by Popje » Thu Mar 21, 2002 12:11 pm
You know we should have known better that when Joss said “Tara’s becoming the heart of the show” , that he really meant, “So that means we can rip it out and stomp on it and therefore inflict major pain”. Unfortunately, as a character-plot driven show, Tara’s death the one factor that would push Willow over to a serious power-trip and “Dark Phoenix” (side note: X-men’s classic comic story arc wherein a red-headed responsible heroine, Jean Grey who has telekentic powers gets zapped with cosmic rays that give her “god-like” powers, but unfortunately she gets corrupted by the powers and goes evvvvvill and can kill planets and hurts a whole bunch of folks. She chooses to go supernova when her loved one manages to bring some awareness and conscience of the old heroic Jean back to the surface. Rather than hurt her friends she blows herself up.)
We’ve been going towards Willow’s dark side for a few seasons now, and it seems her real rage and power comes to the surface when experiencing big grief. If Tara stays dead –then there’s two options. Willow stays bad (Giles in Flooded says “"Oh, there are others in this world who can do what you did. You just don't want to meet them." Willow: "No, probably not, but ... well, they're the bad guys. I'm not a bad guy.”) Or, as others have pointed out, she goes on a suicide run (we’ve had hints that dark magic can devour the user – sic Sam in As You Were says there were these shamans and they got heavy into the black arts, “there was nothing left”).
So do the writers plan to save Willow? Well I hope so. The only thing worse than having Tara hurt is having Will hurt. But who will save Willow? If she becomes unstoppable, which will probably be the case, as how can the Scoobs stop her? She knows their every move, and they are handicapped because they love her. The only way I can see her being saved is if Tara comes back…sigh wish fulfillment I know… But I see Tara as the only one that can “find” Willow and save her. It won’t be about Willow finding Tara, but of Tara finding Willow (to me this would be in keeping with the reversal-parallels in story lines of S5 vs S6).