sawyl | No Future for You, Part 2

Thanks to the valiant efforts of

vincel, who went to Forbidden Planet in Bristol so that I didn't have to, here are a handful of belated comments on Buffy Season 8 issue 7, the second part of No Future for You.

I particularly liked the way that, instead off with the obvious, a Higgins-ed Faith heading off to a big, aristocratic party, BKV jumps back to the events of Graduation Day and Faith's fight with Buffy. Although the events are familiar — the slayers fight and Buffy stabs Faith with her own knife — we get to see Faith's take on the situation, which makes it clear that F's friendship for Buffy was genuine and the she really suffered when they went their separate ways.

The rest of the issue echoes many of the elements of the Graduation Day fight. The way that Faith is unable to bring herself to kill another human, something which, when Buffy experienced it, Faith had called a weakness. Then F finds herself making all the same mistakes with Lady Genevieve that she made with Buffy: falling into a friendship based on the fact that they're both slayers, despite her previous assertion that she's always better off alone, setting herself on an ride doomed to end in yet another emotional train wreck.

Even though the issue itself is quite light on plot — due to poor scheduling and general cluelessness, I originally skipped over it and read issue 8 without really noticing that the situations didn't entirely mesh with those of issue 6 — I liked it. If nothing else, it added an emotional depth to later events and added more details to the giant-sized Dawn subplot that I wouldn't want to be without.