Thanks to Lady Starlight and Wise Woman for correcting the translation mistakes and general copy editing.

I remember having read an explanation of the name of the Initiative based on the irony to apply such a word to people that didn't know much but who simply followed orders. I propose another one: Initiative comes from initiare, the Latin for "to begin." That word of beginning is the one that starts a well known book and gave its name, in the Hebraic tradition, to the first chapter of this book, Bereshith, or in English, Genesis. A Season Big Bad isn't named Adam by coincidence.

One of the problems with the way the story arc of season 4 worked is that there was too few episodes about it. In every other seasons (except S1) there's a dozen episodes more or less directly about the Story Arc and its Big Bad. Season 4 has only 5: The Initiative, The I in Team, Goodbye Iowa, the Yoko Factor and Primeval. Plus Restless, somehow. So we have to check on the other episodes too. Usually, even if they're not about the Story Arc directly, the other episodes support it thematically. (For example in S2, a dozen episodes deal with a boy- or girlfriend being a danger for their date, or people whose dark side is discovered)

By analyzing the themes of each individual episode of S4 and their title, we've got three principal themes that appear clearly:

1. A act of creating / naming a new humanity
2. A state of primordial wilderness, amoral and happily ignorant
3. A rupture with this state brought by an awakening to conscience

One of the rules of fairy tales are that we find, at a smaller scale, the same story told several times that is the story of the whole fairy tale. And the story that tells Season 4 is very clearly the one of the creation of man and its expulsion from the garden of Eden for the discovery of Good and Evil. The crucial point of that Season and of this theme (like Innocence was for Season 2) is Goodbye Iowa.

I - To Create the Human, to Name the Man

If we have a look at the titles and themes of the episodes, we find a handful of them dealing with the idea of renewal of Man. The Freshman, A New Man, This Year's Girl, and even Who Are You, Living Condition, Superstar, New Moon Rising. The Initiative is at the source of the creation, or the recreation, of three important characters from this season: Adam, Riley and Spike (Five if you count Forrest and Graham, but they have probably more value as Riley's doubles). The evolution of these three characters is contrasted, one against the other(s) all along the Season, sometimes in parallel, sometimes in opposition.

The similarities are quite clear between Adam and Riley, Professor Walsh's two "babies". During the first confrontation between those two characters, Adam says to Riley: "But after you met Maggie, she was the one who shaped your basic operating system. She taught you how to think. How to feel. She fed you chemicals to make you stronger. Your mind and body. She said that you and I were her favorite children. Her art. That makes us brothers. Family." (Goodbye Iowa) This helps us to Define what it is that creates man: to form someone, his mind, his body, his feelings. It's not only about makes him exist, but to determine his way of dealing with existence, the terms of one's interaction with one's life.

Spike being an almost accidental result of the Initiative, his case is more ambiguous. The Initiative probably didn't mean to keep him alive very long, and it's only because of his evasion that his re-creation was really made. (Spike is probably too much of a self-made-man to let himself be remake without a word:) But Initiative's intervention by implanting him the chip is still enough to force him to redefine what he is and to change totally his behavior. We do see him put in parallel with Riley first in The Initiative, Something Blue, Doomed and Goodbye Iowa, then with his alliance to Adam in the Season ending. Restless puts him back in parallel with Riley.

The last case of human recreation in Season 4 is Faith, through the double-episode This Year's Girl / Who Are You. She is even symbolically reborn for the occasion, coming out from a grave in the dream before her awakening.

Of course it concerns also, at least a little, the heart of the Scooby Gang; who through their first year in College have the occasion to reinvent themselves, to redefine their identities, their role in the life they look forward to, this definition leading them to the dispersion that marks their relationship in the Season. But as it this has already been analyzed, I tried to see where else it applied. So what does characterize the action to make Man? Keeping in mind what Adam said, I think it is the idea of definition, hence of name.

Genesis describes the creation through word, God says, and bam, so it is.

BUFFY: She pieced you together from parts of other demons.

