Goodbye, Iowa
Moving Riley from team player to his man.
BBC
: Goodbye Iowa saw Riley coming to the fore with his own personal crisis. In some ways it foreshadows his mood in season five. What was the intended approach towards Riley at that point, and how did you want to treat him differently from Angel when it came to Buffy?
Doug Petrie: Yes, his relationship to Buffy is very much explored, but so is his relationship with the Initiative. He realises that he's always been a company man, and this is where he kind of wakes up. He's lost his mother figure in Maggie Walsh, he realises that the team he's been playing for is not a good one and he's a good guy on a bad squad. He's very much at loose ends as to where to go from here. He's always been a team player and he realises that he can't play for this team any more: so what's a guy like that do?
As for the Initiative itself, what we came to ultimately, is, "You guys don't know what you're doing" and it was very much, "Are they good guys or are they bad guys?" They went from being one to the other. They went from being well-meaning good guys to being very much a take on - and we got no political fall-out from this - the United States government and how ham fisted it can be. How stealth and wit and really knowing what you're doing are going to be a lot more effective than a lot of guns and noise.
I think that that's what the Initiative's ultimate purpose is. Riley was a good man caught up in what he discovered is a bad organisation. He always had the best intentions and he realised he was playing for the wrong team.
BBC
: Not to mention pumping him full of drugs to make him superhuman.
Doug Petrie: The fact that they've been putting drugs in his system, unbeknownst to him, is a complicated issue [which] we play out well into season five. He's granted superpowers with these drugs and if you take them away he will be Buffy's inferior. A lot of that is kind of emotional. If he was more secure in himself he would be okay with that and find a way, as Xander does, to be a part of Buffy's world without the benefit of a heightened neurological reflex system.
BBC
: In a sense were you sending out a message to the younger viewers about self-image?
Doug Petrie: Yes, very much so.
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