The Spike, the Wolf, the Ram and the Hart

Random late-night thought: Spike being bound to Wolfram & Hart, and furthermore to LA as it goes to Hell. Angel's team all agreed, for various reasons sufficient to each of them, to join the new staff of Wolfram & Hart. However, as has been revealed in the comics, WR&H were playing a very long game, and they now have the whole team right where they want them. But they wanted Spike, too, and he never would have agreed to join them of his own free will. They knew, though, that he would insist on wearing an amulet designated to be worn by 'a champion, souled but stronger than human', especially to save Buffy. Passing it from Lilah to Angel to Buffy to Spike ensured both that Spike would insist, and that there would be no way for him to understand where/who it came from. Any one of a dozen spells would ensure that the amulet returned to the LA office, and once conjured there, Spike would be bound to the offices, and whether or not he recorporialized, he would then have ties that would keep him in town for a year, which is all they needed. They played him just as much as the rest of the team, just at one more remove.

Nature or Nurture (or, the inevitablity of destiny)

The new season of Heroes has started, and the threads tangle more thoroughly with every scene. First of all we have the clustering of powers: the energy manipulators, with the fire-specific subset and Traci's ice power as well as Elle's electricity; the fourth-dimension folk, who can move at inhuman speed or change the flow of time (I include precogs in this category); the body manipulators, like Claire's self-healing, Linderman's other-healing, and Monica's muscle memory; and the mental ones, like Parkman's telepathy/Influence. And now that we have learned about the Company's formula, how much of this is designed?
Next, of course, is the twists and turns of Gabriel's life. Is he still Sylar? Will he be Sylar four years from now? He will have a child, for whom he will care very deeply, but who is the boy's mother? And why has Gabriel named the boy Noah? Never mind all the convolutions that claim Gabriel is another Petrelli, which seems like something of a cop-out on the part of the writers, frankly.
In an interesting twist, we now have four individuals who are effectively immortal. What that will mean for the continuing story is an interesting point to debate, but there are more immediate concerns. For instance, we have seen both Claire's and Peter's blood restore someone from the dead- if they/someone makes this public knowledge, there will be rioting and mass hysteria. On the other hand, at the moment the Company is keeping this very hush-hush, which suggests that they have nefarious uses for heal-all blood. Well, of course they have nefarious plans- they do have Level 5, with all that implies.
I am a little irked that the writers are continuing the trend of more male characters than female, and the males having more volition than the females. Maya, for instance, took the huge step of seeking out Mohinder so he could help her, but to get there she needed her brother, then she turned to Sylar for help, and now that she has found Mohinder, she has completely submitted to him. She may yet kick him to the curb, but only if she notices that he is being abusive, which, with her history, seems highly unlikely. Claire keeps going back and forth on how active she is (though she's getting more and more dangerous), while her grandmother is just a terrible, manipulative bitch.
Ah, and then there's this formula business... It's possible that, like Mohinder, the Company started with someone with abilities (maybe Adam Monroe? or is there time trickery there?). Equally likely, they decided that they wanted abilities, figured out the formula, and tested it on themselves. We know they found the formula too dangerous for general use, officially for the reasons Hiro saw, but likely for more personal (ie, retaining secular power) reasons, too. Now I just wonder how close Mohinder's formula is to the one the Company created, and how far each of them will spread in the coming months.

The Choices and the Chosen

Warning: this post is entirely spoilers for Buffy Season 7.

One of the wonderful things about Buffy is her awareness of power dynamics. This is most explicit in Checkpoint (5.17), when she discovers that both the Watcher’s Council and Glory, the Hell-Goddess, are behaving as if she is powerless in an attempt to undermine her power. She reclaims her power, and in the process completely redefines the playing field. However, it is most resonant in Choices (7.22). The name of the episode itself conveys so much: for seven years, we (and Buffy) have been told that she is “the Chosen One”, the one girl in all the world to fight the demons and the forces of darkness. Only a few episodes earlier we had discovered that the power was forced into the First Slayer by the first Watchers, in an act some have likened to metaphysical rape, and that the only help those Watchers could provide was to give Buffy another dose of that essentially-demonic power. Instead, Buffy redefines not only the field, but the entire game. She gives the girls themselves, all the Potential Slayers she has gathered, the choice to take up the power and “be strong”. She takes them from passive creatures to active agents, from “We the Watchers have chosen you to be the Slayer” to “I chose to be a Slayer.”

This is beautifully foreshadowed an episode earlier in the season, Same Time, Same Place (7.3). Willow had spent the summer learning to harness and control her magic use, something which before had been closer to an addiction (the handling of that arc is something I will leave for another posting), and finds herself afraid of her friends’ reaction to seeing her for the first time since she tried to kill them. She magically puts herself out of phase with them, leading eventually to her being attacked by the Monster of the Week and having large chunks of skin eaten. In the ‘tag’ at the end of the episode, she is meditating to heal herself, and then she and Buffy talk. Willow tries to go back to meditation with the line “it hurts too much not to, but it takes so much strength…”. Buffy offers to share her own strength with Willow, saying she’s got so much she’s giving it away. Sure enough, by the end of the season, she has given away her strength, her power, and found herself with more than she started with.

Buffy has long made the conscious choice to be The Slayer. She first actively chooses it at the end of the first season, when she knows of her prophesied death and goes to do her duty anyway. At least once a season after that, she has to reaffirm her decision to put her life on the line for the greater good. In the end, she offers the ultimate Choice to the Potentials, and by proxy all women, and thereby empowers herself and all of them/us. No longer is there a Chosen One, and Buffy is free to make her own choices in life.