ADAM: And man. And machine. Which tells me what I am. . but not who I am. (Goodbye Iowa)

Giving a name to something, it means giving its origin, its role, it singularity. It's giving it a function. (Remember Anne: "I'm Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and you are?") Paradoxically it's from the mouth of a child, once out of the Initiative, that Adam discovered the answer to this question: "You're a monster." Yet he seems indeed to refer to Walsh's plans and to try to follow them: "Mother wrote things down. Hard data, but also her feelings. That's how I learned that I have a job here. And that she loved me." And this is more important about what is Adam than what he is made of.

This idea of name comes back, in a way that struck me in Restless: "RILEY: Buffy, we've got important work here. A lot of filing, giving things names." That's probably a reference to the moment when Adam gives name to every animal of the creation. By doing this, he removes a part of the wilderness, of the unknown intrinsic that is a part of them. In short, he gains control over them.

"RILEY: Baby, we're the government. It's what we do." Names give control: remove the speech from a town, and it falls in anarchy. But it's also a restriction of possibilities: "WALSH: So this is what it is.. talking about communication talking about language... not the same thing. It's about inspiration... Not the idea, but the moment before the idea when it's total. When it blossoms in your mind and connects to everything. It's about the thoughts and experiences that we don't have a word for." (Hush)

Freed from words, the couples of Anya / Xander, Buffy / Riley and Tara / Willow are able to communicate more easily than with them. And in Fear, Itself, the fears once named, identified, taken in the light, do not seem so threatening anymore.

Changing one's name, is it changing one's being? Can you be freed from what you are by changing your identity? That's the question of Who Are You. Playing Buffy's role seems indeed to allow Faith to reinvent herself, but Sanctuary proves one can not escape to the consequences of one's identity.

As for the First Slayer, she has not even a name ("TARA: I have no speech. No name.") and Buffy shows how much it's a limit. The answer is probably somewhere in a balance between the freedom of the absence of name, and the responsibilities that goes with the power that gives the name.

II - The Garden of Eden: an Amoral Paradise

According to Maggie, "These are the things we want - simple things. Comfort, sex, shelter, food. We always want them and we want them all the time. Id doesn't learn. Id doesn't grow up. It has the ego telling it what it can't have, and it has the super-ego telling it what it shouldn't want, but the Id works solely out of the pleasure principle. It wants. Whatever social skills we've learned, however much we've evolved, the pleasure principle is at work in all of us. - So, how does this conflict with the ego manifest itself in the psyche? What do we do when we can't have what we want?" (Beer Bad)

This is the state in which Adam and Eve are in the origin, devoid of a moral conscience, they do not know what they should do. What they want, everything they want, is at reach in the Garden of Eden. Heaven is the absence of guilt. (Ironic when you think about Angel)

The best advocate of this state of nature (Cave Buffy not being too clear on vocabulary:)) is indeed Veruca in Wild At Heart: "I can help you, Oz. You're scared. I was, too. But then I accepted it. The animal, it's powerful, inside me all the time. Soon, you just start to feel sorry for everybody else because they don't know what it's like to be as alive as we are. As free." What she proposes Oz to join, this is it. Freedom from moral principles, from society's rules, a return to a primordial and animal state. Veruca isn't bad per se; she'd be more properly called amoral. "You're an animal. Animals kill." She has no cruel intention; she just doesn't care about what she does. What she wants, she takes. For her it is only about obey her nature, and that nature is wild. She thinks any ethical rule is equivalent to an artificial prison, and she can't understand the idea that it's being internalized by Oz, which is the reason why she blames Willow for his behavior. "She's the reason you're living in cages. She's blinding you. When she's gone, you'll be able to admit what you are."

If almost everything is said in this episode, the seductive character of a wild state that doesn't care about humanity's rules is yet again underlined in Where The Wild Things Are (another indicative title) in Spike and Anya's nostalgia for their killing days and the guilty pleasure taken by Buffy and Riley in their forced sexual prison. Adam too describe with a certain skill the wild and ferocious part of the Garden: "ADAM: You feel smothered. Trapped like an animal. Pure in its ferocity, unable to actualize the urges within. Clinging to one truth. Like a flame struggling to burn within an enclosed glass. That a beast this powerful cannot be contained. Inevitably it will break free and savage the land again. I will make you whole again. Make you savage." (The Yoko Factor) It's ironic to see how Adam, who in appearance is so self-controlled, is in reality such a slave of his murderous impulse, just like any demon. He shows that technology used wildly isn't so different from nature in its amorality. The Initiative is thus another figure of the Garden.

