Hmm. Buffy the Vampire Slayer?
I sadly didn’t grow up with cable, so I’ve never watched it. But I do remember watching one episode at one of my friends’ house as a kid.
I forgot what it’s called, but it was were everybody in town became silent due to these two creepy looking guys. I especially remember that one funny scene with the presentation, but also how creepy and scary it was with the creepy men.
But yeah. I suppose I’m asking is… if the show is worth a watch, and if you have any episodes you personally love?
has Buffy the Vampire Slayer is actually one of my top two forever fandoms, that is fandoms that not only I will be forever invested in and rewatch on regular basises, but also fandoms that have had the most impact in not only the stories I read nowadays, but also the stories I want to write.
Not only is the show worth a watch, I think it's an example of the strength of long-form storytelling, and how even a very schlocky show about vampires can be about very powerful themes.
Also, if you like redemption arcs, and are disappointed in MHA because of the slow progress of the redemption arcs, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is all about redemption arcs and has some of the most well-written and touching ones in all of fictions. Also it pretty much invented enemies to lovers, and I mean actual enemies to lovers, not like "they sort of dislike each other."
So, without any further ado my top five episodes.
5. Lie to Me - Season 2 Episode 7
Season one has a solid arc for Buffy and the cast as a whole, and even as a standalone is a good commentary on the story of the chosen-one, but I think Season 2 onwards is when Buffy goes from being a neat show about vampire slayers to a work of fiction that has actual things to say, and commentary on not only other stories in the fantasy genre but also real life too.
Lie to me is basically the introduction of that complexity in Buffy's life, that has only ever been hinted at beforehand. Buffy is a pretty morally righteous hero, for the most part with a few exceptions the vampires she faces are souless monsters, demons possessing corpses. Lie to Me is the first time Buffy faces a human antagonist, and not just a human one but someone who shares a lot of flaws with Buffy as well. I think the best way to make a character arc is to start with an incorrect belief they hold about the world and then go out of your way to correct it. Buffy starts from believing she is the hero of the story, and the people she fights on a regular basis are monsters.
Lie to Me turns that on its head, not only is the antagonist Buffy's childhood friend, someone who has sympathetic reasons but is still willing to kill people enmasse to get what he wants the same way that vampires do, he also has flaws in common with Buffy. The same way that Owen wants the world to be more like a movie with simple logic, and he's playing a villain to make things easier for himself, Buffy is playing a hero. Owen isn't the only liar, Angel hides his worst deed from Buffy because he was scared of Buffy disliking him for it. Buffy's very much lying to herself about the kind of person that Angel is, because she wants to believe the more romantic image of him as a repentant vampire boyfriend then the legitimate bad things he has done.
It's a story that criticizes people for lying to themselves, and shows what can happen when you are caught up in irresponsible lies, and yet at the same time it sympathizes with people. It doesn't say people rely on stories because they're selfish or stupid, at least not all the way, the final speech is Buffy asking Giles to lie to her, because her life is genuinely hard and messy and complicated and she wants the simplicity of a story to reassure her everything will be alright.
4. I Only Have Eyes For You - Season 2 Episode 19
I Only Have Eyes For You is amazing because it not only tells a complicated and tragic tale of victimhood, but also it shows one of Buffy’s most major flaws, and also plays with the expectation of the audience as well. This is an episode I watch with friends and talk the entire time through, because I want to know what their initial reactions are and how those reactions are turned on its head by the end of the episode.
Basically, the whole point of this episode is the twist, we are first presented with what looks to be an unsympathetic and toxic victim. A boy who kills his lover because they no longer want to be with them, someone who is framed as abusive and having done an unforgivable thing. Until you look at the context of the situation, the boy in question was seventeen, and his lover was an adult woman who was dating him. It plays with audience expectations because like, if it had been a teenage girl dating an adult man, then it would be obvious who the victim was and who the perpetrator.
If it had been a teenage girl dating an adult man... oh. This is also an episode where we explore how Buffy has a hard time seeing herself as a victim, because of her issues of guilt and self blame. Giles tells Buffy they should help the spirit that is suffering in this episode because it is in pain, and it needs forgiveness as a tool for healing and Buffy suggests that some people should never be forgiven and they should just leave it alone. Which is not really a heroic or even kind notion. That has nothing to do with the crime they committed and everything to do with Buffy’s inability to forgive herself.
It’s an episode that goes really dark places, especially with parallels to real life relationship abuse, and yet it has something to say about the characters and those issues. It’s also ultimately about the healing power of forgiveness over punishment.
3. Fool for Love - Season 5 episode 7
Season five is really the turning point where the show is about more than just the real life issues teenagers have to deal with growing up, but starts focusing on high concept themes like death, love, the interplay between the two, or even just what it would be like to live a life that’s more than a hundred years and the effect that would have on a person.
