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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Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel: The Series are the property of the WB Network or perhaps Fox, maybe both. I'll leave them to work it out and contact me with the result. This web site, its operators and any content on this site relating to "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" are not authorized by Fox. No copyright infringement intended. This site is for entertainment purposes only and does not profit in any way.

The picture was taken from The Official Buffy website and is © the WB.

The Above the Law banner is an altered form of a screen-cap taken from the The Slayer Show, the original screen-cap is © the WB. orth the source of the slayer power which Willow then modified. Just a theory.

Rmsgrey 4/10/00
The source of Buffy's power, as shown as far back as What's My Line?, appears to be her emotions. On many occasions, she has been outmatched by a demon initially, but once she gets angry, much like the Incredible Hulk, she becomes stronger. Also, her friendship with the Scooby Gang is a source of strength: without them, she wouldn't even be alive any more. It's that emotional core that the coldly logical Adam cannot ever hope to grasp, and the same emotions have defeated many demons in the past. On the other hand, as Faith shows, pure emotion isn't all there is to being a great Slayer. My reading of events is not that they called upon the power of the first slayer to pull off the miracles, but that they called on it to enable them to join, and as a result of the joining, their strengths were combined and played off each other, enabling them to do together what they could never have achieved working individually. To make a very crude analogy, charcoal, sulphur and saltpetre, the ingredients of gunpowder (I think) are all relatively inoffensive in isolation, but when mixed together, they create something with great power. I don't deny that some of the raw energy powering combo-slayer came from the primal force of the Slayer, but if that was the true source of their power, then why does Buffy say in Restless: "You're not the source of me"? If the source of combo-slayer's power was truly the primal slayer, then why bother combining in the first place? why not just supercharge Buffy with the primal forces. Certainly, there seems to be no real reason to include Xander if all that's needed is to call forth the power of the first slayer and use it to cast a spell Giles knows and Willow has the mystical experience to handle.


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Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel: The Series are the property of the WB Network or perhaps Fox, maybe both. I'll leave them to work it out and contact me with the result. This web site, its operators and any content on this site relating to "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" are not authorized by Fox. No copyright infringement intended. This site is for entertainment purposes only and does not profit in any way.

The picture was taken from The Official Buffy website and is © the WB.

The Above the Law banner is an altered form of a screen-cap taken from the The Slayer Show, the original screen-cap is © the WB.