Concerning the three principal creations of the Season, their Garden of Eden are quite present symbolically: Riley brings Buffy in a picnic in Something Blue, Spike attacks Buffy in a park of the campus in The Harsh Light of Day ("SPIKE: Birds singing, squirrels making lots of rotten little squirrels."), Adam kills a child in the wood in Goodbye Iowa. And also for Faith, who has an idyllic picnic with the Mayor (which allow us to get a traditional snake in the garden:)) before her awakening. For each of this characters this moments stands for a time of happy ignorance and unchallenged obedience to their nature. Something Blue is the one moment when Riley goes out with Buffy without their mutual secret identities going in the way. Harsh Light of Day is the only moment (with the brief apparition of Wild at Heart) when Spike is free of his chip, free to revel in his predatory vampiric instincts. For Adam it's oddly his one moment of freedom before being defined as a monster and the moment that defines him as a monster. As for Faith, her picnic with the Mayor represents the only time when she was feeling accepted, happy, without having to repress her most savage impulses, before Buffy came, spoiling that. This Garden of Eden, which is equivalent to the law of the wild jungle, we have a few representations of it all along the Season: Two picnics, the parks of the campus (which by the way means plain), a house invaded by plants, Iowa. a state of innocence, of simple and natural pleasures, of uncomplex wildness and a freedom from the usual laws and what they imply. But if this state is always looked at with nostalgia, it's because it doesn't last.

III - Out of Heavens, Science and Conscience

I said before that Goodbye Iowa was the crucial point of this season's theme, it is because it crystallizes exactly the moment of the fall of man out of heavens for the three concerned characters who are Adam, Riley and Spike. Hence its title by the way, Iowa and its fertile plans will there be our Garden of Eden, and this is the time to say goodbye to it.

Riley's case is the clearest. In The I in Team, he bites the apple given by Buffy-Eve. It's in response to this that Maggie Walsh acts. But behind this, it's of course because Buffy stands for the power to think for oneself, in short an internalized conscience and not authority, a knowledge of good and evil. (Knowledge was analyzed in sexual term as early as The Freshman: "Willow: It's just in High School, knowledge was pretty much frowned upon. You really had to work to learn anything. But here, the energy, the collective intelligence, it's like this force, this penetrating force, and I can just feel my mind opening up--you know?--and letting this place thrust into and spurt knowledge into... That sentence ended up in a different place than it started out in.") The betrayal and the death of Walsh causes Riley's tearing away from his Garden: he doubts the Initiative's authority, or as you could put it, he thinks for himself. "RILEY: I thought I knew. But I don't. I don't know anything." (Goodbye Iowa) So it's about rejecting the prejudiced knowledge given to him by the Initiative, the identity made by Walsh (he refused to listen to Adam's files about him) so as to forge his own.

Forrest stands for the part of Riley that keeps on blindly following the Initiative, who doesn't leave the Garden. (Thus, it is not a coincidence that his name means forest) He prefers to reject the responsibility of his problems on Buffy-Eve over doubting of what he's been told, and he considers the demons as mere animals. It is thus normal that he ends on Adam's side.

For Spike, Goodbye Iowa marks definitely his reject from the demonic world when he's seen being thrown out of Willy's bar, which here plays the role of the Garden. Of course, Spike has not yet a true knowledge of good and evil, it's the chip that plays this role for him. However, it leads him to choose the side of "Good", beginning with Pangs, then in Doomed, by his own choice, even if for it was lead by purely selfish reasons. Pangs is already a little mirror of this expulsion from the amoral paradise: the title can be seen as a pun, meaning both hunger pangs (when we see a starving Spike wandering) and moral pangs, or qualms. Can we associate the two of them is the question his case asks. Is the incapacity to feed, to kill, enough to create a moral conscience ? Probably not. But I think Spike stands here, in a quite ironic way, for most of humanity who most of the time doesn't act for the good because it's the good (which is the hero's mark); but because it's what they have an interest to do so in society for purely selfish reasons. Of course, once could say he goes on to redemption's road after that.

