Buffy the Infantry Officer...

Buffy the Vampire Slayer : New Sunnydale's pilot has been filmed, Sarah Michelle Gellar is working with a crack team to continue (not reboot) the Buffy saga and Ryan Keira Armstrong is an extremely talented young actress.

So what could possibly go wrong?

Just about everything, probably. And before anyone else does, I will admit my own bias. Yes, I think they should all do it my way but that's not going to happen.

There are about three main reasons which, from my skewed perspective, mean that Buffy II is most likely buggered.

The first one's a doozy!

As previously explained, an extraordinary and seemingly inexplicable series of events threw myself, Dru and Juliet together, sent me halfway across the world to a mythic meeting on Sunset Boulevard and (it seems) presented me with the lost story arc. The way to continue Buffy, develop many of the existing characters' story arcs in completely unexpected ways and turn the Slayerverse upside down.

The odds against all these disparate factors meshing seamlessly and delivering the lived and written outcomes which actually took place are phenomenal. You could probably win the National Lottery more easily. I ran it through AI one dark night once and got this reply:

When you combine all these individually unlikely events, the probability of the entire story happening as it did becomes astronomically small. It's a chain of low-probability events that, when linked together, create an incredibly improbable, yet true, narrative. It's this confluence of rare occurrences that makes your story so remarkable. It's not just one lucky break; it's a series of them, woven together into a compelling and unique life experience.

(Gemini AI)

One man in all the world. Chosen...

Unfortunately, no one else chose it and I remain one of only about four people in the world who know the secret of the lost story arc.

But although I 'm sceptical about the existence of God, the whole experience came together as if by magic or intelligent design and, it seems, cannot be destroyed.

A book is forever, one of the few absolutes in life.

But the failure to run with this set of possibilities actually seems to have set Buffy up for a fall. In brief, Whit Anderson was fired, the original Buffy reboot was paused (ie sent to Hell), the supposedly untouchable and godlike Joss Whedon fell headlong from grace and the Slayers audio drama got stomped on hard by Disney.

It really felt like every other route they tried to take was suddenly and savagely cut off. However, it seemed I'd followed the chosen route and, because I did so, had my personal and professional problems fixed with mathematical precision.

I've said it to myself for years: God may be merciful, but He ain't democratic. You do it His way or you get stomped.

I'm not sure I believe, but sometimes I wonder.

So here's my first, darkest and most all-encompassing reason:

The new Buffy cannot possibly succeed because it's flying in the face of the fates and going the wrong way. It's as simple as that. I am not decrying the class and professionalism of Sarah Michelle Gellar's production team but, to me, it's as if they're trying to find their way through Carlsbad Caverns without a flashlight.

And the hard fact of Hollywood life is that very few reboots of or sequels to much beloved series make it. There are exceptions. Cobra Kai and Battlestar Galactica did well but the 2011 remake of Charlie's Angels was abysmal and the 2023 Frasier revival was a poignantly painful revival of an exceptional and beloved series which, I think, should never have been attempted.

So the odds are against Buffy, even if the fates aren't.

Then there's the second one:

You can't go home again, especially if it's been turned into a crater like Barringer near Winslow, Arizona!

But Hollywood just keeps on trying to...

That was my instinctive reaction, but it was also driven by a writer's equally instinctive grasp of what will and what won't work.

In a word, Buffy did the High School is Hell thing and did it extraordinarily well, climaxing with all that cheerful carnage at graduation. It also featured the wonderful Cordelia whose layered portrayal of high school bitchiness achieved a pinnacle of perfection which cannot and should not be supplanted.

In my own novellas, I instinctively took the characters onwards. Away from Sunnydale and, bit by bit, into the real world. These two excerpts from the Dru Quartet provide a flavour of that:

There had been a bit of dust in the wake of Sunnydale’s collapse into a crater, a calm beneath the high clear sky, a collective shrug of the shoulders as they all looked at the plain of stones which had once been home. Then Buffy turned back to the bus, the question of what they would do now fading behind her.

