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Jane Espenson - Interviewed at the Buffy soundstage February 2002
Double Jeopardy
As you've co-written a couple of episodes this year, can you tell us about the experience of working with other writers?
I've had the chance to co-write a number of episodes while I've been on Buffy, and in season six I did two in a row. I wrote half of Flooded (with Doug Petrie) and then half of Life Serial (with David Fury). We did those two in completely different ways.
With Flooded, I wrote a draft and then Doug took it and did the re-write on it. And then I took it and did the re-write on that and it went back and forth. [With] Life Serial, Fury took the first half and I took the second half and there was no re-writing of each other's material, we each re-wrote out own. That method works a lot better.
The one with me and Doug where we kept re-writing each other, we both would just throw out the other person's stuff and put our own stuff in there, so it just kept turning into my script, his script, my script and that didn't work as well.
It works better when we're each given our own domain and Life Serial was perfect for that because it was such an episodic episode by nature. We had originally designed it to be written by four different writers, each one taking an act but there were regulations about how many names you could put on a script so we ended up doing it with two writers each taking half. And in general that's how we do scripts when there's multiple credits.
In a previous season I co-wrote Doomed with Fury and Marti Noxon, and we did that by actually breaking a script. Even though there are four acts in a script, we actually broke it into thirds, so one person would stop at the end of a certain scene and the other person would pick up there. We wrote that one in big chunks like that, and that worked out quite well.
Keep it dark
Afterlife was quite a dark episode for you. How did you find the change from writing comedy?
Afterlife was pretty much the first episode I've written that wasn't really a comedy; that wasn't at heart a comedy. It was quite dark.
[There were] few opportunities for humour, and I was really worried about that because the part of writing that I'm most confident about is I know I can find the jokes. When there are no jokes to be found, when in fact it would be wrong to find the jokes, when it would feel jarring to have humour there.
I felt like I was a little at sea, but I'm getting a lot of compliments on that episode. I'm really surprised the number of people who really liked it, which was really gratifying because I didn't feel that I was in my most comfortable area.
But it's actually made me eager to take on the challenge now, so I don't cringe any more if I'm assigned something that doesn't have obvious humour, because I know that I'm okay even without it. I think. We'll see.
Wet, wet, wet
The events in Flooded imply that you and/or Doug have had problems with plumbers or bank managers. Is this the case?
In Flooded Buffy had a big problem with the plumber and I can absolutely identify with that. I've just bought my first home and I'm dealing with all of that. But that all happened after Flooded, so that really came much more from just a notion of what Buffy is going through this season.
We wanted to take her out of heaven and put her in the most horrific and yet prosaic of situations, just the business of day-to-day life. So that really came much more out of the necessities of the season than out of any household problems Doug and I might have been having.
Pay per slay
Do you think Buffy should charge for slaying, or is that a bad idea?
Generally when Anya makes an argument, I try to make it absolutely as logical and plausible and reasonable as it can be, because I don't think she's crazy.
I think if you take the world and you strip away the sentiment and you get down to how things really work, I think Anya usually makes a tremendous amount of sense. She's right; it's a valuable service and you have extraordinarily motivated people, you have people who are in the position where they're not going to be in the mood to bargain.
I think Angel's actually dealing with the same issue too, of charging for services. I mean, why is it that we feel that the most virtuous act has to impoverish the person that has the virtue? Why not have a little profit motive in it? Maybe we'd have more people on the side of good if it paid better.
Ready to wed?
Once upon a time you said Anya is you. Do you think that's still true and would you marry Xander?
There's a lot of Anya in me or visa versa. Would I have made the choice to marry Xander? They are very good together and I'm the one who keeps going, "Oh they're very young to get married", but on the other hand, she's about twelve hundred or something - if she's not old enough, who is?
I think she knows what she wants and more power to her. Yeah, I think I'm still Anya. We made the decision to have her, at one point, talk about how she would like to have children some day, and I'm not like Anya in that respect.
Loopy
What's the worst thing you'd like to be stuck doing in a time loop?
I recently had to wait two and a half hours in a doctor's office, just waiting to be seen.
I literally was genuinely thinking "Well, maybe this is a time loop", because nothing seemed to be happening, no progress of any kind seemed to be being made, so I think we've all fallen into those time loops.
It usually involves waiting for someone in a profession where you wait for them; it just takes forever.
Who's the daddy?
With less Giles this season, are you finding it hard to write for the group, now missing that father figure?
Giles left this year, and at first it was hard for all of us. When you get into a big scene, a big Magic Box scene of assigning who's going to investigate this thing, I kept hitting those lines where I'd go, "This would be the line where Giles would say, 'Everybody focus'", and he wasn't there.
For a couple of episodes I felt the absence really acutely. But then you just sort of go "Okay", you get used to the new dynamic, you get to him not being there and you stop thinking that way. It becomes easier and easier to write without him.
The interesting thing [is that] this exactly mirrors what our characters are going through. Our characters, for the first several episodes that he was gone, would actually comment, "Gosh, I missed Giles".
[It's] that feeling of, "Where's the grown up that's going to tell us to start working? Oh my god, we are the grown ups!" [It's] exactly what we wanted to capture. We wanted this to be the year where they sort of realise, "Oh, we're adults now", and all the adult problems that they're dealing with this year are part of that aspect of the show right now. So Giles leaving just worked perfectly.
World Domination
The geeks of course have got their own agenda for world domination. What would be your top priorities if you had the power, the money and the gadgets?
Ah well, if I had all the resources at my disposal that the nerds have? Well yeah, I think monkeys, jet packs and boys, boys, boys.
I don't see really a huge need to change what they're going for, it makes perfect sense to me.
Doublemeat Palace (spoilers)
Why was it decided that Buffy should work at a burger bar?
Well, we gave Buffy the job at the Double Meat Palace, [and] we put her through a couple of different jobs, and we wanted to have her hit [rock] bottom.
We thought, "What's the most horrible job?" A job that's usually held by someone younger than her even - a yucky, dirty, very identifiable teenage job. Fast food just seemed like the perfect thing. It's stinky and greasy and you have to wear the stupid clothes, and it just seemed like the kind of thing that would give us maximum humiliation value.
Also, it's unnaturally creepy - a fast food place is a naturally creepy setting. There is blood built into the job, just like her other job, so it does seem like a natural for her.