Influence
Joss Whedon created Buffy Summers to subvert the dual ideas of female subordination to patriarchy, and authority steeped in tradition, both dynamics well-established in the Master's world order. According to Buffy scholars, the Master is a classic villain. Rhonda Wilcox writes, "There could hardly be a nastier incarnation of the patriarchy than the ancient, ugly vampire Master", and Gregory Stevenson places him in the category of "absolute evil" with the second season's Judge (also Brian Thompson), third season's Mayor (Harry Groener), and fourth season's Adam (George Hertzberg). In contrast, other Buffy characters are more morally ambiguous. The Master is a grand patriarch consumed with hierarchy, order, subservience, and is defined by what is old. Buffy's opposition to the Master addresses media tropes found in many horror films where a young, petite blonde woman, up against a male monster, is killed off partway through the film as a result of her own weakness. The series also highlights the generational divide between the younger characters and the older ones. In particular, the dialogue, termed "Buffyspeak" by some media, frequently makes the younger characters indecipherable to the older ones. The Master speaks with a stylistic formality found in Bible verses. According to Wilcox, Buffy can hardly understand Giles' language, much less the Master's "pompous, quasi-religious remarks". The entire first season confronts the younger characters with the problems of impending adulthood, which they only begin reconcile in the last episodes of the season.
Each season finale signifies a turning point for the main characters — usually Buffy — and her confronting the Master, according to Stevenson, represents "the end of her childhood illusions of immortality". The scene is fraught with romantic imagery, with Buffy in a white gown, initially intended to be her party dress. When the Master bites her it is, according to Elisabeth Kirmmer and Shilpa Raval, her sexual initiation: a different take on the young girl dying at the hands of a monster. Kirmmer and Raval write that the "paradigm of Death and the Maiden is replaced by that of the hero who faces death and emerges stronger". When he tries to hypnotize her on the roof, she is able to resist him and kills him. Buffy's willful behavior and tendency to buck tradition is later underscored again in contrast with another Slayer. In the mythos of the series, when one Slayer dies, another takes her place somewhere in the world. Buffy's brief death introduces the Slayer Kendra (Bianca Lawson) in the second season. She is a committed, rule-abiding young woman who does everything authority figures tell her to do, and is therefore fatally vulnerable to being hypnotized by Drusilla (Juliet Landau), an insane vampire with extraordinary mental abilities who kills Kendra easily.
Following his death, the Master makes several appearances in the series, and his presence is still palpable in early second season episodes. In the second season premiere Buffy has still not exorcised the trauma she experienced in her confrontation with the Master, and is masking her anxiety by being hostile towards her friends. She has her catharsis by smashing his bones with a sledgehammer. The Anointed One remains alive until killed by a vampire named Spike (James Marsters) in "School Hard". In the third season, "The Wish" presents audiences with an alternate reality in Sunnydale: after dating Xander and breaking up, Cordelia expresses to Anyanka (Emma Caulfield), a vengeance demon, a wish to live in a Sunnydale where Buffy never arrived. In this reality the town is overrun with vampires loyal to the successfully risen Master who, in a capitalistic turn, has devised a machine to make an assembly line to bleed humans to feed his followers. In this Sunnydale, very powerful vampires Willow and Xander are his favorites. Near the end of the episode a very different Buffy arrives, friendless and fighting alone, and when she confronts the Master she falls quickly under his hypnotic powers and is killed when he snaps her neck (again fulfilling the prophecy that in their fight, she will die). In the seventh season premiere of Buffy, "Lessons", the Master appears once more as a face of the First Evil, a shape-shifting villain and the Big Bad of the final season. Metcalf also guest-starred on the Buffy spinoff series Angel in the second season episode "Darla", which goes into more detail about Darla's human life and her transformation into a vampire at the Master's hands.
Read more about this topic: Master (Buffy The Vampire Slayer)
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