They had taken the bus down to Los Angeles, met with Angel at Wolfram & Hart and rented a two-storey house in the San Fernando Valley. Giles had contacted the remnants of the Council for funding and all the newly activated slayers were slowly being located as they began to rebuild the organisation, making sure they didn’t accidentally create another tight-arsed bureaucracy full of poncey watchers, as Spike might have said.

(Drusilla's Roses)

“We’ve graduated,” he said, meeting Dru’s eyes. “We were kids. All parts of a tale in a small California town we’ll never see again, but now we’ve scattered across the earth like swallows and the big bad world, well, it’s tougher than any Hellmouth could ever be.”

(Drusilla's Redemption)

While I do agree with Miss Gellar that, "in this world, we need those heroes, I think, more so than ever," I'm much less interested in "trying to figure out how to modernize the themes of the series, especially what it means to feel like an outsider in a world dominated by social media. What we want to explore are the space-time boundaries that affect society today."

Putting your smartphone away and dealing with the vampire trying to kill you might answer that question pretty quickly...

I'm also very wary of the drawbacks of too much navel-gazing, preaching and prattling on about one's feelings in TV shows. It does not always interest the audience. As The Critical Drinker once said:

"What I do want to see is tough, cool, stoic heroes inflicting massive amounts of destruction and violence on the world around them!"

Entertaining the viewer, not preaching at him, is absolutely critical and while character development is also a necessity, it should be combined with action. In one scene in Drusilla's Roses, Buffy and Dru have to take on a nest of vampires the size of linebackers. Buffy has been repressing her feelings about Spike's death and during the fight they suddenly catch up with her.

The slayer had never broken down before. She had killed Angel, pushed Riley away, lost her mother and punished Spike; but she had never completely given in to her grief, never felt she could allow herself to just lose it. So it had built up and up.

Now all the grief poured out, and Buffy lay helpless in the arms of her enemy, sobbing her heart out.

(Drusilla's Roses)

I recently saw a sci-fi show in which a character just stood around lamely talking about her feelings. As she did so, any interest I might have had in character and show just quietly drained away...

So taking Buffy back to high school with teens yet again going on about their feelings? Been there, done that, bought the Blu-Ray.

The third reason is probably the most contentious:

Buffy needs its masculine side.

As Spike once said to Buffy:

"The only thing about the dance is, you never get to stop. Every day you wake up, it's the same bloody question that haunts you. Is today the day I die? Death is on your heels, baby, and sooner or later, it's gonna catch you."

And Giles once gave Willow quite the tongue-lashing after Buffy's resurrection...

It's simple yin and yang. Sometimes a reality check needs to be delivered, and it's often best done in a baritone.

Miss Gellar's production team is all-female, and although there are men in the cast I have a slightly sick feeling they're going to be browbeaten into submission and end up as the butt of most jokes.

The harsh truth is that slayers fight and die. There is violence, pain and brutal death (remember Jenny Calendar), it's not all cute little coffee shops and clever quips. Juliet once asked me how I could write Dru so well. I didn't want to tell her that it was because part of me was kind like Dru, but another part knew all about killing and violence.

I come from an army family. My father was in the Parachute Regiment during World War Two and he actually talked to me about it. Most sons learn about plumbing and carpentry from their fathers. I found out how to kill a man in five different ways. What men say when they're dying. The terrible decisions which must be made and how they weigh on soldiers.

And most soldiers are male.

As it's now 2025, I might be one of the last people alive who can tell you what being a combat infantry officer in Burma was actually like. I don't think a "civilian" writer can quite get it, and I well understand why war veterans don't want to tell them.

But it helped me write Drusilla.

I'll take a very good bet none of Buffy's current writers have that knack, but I distilled its' essence into the Dru Quartet and visited the real life locations I'd used. I found the house on Candlewood Drive, though it's rose was long gone. I stood outside Dru and Xander's flat in Great Russell Street, and walked up the streets of Avalon to the gates of Dru's home on the hill.

Sometimes I still see a glimpse of her. No more than that, though. Because she knows I did what it seems I was chosen to do.

I wrote her story.