"Get It Done" is the 15th episode of the seventh and final season of the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The episode aired on February 18, 2003 on UPN.[1][2]
Buffy and the Scooby Gang, now (sort of) including Andrew Wells, and the Potential Slayers learn the origin of the Vampire Slayer line.[3]
Plot
The First Slayer tells Buffy in a dream, "It is not enough," referring to their preparations to fight the First Evil.
Anya and Spike are walking to a bar when a demon appears, sent by D'Hoffryn to kill Anya. Spike defeats the demon but does not kill it.
Principal Wood tells Buffy to stop working at her job as high school counselor and concentrate on her "real" job, killing monsters and getting ready to battle the First. Buffy takes him to the house and introduces him to the rest of the crew, including Spike. The tension between Spike and Wood is tangible. Wood gives Buffy a satchel that he got from his mother and should have been passed on to Buffy anyway.
Potential slayer Chloe kills herself after the First talks to her all night. Buffy delivers a strong lecture, angering many of the others. She accuses Spike of holding back in fights and rebukes him that he used to be a better fighter before he got his soul back. She calls an emergency and opens the Slayer's bag. Inside is a set of shadow figures that trigger a portal. Dawn, suddenly able to read Sumerian, translates the text that accompanies the shadow-casting.
Against the advice of her friends, Buffy jumps in, sending back an enormous demon that beats everybody up and flees. After Spike recovers, he gets his leather coat out of a trunk and tracks down the demon. Fighting with his old swagger, from before he regained his soul, Spike kills the demon after a long, brutal battle. He then drags it back to Buffy's house.
On the other side of the portal, Buffy is back in the desert where she once met the First Slayer. There, three African shamans, speaking Swahili, tell her she is the last Slayer to guard the Hellmouth and try to infuse her with additional essence of the demon that give all the slayers their strength. Buffy refuses the power, telling the men that they were wrong to have created the Slayer line in the first place. As a parting gift, one of them touches Buffy's head and gives her a vision (though the viewer does not immediately see what it is).
After struggling with the incantation, Willow manages to reopen the portal by sucking energy from Anya and Kennedy. Spike throws the dead demon into the vortex, and Buffy returns. Later, she tells Willow about the vision and admits that the First Slayer was right saying that what they have is not enough. Willow asks Buffy about what she saw, and the vision is shown to the viewer: Inside the Hellmouth, the First has an army made up of thousands of Turok-Han vampires.
Themes
Laurel Hostak of the website Screen Rant says, "When Chloe dies by suicide following the First's intrusion, Buffy uses it to scare and motivate the remaining Potentials. In the episode "Get It Done," she uses cruel language about Chloe in front of grieving, traumatized young women. ... Especially given Buffy's struggles with depression, this speech feels almost inhuman. Buffy's transformation into a ruthless general is in stark opposition to her character; even if she's hoping to toughen the Potentials up, she has lost the empathy that always made her strong."[4]
Elizabeth Rambo writes, "Buffy is a show that from at least its second season has increasingly rewarded the attentive viewer with intertextual and metatextual references, and often baffled the casual channel-surfer, and perhaps never more than in season seven, which continually alluded to past seasons and episodes and gave false clues about where it was going. In 'Get It Done'... the importance of watching carefully will be spelled out as 'You can't just watch, you have to see'," which is a line that Dawn narrates during the shadow play.[5][6]
Mark Oshiro targets the show's continual, if unintentional, racism: "Sunnydale is really white for a city in Southern California.... Then there's the First Slayer, who evokes some terrifying colonial images of the 'savage' black woman that many black people have spent centuries trying to escape. ... It is rather upsetting to see that the Watchers Council likely got their idea for the Cruciamentum from African men. Who speak Swahili. In a time when Swahili wasn't even a goddamn language. So we have a rather unfortunate scene where Buffy, a very white woman, confronts a group of African men, insults their cultural practices, and acts as if she knows better than they do. There is obviously a different context for this scene, but there’s also an unfortunate implication that is undeniable for me. The source of that heinous rite of passage that the Watchers Council makes a Slayer go through has nothing to do with stuffy white men sitting around the table. Africans invented it."[7]
Critical reception
Vox, ranking it at #126 of all 144 episodes on their "Worst to Best" list, writes, "It's an interesting wrinkle to the Slayer mythology that will pay off beautifully in 'Chosen,' but a) this episode suffers from the dread season seven sameness, and b) it’s kind of weird that the origin story for the Slayer power that the show treats as empowering and beautiful comes with so much rape imagery, no?"[8]
Paste Magazine, in a similar list, ranked it at #86 and wrote, "This one packs a wallop, and as Slayer lore goes, it's pretty loaded, complete with the origin story of the Slayer line (which, of course, involved a group of men abusing a scared girl and forcing the essence of a demon upon her). It also marks the beginning of the painful mutiny of the Scooby Gang that culminates in 'Empty Places,' although here it seems almost justified, as Buffy, one by one, insults almost everyone. All the goodwill and energy gained at the end of 'Bring on the Night' is seemingly torn away by Buffy’s lecture, while the vision she received from the Shadow Men strips her of much of the confidence that she'd been building. The last shot is one of the more arresting ones of the series."[3]
Noel Murray of The A.V. Club writes, "The real, fascinating question that 'Get It Done' raises is: What is the line between destroying a person and lighting a fire under them?"[2] Billie Doux enthuses, "I was thrilled to see the old Spike again... Willow is back, too, with the spells and the black eyes and everything. I just loved her chucking the Latin and doing it in English ("Screw it, mighty forces, I suck at Latin, okay?")."[9]
Entertainment Weekly calls it "one of the season's worst episodes," faulting the writers who "are busy putting another nail in the coffin of the show by demystifying the Slayer mythology... [T]hey’re offering her the power that she needs to defeat The First, and she rejects it — not on the grounds that the offer is a trick, but because the sacrifice is too much to ask. Wait a minute. ... After the many times we've been subjected to variations on her 'It's all about Power' speech, this sudden reversal of priorities seems like poorly thought out back-pedaling."[10]
