Means

Buffy's Power Speech

BUFFY: 

Okay. Let's see What You Are. 

She removes the chain-mail mask to 

reveal an ordinary-looking human man 

with a symbol on his forehead. 

BUFFY: 

Or who you are. 

KNIGHT: 

One soldier in a vast army. 

BUFFY: 

What army? 

KNIGHT: 

The Knights of Byzantium, an ancient order. 

And now Your Enemy. 

BUFFY: 

(pushes the staff harder into his throat)

You work for Glory? 

KNIGHT: You think we align ourselves with the beast? You must be mad. 

BUFFY: 

You're the ones tried k*ll me.

 KNIGHT: 

No, we were fools, three alone. 

But if it takes a hundred men, 

we send a hundred men, and 

if it takes a thousand, 

we send a thousand. 

BUFFY: A thousand? 

KNIGHT: So long as you protect the key, 

the brotherhood will never stop until we destroy it and you. 

You are the Slayer, and we know what we must do. 

Now, be done with it. k*ll us, and let legions follow. 

Buffy shoves the staff into his throat again, 

then tosses it aside, gets up and picks up the sword.

 The knight gets to his feet, and 

she puts the sword to his throat. 

He turns his head away waiting for the k*ll stroke. 

BUFFY: Go. 

The knight looks surprised, edges around her 

and leaves. Buffy stares at the sword. 

Cut to: Buffy entering the magic shop, still holding the sword. 

Pan across all the Watchers standing there, 

the four Slayerettes still sitting on the upper level, 

and Travers sitting at the table with a pile of papers 

spread out in front of him. Giles sits on the stairs 

leading up to the balcony. 

TRAVERS: 

You're late. 

BUFFY: 

Yeah. 

GILES: (sees the sword, gets up) 

Was, was there an attack? 

BUFFY:

Yeah. 

TRAVERS: 

We can begin the review at last. We'll, 

uh, skip the more obvious questions... 

Buffy puts the sword down on his papers. 

BUFFY: 

There isn't gonna be a review. 

TRAVERS: 

Sorry? 

BUFFY: 

No review. No interrogation. 

No questions you know I can't answer. 

No hoops, no jumps - 

(Nigel starts to speak) 

and no interruptions. 

(Nigel shuts up.) 

Buffy looks around, 

begins to pace. 

BUFFY: 

See ... I've had a lot of people 

talking at me the last few days. 

Everyone just lining up to tell me 

how unimportant I am. 

And I've finally figured out why. 

(looks Travers in The Eye) 

Power. 

I have it. They don't. 

This bothers them. 

Buffy moves back to the 

table, removing her coat. 

BUFFY: 

Glory ... came to my home today. 

GILES: (alarmed) 

Buffy, are you- 

BUFFY: 

(puts her coat on a chair) 

Just to Talk. (resumes pacing) 

She told me I'm a bug, I'm a flea, 

She could squash me in a second. 

(stops, looks at Travers again) 

Only She didn't. 

She came into My Home, 

and We Talked.

 

We had, what in Her warped brain probably 

passes for a civilised conversation. Why? 

(pauses) Because She needs 

something from me. 

Because I have 

Power over her. 

Buffy looks around, hands on her hips. 

She walks the floor, looking from 

one Watcher to the next as she talks. 

BUFFY: 

You guys didn't come 

all the way from England 

to determine whether or not 

I was Good Enough 

to be let back in. 

You came to beg me 

to let you back in. 

To give Your Jobs, Your Lives 

some semblance of Meaning. 

NIGEL: 

This is beyond insolence- 

Buffy grabs The Sword from the table 

and throws it across the room 

in a single movement. 

It flies point-first into the wall 

directly in front of Nigel's nose. 

He jumps back looking shocked. 

BUFFY: (clears throat) I'm fairly certain I said no interruptions. 

XANDER: (whispers) That was excellent! Willow and Tara grin. 

BUFFY:

 You're Watchers. Without a Slayer, you're pretty much just watchin' Masterpiece Theater. 

You can't stop Glory. You can't do anything with the information you have except maybe publish it in the "Everyone Thinks We're Insane-O's Home Journal." 

(Pauses, addresses Travers again)

 So here's how it's gonna work. 

You're gonna tell me everything you know. 

Then you're gonna go away. (resumes pacing) 

You'll contact me if and when you have 

any further information about Glory. 

The magic shop will remain open. 

Mr. Giles will stay here as my official 

Watcher, reinstated at full salary... 

GILES: (coughing) Retroactive. 

BUFFY:

 ...to be paid retroactively from the month 

he was fired. I will continue my work 

with the help of my friends...

 WATCHER2: 

I, uh, I ... don't want a sword thrown at me, but, 

but, civilians, I - we're talking about children.

 BUFFY: (looks up at her friends on the balcony) 

We're talking about two very powerful witches 

and a thousand-year-old ex-demon. 

ANYA: Willow's a demon?! 

PHILIP: The boy? No power there. 

BUFFY: 

The boy has clocked more field time 

than all of you combined. 

He's part of the unit. 

WILLOW: (whispers to Xander) 

That's Riley-speak. 

XANDER: (whispers back, with a big grin) 

I've clocked field time. 

BUFFY: Now. (addresses the Watchers) You all may be very good at your jobs. 

The only way we're gonna find out is if you work with me. 

You can all take your time thinking about that. 

(turns back to Travers) But I want an answer 

right now from Quinton, 'cause 

I think he's understanding me. 

TRAVERS: 

(clears throat) Uh, your 

terms are acceptable. 

Giles smiles hugely. The Slayerettes burst into cheers 

and applause, but quickly stop, looking embarrassed. 

