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![]() post Buffy s4 In the final showdown against Adam the vestiges of the bad feelings and misgivings between the Scooby Gang which had been brewing the entire season were dispelled in a single moment where the four of them actually became a single person, the comboSlayer, made up of the best of what each of the group could provide. This allowed the suitably supercharged Buffy to take the previously invulnerable Adam to pieces with the aid of such cryptic sentences as the title of this article in place of her usual glib witticisms. So while Adam got thrown on the scrap-heap I began to wonder exactly what comboSlayer meant. The over-arcing theme of the episode was friendship, specifically the friendship between Buffy, Giles, Willow and Xander and that was an obvious place to begin. The source of comboSlayer's power was friendship, something that Adam (as a half-human, arch-evil nemesis) would not be able to experience or even comprehend. He considered others to be as tools, to be used to the extent of his interests and then discarded, such a creature could never understand what could be gained through intimacy with another person. As wholesome as that may sound it's a bit ludicrous to consider that friendship can be tapped as though it were some mystical battery. Friendship isn't really the source of the power that comboSlayer was using, friendship facilitated it's use. It was their friendship which allowed the four of them to be able to give themselves into the Buffy vessel, but it didn't provide the power. The powers that comboSlayer displayed (stopping bullets in mid-air, turning a missile into a rather surprised flock of birds etc.) were all magical in nature. And magic was something that Adam (as a human-demon-machine hybrid) and in fact all of the Initiative tended to dismiss. Adam could not comprehend the magical source of comboSlayer's power and that is why he fell so easily to it. However, such reasoning is not borne out by the evidence of Superstar, he was the one person who did realise that something was wrong. Adam knew about magic, he was even resistant to that particular spell having a grounding in cold reality that humans and demons alike lacked and, after all, he is part-demon, a creature that is inherently supernatural. The answer comes in the words of the spell that Willow chants: "The power of the Slayer and all who yield it. Last to ancient first, we invoke thee. Grant us thy domain and primal strength." So it seems that the power that Adam could never hope to grasp was the power of the Slayer, whatever force it is that has granted the Slayers down through the ages their mystic strength, which is fair enough. Which, to my mind, begs the question, where on earth did they come up with this spell? There were two spells in operation at the time, the first was the adjoining one which joined Buffy/Xander/Willow/Giles together to allow Buffy to utilise their separate abilities. comboSlayer then used that ability to call forth this 'power of the primal Slayer' deal. But when they were planning this operation the spell that Giles picked out he said was a paralyzing spell written in Sumerian. This was the spell that they needed the adjoining spell for so that comboSlayer could use Giles to read the Sumerian, use Willow's witchcraft experience to cast it, use Buffy's Slayer abilities to get within striking distance of Adam and use Xander. . . to do what he did. Giles, Willow and Xander used the adjoining spell to put themselves within Buffy (hence the orange eyes) then comboSlayer (as she had become) started chanting herself using the various attributes of the others, calling down the power of the primal Slayer to aid her. So how did the paralyzing spell turn into the primal Slayer spell? And what more does Giles and the Watcher Council know about the Slayer as a timeless force to have had experience with such a spell that we have not yet discovered?
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