One of the major ideological bases of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the attention and service it gives to considering the extent to which good and evil overlap, coincide, and resist each other in ways that are often unnatural or especially complicated. In the major narrative arc of season 4 of the series, information-gathering becomes central to the discrepancies between the polarized forces of “good”: Buffy’s close-knit, emotionallly familial gang of “Scoobies” and the militant, hierarchically familial cluster of The Initiative. The nature of question-asking as a primary—yet disputed—form of information-gathering comes to a head in the mid-season episodes “The I in Team” and “Goodbye Iowa.”

The Initiative is, on the surface, a highly-skilled, highly-trained specialized military force that seeks out HSTs (their acronym for demons, or “Hostile Sub-Terrainians”) and detains them in a technologically advanced, covert hideout beneath the University of California—Sunnydale campus, where Buffy is a student. The Initiative is successful because it resists acts of questioning: information is delivered from a top-down perspective and only on a need-to-know basis. The Initiative distinguishes between public and private information through the designations of “classified” and “de” or “unclassified.” Among the players in the Initiative, Maggie Walsh represents the brick wall of resistance to information-gathering, at least on the surface: she is the information relayer, providing the troops with only as much information as they need to complete missions. Riley Finn, her first in command, tells Buffy, “I know as much as I need to know.” The act of questioning is not natural to him, having been “trained out of him.”

Buffy’s Scooby gang, on the other hand, communicates nearly entirely through questioning. Often, the questions delivered among the group members are sarcastic or ironic, but always questions represent a desire to gather information or further a given discourse. Much like the nature of Judaic communciation, wherein question-asking is perceived to be part of a larger “dialogue” with God, the Scoobies’s questions are frequently more rhetorical. However, in terms of exploration and information-gathering, questioning is their primary mode of action. Nearly every Buffy episode contains scenes of the gang conducting “research” in Giles’s collection of mystical texts; the very act of research requires a question. The Scoobies, by virtue of seeking an answer, are asking the questions.

The Initiative relies heavily on perceptive binaries in drawing conclusions. Since there is no succinct research-based dialogue occuring among them, the isolation among their members requires the built-in decision making skills a binary provides. In Initiative terms, things may fall into one of two categories: “Good” or “Evil.” No term may safely reside in more than one term, nor may terms shift comfortably between the binaries.

Two examples: Spike, one of the most evil vampires on the show by any group’s esteem, is captured, detained, and “neutered” (prevented from harming humans) by the Initiative, who perceive him to be Evil. Buffy’s camp also considers him Evil based on his actions and his ideology, a me-first credo that encourages him to help whatever group or master may best serve his own needs (which stands in direct violation of Scooby ideology, which prizes group solidarity over individual needs). Upon his “neutering,” Spike ceases to be a physical threat to any living creature beyond the demon variety. The Initiative continues to consider him Evil while Buffy and the Scoobies recognize the relativity of his Evilness: his ability to carry out and commit Evil is nearly zeroed out, and since he is not a threat, he is no longer Evil. At times, Spike does fight demons (when it suits his needs or pleasure), which, in the Scooby’s ideology, makes him marginally more “Good” than “Evil,” but does not disallow the simultaneity of those terms to coexist within Spike.

Secondly, Buffy herself exemplifies the Initiative’s resistance to perceptual change. In “The I in Team,” Buffy is allowed to enter into the community of the Initiative. At her very first Initiative debriefing, she visually stands apart from their homogeneity by wearing, in their sea of dark green camo, a melon-colored stringy halter top. “Don’t worry,” she assures them, “I’ve fought evil in this halter before.” During the briefing, the Initiative officers ask, rhetorically, if there are questions. In military terms, there should never be questions because the information given should be sufficient to carry out the mission—everything provided is everything necessary. Buffy fires a series of questions about the mission: What does this demon want? Why is it here? Why can’t we injure its arms? In Buffy’s terms, a demon’s “degree of Evilness” is relative to its ideology. The Initiative perceives Buffy’s insistance on question-asking to be hostile to their own ideology, and she shifts categories from “Ally” to “Enemy,” or, from “Good” to “Evil.” As a result of the change, Maggie decides Buffy must be killed in order to restore the binary order to the Initiative way of life before anyone else, dangerously, considers asking questions.

When not fighting demons or plotting to kill Buffy, the members of The Initiative perform “civilian” roles on the college campus—Maggie teaches Psych 101 and Riley is her Teaching Assistant. The irony that The Initiative is located under one of the primary research-based centers of question-asking in the United States is not lost here; in fact, Maggie’s teaching style is as far from the Socratic method as one can safely get. Didactic, stern, and bossy, Maggie is not the teacher who raises questions: she prevents them. In their “civilian drag,” the members of The Initiative engage in a sort of pantomime of Scooby-like ideological acts. Surely, then, since they are university-based, they must be like-minded, just as Giles was so irrevocably linked to the High School that even his dismissal as Buffy’s watcher couldn’t physically remove him from that space. It is only under the cover of darkness or in the thickets and woods around the university that The Initiative may wear their true faces.

The polarization engaged in by The Initiative comes to a head for Riley in “Goodbye Iowa.” Buffy, seeking information on a demonic threat, goes to what she perceives to the source: Willy’s Place, the demon dive bar in Sunnydale. She goes to question Willy, to gather information. Riley arrives at the bar and catches her in the act of questioning, and says “I thought you were out hunting the Polgara demon, but instead you’re socializing them.” The binary of “Good” versus “Evil” in The Initative’s ideology results in an ever-expanding string of binaries: one cannot be among demons unless one is “socializing” with them. Securing information from demons is not a valid method of information-gathering for the members of The Initiative. Furthermore, The Initiative perceives living things as “Human” or “Demon.” Riley points his weapon at a frightened woman (or demon?) trying to leave the bar and says, “If I shoot you, I don’t know if I’ll have a corpse on my hands or one pissed-off vampire.” Buffy’s ideology, however, has had to make allowances for the simultaneity of these terms. Angel, her love interest from seasons 1-3, was a human/demon vampire hybrid. Although Buffy claims, “When a vampire bites you a demon takes up residence in your body,” Angel is an uneasy mixture of Good and Evil: although cursed with a soul (“Good”), the demon Angelus (“Evil”) is omnipresent. Willow’s boyfriend Oz, a werewolf, also represents this Good/Evil split, as does Anya, the ex-vengeance demon who became trapped in the body (and emotions) of a 17-year-old girl when her “power center” was destroyed in season 3. Because The Initiative insists on dividing the world, on “categorizing” it, it divides every situation up into divisive and dangerous binaries.

The Scooby ideology prizes question-asking because it secures information from the outside world and brings it into the group, where it can be discussed, evaluated, and shared. The socialist spirit (socialist because, after all, only Giles owns the right books…) of the Scoobies prizes debate and dialogue over blind acceptance. The Initiative’s ideology resists any form of non-binary thinking, perceive it, actually, as a threat akin to “Evil”—which makes, then, the very act of questioning an Evil act. If the Initiative’s attitude could be summed up as “Shoot first; ask questions later,” you might say the Scoobies believe something more like “Ask questions always; shoot only when appropriate.”