Concerning Adam, his case is more ambiguous. Out of room 314 ( Out of curiosity, I've checked what verse 3.14 of Genesis is. It's the one describing the snake's punishment to walk in the dust. I'm not sure it's relevant, but if it is it's quite interesting. The Mayor was already in S3 an authority figure associated with a snake, that the Initiative is another take on the theme. It's also coherent with Walsh acting through jealousy against Buffy, made me think that the snake is sometimes seen as an incarnation of Lilith, coming to take revenge on Eve for her rejection by Adam), despite his "design flaw", Adam doesn't reject Walsh's plans, quite the contrary, he accepts totally her definition of him and decides to set her plans up: "ADAM: I have a gift no man has. No demon has ever had. I know why I'm here. I was created to kill. To extinguish life wherever I find it. And I have accepted that responsibility. (Who Are You)"

Adam seems totally deprived of moral conscience, incapable to think for himself. "ADAM: I'm aware. I know every molecule of myself and everything around me. No one - no human, no demon - has ever been as awake and alive as I am." It's because Adam KNOWS already everything there is to know about himself and the world that he is unable to LEARN anything, to develop an internalized morality. "ADAM: I've been thinking about the world. I wanted to see it. Learn it. I saw the inside of that boy and it was beautiful. But it didn't tell me about the world. It just made me feel. So now . . . I want to learn about me. Why I feel? What I am?" (Goodbye Iowa) Adam's tentative analyzing can not allow him to understand this 'why', by default he chose Walsh's file as a guide, losing thus the occasion to think for himself. Paradoxically, ignorance is thus a path toward a more complex knowledge than the Initiative's "science sans conscience".

Tara is therefore right to stop Willow's spell to find demons around her: "With your knowledge may we go in safety. With your grace may we speak of your benevolence." Yes this knowledge from Thespia would allow security, but the time of security is passed, they must walk out of the Garden and know good from evil, humans from demons by themselves. Because knowing who's the demon and who's the human isn't indicative anymore of good and evil.

If we go back to the other case of expulsion from heaven of the Season, apart from Pangs that I've already talked about, there is Faith in Who Are You and Jonathan in Superstar. In both this cases, the characters were trying to reinvent themselves, to recreate a new identity using magic. If both this cases are failures in appearance, they however allow them to discover a knowledge of good and evil that makes them go out of the Garden. Indeed both of them make the decision, after a bad beginning, to assume the responsibility that comes with their new identity and act for the good / save lives. And it's this decision that lead them to the failure of their initiative. But the journey they've made here is far from a failure and allows them to actually discover themselves anew. If they don't forget this knowledge: Faith showed then in Five by Five and Sanctuary that staying on the path isn't that easy.

Conclusion: Nature or Culture?

The use of the theme of the fall from the Garden of Eden allows ME to articulate with a certain nuance the dialogue between Nature and Culture. Despite its amoral aspect, the Garden isn't totally condemned. On the contrary, Where The Wild Things Are shows how much with too much repressing of it (censoring the children's sexual ideas) we only makes it stronger. Chase the natural, it chases back.

The case of Oz in New Moon Rising seems also to show this: the more he tries to control his inner wolf, the more it's uncontrollable. Pangs condemns the occidental invasion of America, but it refused to consider that it justifies revenge on the present American society. Buffy and the Scoobies use their own primordial energies to defeat Adam, before having to submit this primordial energy in Restless. The Garden has its place, which mustn't be too repressed, or too accepted.

Culture is also presented with ambiguity. The out of control technology of the Initiative is not in the end so different from the barbarism of the Garden. Nothing very original with the idea that knowledge should go in pair with ethical conscience, of course, but to show that knowing too much can inhibit learning is an interesting way to condemn prejudices and false opinions.

I'll end with the theme of Names which seems the most enigmatic of this season and is also what encircles the relation ship between Nature and Culture: Names is an acknowledgment of what is, of Nature, yet doing so, it makes it a cultural fact.