Buffy has always had a problem with turning minor side characters into the main attraction. The series did it with Spike, they did it to some degree with Anya, but Buffy the comic book manages to do it with Harmony. Harmony was always a one shot joke, and the series knew that keeping her mostly in the background. David Fury did a good job sketching her into an Angel episode, but with a turnaround demonstrating that she was evil. Then the disastrous 5th season of Angel felt the need to drag Harmony back as a non-evil Vampire secretary and built one episode around her being framed for drinking someone.

This time around Jane Espenson pens Harmonic Divergence, the 21st issue of the rapidly sinking Buffy Season 8, and probably the worst and ugliest issue of the season to date. Which is pretty much what you can expect from Jane Espenson, since Marti Noxon apparently wasn’t available to do something even worse. Like Harmony it’s a shallow, annoying and completely empty issue with an ugly touch that sees the pointless death of a Slayer, and pushes the whole storyline way outside reality.

We begin with Harmony, back to being evil again, and getting her own Reality TV show after getting caught drinking Andy Dick’s blood outside a nightclub. This turns into an MTV reality show, and when a Slayer who struck out on her own tries to kill her, Harmony kills her instead, leading to CNN reporting on the evil army of Slayers. There’s lots of glib satire in there, but mostly it’s hard to believe that the world is suddenly ready to accept the existence of vampires, after Buffy was dedicated to the premise that the world wasn’t. And would that same world which saw Harmony drinking blood on TV really believe the vampires are the good guys? Satire may be satire but this is pushing against the boundaries of plausibility. Sure if you substitute terrorists for vampires, the metaphor can sort of work, but then again if terrorists turned into demons and drank blood on TV, they’d still be the ones with the PR problem, except maybe in Berkeley and the UK.

Buffy Season 8 was chock full of problems before, and another Far East issue which seems to be coming up next, is certainly not the solution. Still Issue 21 is a clear low point. It’s not just the return of George Jeanty, whose Harmony is virtually indistinguishable from Buffy, because neither of them look recognizable at all. It’s a storyline that discards all the continuity of two series’, in order to make a few jokes about a one joke character, that never connect.