Buffy looks up at them, looks at Giles. She doesn't smile, 

but looks satisfied. She sits across from Travers. 

BUFFY: 

See? No Begging.

TRAVERS: (nods) 

Uh, Rupert. 

GILES: 

Quinton? 

TRAVERS: 

When we inventoried your shop, we found a bottle 

of single malt scotch behind the, uh, incense holders. 

GILES: 

Well, it's, it's not, you know, 

during working hours. 

TRAVERS: 

I think I could use a glass. 

GILES: 

Well, I suppose we could- 

(starts to move away) 

BUFFY: (gets up) 

Just a minute. (Giles stops) 

Glory. I wanna know. 

TRAVERS: 

Well, there's a lot to go through. 

BUFFY: 

Just tell me what kind 

of Demon I'm fighting. 

TRAVERS: 

Well, that's The Thing, you see. 

Glory isn't A Demon. 

BUFFY: 

What is She? 

TRAVERS: 

She's A God. 

BUFFY: 

(long pause, eyes widen) 

-- Oh. 

Blackout. 

Executive Producer : 

Joss Whedon.

The Intentional Fallacy

“The New Critics, rather level-headedly at first, 

sought to dethrone The Author 

by attacking what they called “The Intentional Fallacy.” 

Writers are sometimes wrong about what their texts mean, or sometimes have no idea what they really mean. Sometimes The Text’s meaning even changes for The Writer. 

It doesn’t matter what The Writer means, basically, for The New Critics; 

it matters only what The Text says. 

This critical overthrow of creative intent set the stage for the poststructural show that opened a couple decades later. The deconstructionists (“deconstructionist” and “poststructuralist” mean the same thing, by the way : “poststructuralist” is what you call a deconstructionist who doesn’t want to be called a deconstructionist), explicitly following Husserl and Brentano and Heidegger the same way The New Critics had co-opted Hegel, see the debate over the ownership of meaning as a skirmish in a larger war in Western philosophy over the idea that presence and unity are ontologically prior to expression. There’s been this longstanding deluded presumption, they think, that if there is an utterance then there must exist a unified, efficacious presence that causes and owns that utterance. The poststructuralists attack what they see as a post-Platonic prejudice in favour of Presence over Absence and Speech over Writing. 

We tend to trust Speech over Writing because of the immediacy of The Speaker : he’s right there, and we can grab him by the lapels and look into his face and figure out just exactly what one single thing he means. But the reason why the poststructuralists are in the Literary Theory business at all is that they see Writing, not Speech, as more faithful to the metaphysics of True Expression. 

For Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault, Writing is a better animal than Speech because it is iterable; it is iterable because it is abstract; and it is abstract because it is a function not of presence but of absence : The Reader’s absent when The Writer’s writing, and The Writer’s absent when The Reader’s reading. For The Deconstructionist, then, a writer’s circumstances and intentions are indeed a part of the “context” of a text, but context imposes no real cinctures on The Text’s meaning, because Meaning in Language requires a cultivation of Absence rather than Presence, involves not the imposition but the erasure of consciousness. This is so because these guys — Derrida following Heidegger and Barthes Mallarmé and Foucault God knows who — see Literary Language as not a tool but an environment. 

A Writer does not wield Language; he is subsumed in it. 

Language Speaks Us; Writing Writes; etc. 

Hix makes little mention of Heidegger’s Poetry, Language, Thought or Derrida’s Margins of Philosophy, where all this stuff is set out most clearly, but he does quote enough Barthes — “To Write is… to reach that point where only Language acts, performs,’ and not Me’”— so you get the idea that author-as-owner is not just superfluous but contradictory, and enough Foucault — “The Writing of Our Day has freed itself from the necessity of ‘expression’; [it is] an Interplay of Signs, regulated less by The Content it signifies than by the very nature of The Signifier”— so you can see that even The New Critics’ Holy Text disappears as the unitary lodestone of Meaning and Value. 

For Hix’s Teachers, trying to attribute Writing’s meaning to a static Text 

or a Human author is like trying to knit Your Own Body, Your Own Needles. 

Hix has an even better sartorial image: “Previously, The Text was a cloth to be unraveled by The Reader; if the cloth were unwound all the way, The Reader would find The Author holding the other end. 

But Barthes makes The Text a shroud, and no one, not even a corpse, is holding the other end.”

New Power Generation

Behind the Regeneration 🔥 | The Power of the Doctor | Doctor Who

Tom: 

Leela?

LEELA: 

Yes?

Tom: 

Take that for Me.

(He Gives her The Great Key.)

BORUSA: (sotto) 

You can’t give 

The Great Key 

to an alien..!!

Tom: 

I just have.

BORUSA: 

You Trust Her?

Tom : 

I Do. Leela, 

That's Important.

LEELA: (smiles)

Then I shall look after it.

Tom : 

Good. Off You Go.

CONTACT COMFORT

Physical Touch is something that doesn’t necessarily make sense to modern day science. 

But the mind and body are inextricably connected. 

With every physical ailment we have, there is a corresponding mental or emotional cause at the root of it. 

Touch is also a way to communicate without words. 

But touch can be corrupted, especially with physical or sexual abuse. 

Our relationship to touch may be destroyed or confused. 

So Teal Swan explains that it is vital that we improve our relationship to touch, because it is something physical humans literally cannot live without.

John Bowlby - Maternal Deprivation Experiment https://www.simplypsychology.org/bowlby.html

Harry Harlow - Cloth Monkey Experiment
https://www.psychologicalscience.org/publications/observer/obsonline/harlows-classic-studies-revealed-the-importance-of-maternal-contact.html