Entropy means a thermodynamic quantity representing the unavailability of a system’s thermal energy for conversion into… actually, we don’t need the physics explanation. In the context of human life, the word is used to represent decline into uncertainty and disorder. As Tara says in her beautiful little speech at the end, things fall apart.

This is an episode about what people do when their lives become entropic. Xander tries to put things back together, but one of the pieces doesn’t fit. He is still afraid of commitment. Anya sums him up with bitter cruelty but accuracy. He’s a frightened little boy. Promising marriage at some point in the future when “we” are ready, means when “he” is ready, which might be never, for all Anya knows. The feelings of fear that mainly stem from the example of his parents’ bad marriage aren’t going to magically disappear. So Xander is trying to reassemble something he broke, but that won’t work. Anya doesn’t want things the way they were before, because it was all built on a lie. Could the relationship work in a new way, with the truth of Xander’s inability to commit? It seems doubtful. The reassembly of something broken that we see at the end of the episode for Willow and Tara seems unlikely to be repeated for Anya and Xander. Willow broke trust, but that can be re-earned. Xander displayed cowardice, and a lack of commitment to the relationship. None of that has changed, and there is nothing to be re-earned. For Anya to take him back would be her acceptance of a compromised relationship. Willow worked hard to change, and in doing so earned Tara back. Xander wants Anya back without changing anything about himself first. It’s not good enough just to say sorry.

Anya’s response to the entropy in her life is to get angry. She wants revenge on the person who has broken her life into little pieces, but to do so she needs help. She needs somebody else to be angry with Xander as well, and perhaps the most interesting observation this episode has for us about entropy is that for onlookers it’s mostly just sad. Buffy, Willow, Tara and Dawn don’t hate Xander and they aren’t going to wish bad things on him. Even Spike doesn’t really hate him. He just thinks he’s a… well, I’ll give you a clue: music composer on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, first name Thomas.

Anya doesn’t really hate Xander either. She’s just frustrated and angry. And she finds comfort with Spike, who is also hurting from a broken relationship. Strictly speaking, neither of them do anything particularly wrong. As Ross would say, they are on a break. The look on their faces tell us everything we need to know after it happens. They aren’t ashamed by what they have done. They just give each other a look of respect and there is tacit acknowledgement that it was a one-off and meant nothing more significant than taking comfort from each other. And yes, that is all perfectly clear just from the looks on their faces. These actors can really act.

Xander doesn’t really have any right to be angry with Anya or Buffy at the end. We will see what happens next, but I don’t think there has ever been quite enough acknowledgement of how dominant Xander was in his relationship, how he treated Anya like a child to often be belittled and patronised. The only time it was really reflected upon was when Halfrek noticed the way Xander spoke to Anya. In the end, the wedding could even be interpreted as a man trying to take ownership of a woman, and then deciding he wasn’t ready for the responsibility of ownership. He is still acting as if he has some say over Anya’s life, even after he literally walked away from her. As for Buffy, he helped to rip her out of heaven, bringing her back to sink into a deep depression at what her life had become, and now stands in judgement over her because she did what Anya has briefly done: sought comfort somewhere to ease the pain. It’s none of his business, unless his business is about being understanding, compassionate, and guilty about starting a chain of events that brought Buffy together with the thing he hates. Entropy increases. Things crumble and fall apart. As we see with Willow and Tara, broken things can be mended, but before that can happen for Xander he is going to need to understand something fundamental about himself. He’s broken too, and he’s going to have to fix himself before he can try to fix the world around him.   RP

The view from the Sunnydale Press:

Entropy gets bonus points for superb use of a title.  I’m reminded of the Doctor talking to Adric in Logopolis.  He says:

DOCTOR: Entropy increases.
ADRIC: Entropy increases?
DOCTOR: Yes, daily. The more you put things together, the more they keep falling apart, and that’s the essence of the second law of thermodynamics and I never heard a truer word spoken.

Tara ends the episode by saying the same thing, perhaps a bit more poetically, mirroring Willaim Butler Yeats (The Second Coming) with “things fall apart”.  Weirdly enough, from a viewer’s perspective, I think the opposite is true: everything over the last few weeks has come together thanks to this episode.

I won’t deny there’s a soap opera quality here but I think it’s the needed culmination of what’s been happening in the show up until this point.  Buffy realizes that even with having tried to kill her friends (in last week’s episode), they don’t judge her and her secret about Spike probably doesn’t need to be kept secret.  The key to that would have been to come clean with it, but that’s neither here nor there yet.  Then there’s the realization that Dawn needs her sister which has lead to the two bonding while going into town together.  Even their morning breakfast together was very heartwarming because you can see them working things out.  Tara and Willow, after weeks of wanting to be together again, are finally able to do just that.  But then we have Xander and Anya.  In fairness, this is quite tricky and I’m deeply torn on my thoughts here.

Let’s be honest: Xander walked away from his bride on their wedding day and expects to be able to make her see past what he did by saying he still wants to be with her.  By his own admission, he practiced what he would say but never thought it all the way through because in some ways, Xander is not that mature despite the changes he’s made to his life.  Anya even says he’s just an insecure little boy and that’s hard to argue.  So, he created the situation that eventually leads Anya to seeking revenge and cause Xander pain.  This leads to a very important life-lesson: wishing ill on a person is never good, no matter how justified it might feel.  Anya spends half the episode trying to get someone to wish harm on Xander just so she can feel a sense of revenge.  In the end, she sleeps with Spike and Xander sees it, purely by happenstance.  Things have truly fallen apart and Anya knows that the pain she wanted to inflict has been dealt but it comes with greater consequences.  Interestingly, just as Spike goes to finally say a wish, Anya says “Don’t!” because she knows the wound has been struck.

I don’t know if I agree with Xander’s reaction to Anya because he brought on the entire situation himself.  I’m not saying he deserved to have his fiancée sleep with another man, but I’m also not sure that he and Anya are still a couple.  One imagines that would not be an easy thing to get over, being stood up on ones wedding day in front of all your friends and family.   Yes, Xander may want them to still be a couple, but she hasn’t said yes and she was the one jilted at the altar.

There are a few things that didn’t sit well with me, and one of those things dawned on me when Anya turns into the demon-form again, unbeknownst to Xander as she has her back to him.  Demons can look human if they want to.  So why was no one at the wedding even trying to blend?  Furthermore, Buffy’s reaction to Spike has me annoyed (again) because she keeps telling him to move on, then when he does, she’s annoyed by how fast it happened.  Make up your mind, Slayer.  At least she’s treating him like a person but she really leaves a lot to be desired as the hero of the show.

Overall this was a strong episode and draws on the events of everything that has happened over the last several weeks.  It does a lot right.  It even had me thinking about Normal Again because of Willow’s ability to hack networks and the like: is this really reality or is she still in that asylum?  (I suspect that’s never meant to be answered, but I love the idea that it might be…)    The one thing this episode did really well that I wasn’t expecting was to turn Andrew Wells into an actual villain.  I’ve complained about the non-villainous nature of the Trio before but anyone who is willing to highlight in a Babylon 5 novel is most definitely a villain.   I can’t wait for Buffy to beat him down…  ML

Read next in the Junkyard… Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Seeing Red