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Most commentary was inserted in the script, and placed in a gray box with red
text... like this. Well, The Road To Hell, parts 1 and 2, required a bit more
explaining. We decided to have a stand-alone commentary, shared by parts 1 and 2, as you can see below. I shouldn't have to say this, but... Beware of spoilers for all of the Season 8 scripts! |
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THE ROAD TO HELL… WHAT WERE WE THINKING?
Going into "The Road To Hell", we knew it would be risky to devote two full episodes to a storyline which appeared to not involve the main characters or arc of the show at all. In this section, we (the story writer and the script writer) will attempt to address this issue, and others that have been brought up by readers. We'll attempt to answer as many questions about the two parter as possible. The original intention of this episode was to demonstrate one of the major themes of this season. We wanted to show how the decisions made by Buffy and the others at the end of season 7 would ripple thought time. Another aspect of the story was to make a connection between the Buffy series and the Fray comic book series, which was created by Joss Whedon, so holds some canon in the Buffy universe. In the teaser of "The Road To Hell, Part 1", the slayer that kills the vampire is Buffy. Just to make that clear. This shows the end of the journey that she starts in the season 8 finale, "The Power". After the Night Of Morel Divineh, she realizes that Slayers will no longer be called and she feels that it is her responsibility to rid the world of the demons in order to fix her mistake before she dies. The vampire that she kills is the last vampire that walks the earth. Now that she's killed that last vampire, she is able to rest. She's finally able to find her peace… which happens to be death in her case. Just keep in mind, she was very happy with being dead the last time it happened, so this isn't really a bad thing. "The Road To Hell" basically tells the story of three generations of women whose lives were impacted by the spell that was performed at the end of season 7, to activate all of the Slayers. The first was a girl, about sixteen years old when she was activated as a Slayer after Willow performed the spell. Somewhere between the time of her being called, and the Night Of Morel Divineh, this girl found herself pregnant. On the Night Of Morel Divineh, she died, but her baby survived. This baby would be Laura, who we see in "The Road To Hell, Part 2" (just to make this point clear for any who question it, Buffy is not Laura's mother). Laura is haunted by the so-called Slayer dreams because of her connection to her mother on The Night Of Morel Divineh. This situation isn't unheard of in Joss' own vision of the Buffy universe. In the comic series, "Fray", Joss writes of a twin brother of the Slayer, who has Slayer dreams because of his connection to his sister. In "The Road To Hell", this and a lot of other aspects are kept a little vague because the stories are told through the eyes of Laura and Sara, who don't know very much about how the whole Slayer thing works. Laura, because of the Slayer dreams, begins to think that she is a Slayer. Of course, by this time, there are no more Slayers because the line had been disrupted by the spells performed. Therefore, Laura cannot possibly be a Slayer. Because she does have a connection to the Slayer line through the dreams, she is drawn to the Scythe, where it has been since Buffy killed that last vampire. Believing that she is a Slayer with a very important calling, and also because of a tough upbringing and traumatic experiences throughout her young life, Laura becomes a serial killer of sorts… Okay, forget the "sorts" part, she's just a serial killer. Creating vampires just so that she can slay them, because she believes this to be her calling. The way that Laura goes about creating the vampires is of course not the normal method. Since there are no longer vampires in the world, Laura has to find a way of creating her own. She uses traces of vampire DNA from the Scythe, along with specialized synthetic blood and stem cell technology to create vampire blood. This is why the way the vampires are created, and the vampires themselves (and their teeth) aren't quite normal. The people that Laura starts to go after in the beginning tend to be very abusive men, and it just so happens that she had some very negative experiences with this type of men in her past. So now that she has this perceived power, she's using it to seek "justice". Things do eventually get out of hand and she finds herself killing innocent people. This eventually manifests itself in the story when the Scythe kinda takes on a life of it's own. The question of whether her killing getting out of control is due to her own psychological problems, or the power of the Scythe influencing her non-Slayer mind is left open, and will remain left open here. Laura tries to stop this killing when she falls in love, but she ends up accidentally killing the man that she was in love with. After his death, she discovers that she is pregnant. She believes that the Slayer line is passed down from mother to daughter and figures that in order to empower her own daughter, she must die herself. So Sara shows up after Laura dies. She has a much more stable upbringing than her mother had, and she doesn't have the Slayer dreams because she never had that connection to the Slayer. When she finds out that she is adopted, she sets out on a journey to discover who her parents were. What she finds isn't exactly what she expected. At first, she's not sure what to believe. She's not sure what she wants to believe. And if these stories are true, she certainly doesn't believe in the vampire aspect. After she discovers the Scythe hidden in the trunk beneath her mother's journals, she has to deal with the realization that her mother was in fact a serial killer. She still doesn't believe that the vampires were real. She believes that they were all in her mother's head. When they discover the necklace of teeth really do turn into vampire teeth, she begins to believe what her mother said in the letter about Sara being a Slayer. This seems reinforced by the nightmares that she now believes could have been Slayer dreams, even though they were not really Slayer dreams at all. Of course, Sara isn't insane, so she doesn't want to go out and kill these people the way her mother did. She decides that she doesn't want to be a Slayer… even though she is not a Slayer at all. She just doesn't know that. So she disposes of the Scythe by throwing it into the ocean where it is retrieved by two men in suits. At least one of whom has an British accent. These, of course, are Watchers. A rare bunch by this point. You may have noticed that the Sara section of this commentary didn't take up too much space. That isn't because her story isn't still interesting to us, or because it was pointless. I just think that it's themes are a little more obvious, so they don't require as much explanation. |