Harris
• Alyson Hannigan as Willow Rosenberg
• Emma Caulfield as Anya Jenkins
• Michelle Trachtenberg as Dawn Summers
• James Marsters as Spike
• Anthony Stewart Head as Rupert Giles

Guest starring

• Clare Kramer as Glory
• Adam Busch as Warren Mears
• Troy T. Blendell as Jinx
• Amber Benson as Tara Maclay

Co-starring

• Sharon Ferguson as Primitive
• Todd Duffey as Murk
• Kelly Donovan as Xander Double (actor credited, but role not stated)

Production details

Writer Jane Espenson explains the Buffybot was introduced out of "the necessity of story", as it was "interesting to see what Spike would do with this bot... to see how those personalities affect each other." Providing Sarah Michelle Gellar with the chance for comic relief during a period of particular grimness for her character was a "bonus... an extra scoop of ice-cream," says Espenson.^[1]

In some fight scenes in "Intervention", Xander was played by Nicholas Brendon's identical twin, Kelly Donovan, because Nicholas was sick.^[2]

Translations

• Italian title: "Pronto Intervento" ("Prompt Intervention")
• German title: "Der Zorn der Göttin" ("The Rage of the Goddess")
• French title: "La Quête" ("The Quest")
• Spanish title: "Intervención" ("Intervention")
• Japanese title: "仲裁" ("Chuusai" - "Intervention")

Cultural references

• The Price Is Right - Spike mockingly tries to convince Glory that Bob Barker is the key.

• The Lord of the Rings - Xander calls Glory's minions hobbits with leprosy.

• Buffy asks if the quest is for finding a grail.

• Giles's ritual for the vision quest resembles the Hokey-Pokey.

• In this episode, Dawn reads Twist magazine.

Quotes and trivia

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Buffy the Vampire Slayer#Intervention

• In Intervention, the Buffybot pronounces "Giles" with a hard g (as in "guy-els").

• According to Buffybot's system screen Xander: Friend. Carpenter. Dates Anya. / Anya: Dates Xander. Likes Money. Ex-Demon. / Willow: Best Friend. Gay (1999-Present). Witch. Good with computers.

• Buffy and Spike share their first kiss at the end of this episode not influenced by a spell ("Something Blue") or as the Buffybot.

• While having sex, the Buffybot calls Spike the "big bad." This term is used by Buffyverse fans to identify the major villain of a season. Spike also commonly refers to himself as the 'Big Bad' to boost his ego, which is commonly refuted by Buffy and the Scoobies afterward.

Continuity

• In the season four finale, "Restless", which also had a psychological bent, the First Slayer made an appearance but did not speak except for the words "No... friends...just...the kill." Here she speaks fluently because she is actually a spirit guide in the form of the First Slayer there to tell Buffy things about being a Slayer, and in three episode's time this conversation with the spirit guide will lead Buffy to believe that she is just a killer, as the First Slayer was.

• Xander says of Buffy and the Buffybot in "Intervention", "They're both Buffy". This is a reference to the catharsis of "The Replacement", also written by Jane Espenson who said on multiple occasions she enjoys adding references to episodes she wrote.

• Spike's dislike of Angel manifests itself when we see the Buffybot's programmed opinion of Angel is that he is "lame. His hair grows straight up and he's bloody stupid."

• The desert in which the mountain lion leads Buffy on the vision quest in "Intervention" is the same desert which Buffy dreamed about in "Restless", in which she met the First Slayer. She says she remembers it.

• This is the same desert she will send the potential slayers to in "The Killer in Me" in Season 7.

Arc significance

• The Buffybot, first introduced in this episode, plays a crucial role in "The Gift" and "Bargaining".

• Dawn is shown to steal Anya's earrings; her increasing kleptomania is eventually discovered in the Season Six episode "Older and Far Away".

• In this episode, Buffy finds out that "death is [her] gift", which leads to her decision to die to save the world in "The Gift".

• This episode, like "Something Blue", foreshadows the romance between Buffy and Spike.

• The emphasis in this episode on the First Slayer as a beginning of the slayer tradition (and not just a hostile force, like in "Restless"), foreshadows her role in Season Seven.

References

External links

• "Intervention" at the Internet Movie Database
• "Intervention" at TV.com
• BuffyGuide.com
• Buffyworld summary, statistics
• Buffy Trivia Guide
• All Things Philosophical -- Metaphysics in "Intervention"
• Music in "Intervention"
• Buffy vs. Angel Episode Guide
• A mock-up of the Buffybot programming