Spike is my favorite character of all time, in anything, ever yet it’s funny that his focus episode is only third on the list, but that’s because also later episodes build on this one and have more to say. Fool for Love is just, very targeted in its messages and what it’s about in relationship to Spile’s character. Spike is sympathetic and engaging as a character not because he has a sympathetic backstory, in fact he’s a frilly victorian poet boy, turned murderer because he thought it would give him love or something more meaningful to live for. He’s not a moral person, he’s a-moral, all of his actions are framed selfishly around what he thinks will get him love, and he’s not even always a good boyfriend he’s godawful to harmony on several occasions.
Yet Spike is interesting because he’s a monster with human feelings, who wants the things every person wants, which is to be loved and love in return, and yet he feels like as a vampire he can only deal in death and violence and this also relates to Buffy. The episode is about more than Spike’s personal story though,i it’s about Buffy’s relationship to her own mortality, that despite Buffy being a literal superhero she might not die by a big bad, or even die saving the world, she can just slip up in one fight and be stabbed by a random mook. It’s about the life that Buffy leads, where no matter how strong she is, people will just relentlessly come and come for her no matter what, and that’s also relatable because how many people have expressed something like “I always feel like I just have to get through the week and things will get better only for the next week to be harder.”
It is about a life that is both empty and full of violence for both Buffy and Spike, and yet somehow both of them are still searching for love within that life. The biggest scene of change for Spike at the end of the episode is after a whole episode of peacocking around, after trying to insist to Buffy that his vampire idenitty as a killer is the real him, that Buffy is attracted to him as a killer because she has a death wish, his last real action in the episode is to put the gun down and try to comfort Buffy as Spike the sensitive poet, because no matter how hard he tries to bury that identity it’s who he is inside and people grow close to one another when they can show that vulnerability around each other.
2. Once More With Feeling - Season 6 episode 7
Not only the best musical episode ever, but actually a really good standalone forty five minute musical, but besides being an amazing production in general it's the themes of this episode that make me love it.
It is more or less Season 6's version of Lie to Me, where once again we are demosntrating that the stories people tell each other to comfort themselves can actively be harmful as well. Buffy suffers under having to put on an act and pretend everything is okay when she's not happy her friends brought her back from the dead. Spike suffers from being a much more selfless version of himself than he really is, because he's trying too hard to be the ideal boyfriend and supporting character to Buffy when he's still in love with her and wants a relationship. Tara suffers because Willow quite literally controls her mind to make her forget a fight, so they can both play-act a much happier version of their relationship.
Once More with Feeling is about both the collective desire of how everyone wants life to be more positive, more meaningful like in a musical, how they want life to be more like a song, but also how that very human desire can be harmful because it comes at the cost of denying the reality and not dealing with it. Every single song has a much darker subtext that is revealed over the course of the show.
Also, for an episode that's really dark, and is about not only Buffy's suicidal ideation but how genuinely hard life is to live, and how meaningless it can seem at times, it ends on such a beautiful message that even if say Life is pointless, nihilism is correct, there's nothing greater waiting for us, Spike still tells Buffy to keep living because "Life is just living" the only way you can survive in the world is by trying to live in it, simply because we don't know what comes after this and this life is all we got.
1. Conversations with Dead People Season 7 Episode 7
As a lover of drama, as a lover of Spike, a lover of Spuffy and romance it's funny to me that my favorite episode is an episode Spike is barely in, and nothing really happens except for all of the characters sitting down and talking, but the thing about Buffy is that all the characters are so interesting that you can have an episode like this where everyone finally sits down to talk through their issues.
It's not only an episode where a lot of characters have the conversations they've been putting off for forever, Dawn and her feelings about her dead mother, Buffy and her feelings about both the Slayer and her relationships with Angel and Spike, Willow and her mourning of Tara and her suicidal ideation that hasn't quite gone away.
It's also demonstrative of the kind of people all three of these characters that get focus are, it informs you a lot about their characters, and takes the time to do the kind of character work that Buffy is known for. It's also not just about mortality, but also about the people you are in the privacy of your own head, or when no one else is around. Like, the conversations that they all have are literally with dead people. Willow is talking with someone she believes to be a ghost, Buffy is going to stake the vampire at the end of her conversation, Dawn is dealing with what she thinks is the ghost of Joyce. These conversations are revealing specifically because all three women are pretty much alone, and so they can be their true unfiltered selves.
It's almost the exact opposite of lie to me, because dead men tell no tales, so all three of them are allowed to be much more honest than they usually are, and that makes their emotional responses so much more visceral and telling of what they really think. It drags up the subtext and makes it text. It acknowledges what we have known was already there about the characters, but also after dragging those issues up to the surface it helps them move on in a much more conciliatory way. Buffy after admitting for the first time her issues is comforted by the vampire trying to murder her, "I'm not here to Judge you, just kill you." Willow ignores the first's taunts that she should just kill herself to be with Tara. Dawn chooses not to believe in what is maybe ghost JOyce's warning that Buffy will abandon her. THe characters are confronted with their most negative thoughts and their worst flaws, but they also choose to think more positively about things in the aftermath of these confrontations and so that healthy and honest conversation becomes a starting point in healing for all three of them.
