From: bruwestro@hotmail.com   
      
   With Nicholas Brendan doing his part to keep Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the   
   headlines I may as well post this and see if I'm just late to the party.  I   
   don't know why it took so long to put Xander's character changes between The   
   Replacement (5.3) and    
   Hell's Bells (6.16) into a proper story line.   
      
   Xander was supposed to reconcile his "two halves" at the end of The   
   Replacement. According to Giles "There's nothing in either of them that our   
   Xander doesn't already possess. But the two halves can't exist without each   
   other."   
      
   The jokster nerd and the competent carpenter are the same person. The hero in   
   The Zeppo is the same guy who gets made into everyone's "butt monkey" and the   
   same guy who graciously helped Cordelia out of the jam in The Prom.   
      
   Instead of accepting who he was, Xander took what he thought was the easy way   
   forward. He turned his entire life over to his 'suave' half and just   
   disregarded the 'scruffy' side. "He's doing everything better. He's smarter,   
   and ... maybe I should just    
   let him have it. Take my life, please."   
      
   What follows are 34 episodes of 'artificially' grown-up Xander. That worked   
   well in many ways, until Stewart Burns showed up at the wedding with his   
   magical orb which he used to dredge up Xander's "nightmare vision" of his   
   marriage.    
      
   In the back of Xander's mind the orb found his 'scruffy' half. The Xander who   
   considered himself the "great humiliation."    
      
   What Xander experienced wasn't a vision of some possible future. IT WAS WHAT   
   HE ACTUALLY THOUGHT HIS MARRIAGE WAS GOING TO BE LIKE. He was going to be a   
   miserable louse like his father and marry an unfaithful woman like mom who   
   threw it all back in his    
   face.   
      
   Xander couldn't deny it because those were his own thoughts. Nor could he go   
   through with the wedding knowing what he expected to happen.   
      
   All because he was so eager to get out of his basement prison a year and a   
   half earlier.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)