A Reflection on Buffy the Vampire Slayer

“Except it doesn’t appear in a mirror, so you can’t see it”

Ah, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. What can I possibly say about this show that hasn’t already been said a million times? Like about how the show changed television as we know, not only kicking open the monster-of-the-week that X-Files had unlocked but converging that with serialized, season-long arcs? Or about how Sarah Michelle Gellar played one of the strongest feminist icons of television, starring in a world where a woman wasn’t just the center of attention, but the center of power? Or the fact that the show introduced one of the earliest and longest-running lesbian relationships in television, not only including lgbt+ main characters but presenting them in positive lights (in the 90’s?). Or how the show is just really well-written, with witty quips and pop culture references that only gently obscure the fact that there is some genuinely meaningful dialogue, character development, and fun with language? This list goes on. Everyone has something to say about Buffy the Vampire Slayer because there’s so much worth saying about it.

Although from the outside it may look like just your typical teen comedy-drama campy schlock (and it is campy), it’s so much more than that. It’s an intelligent show with a lot of heart, a deep well of talent from both writers and actors, tons of subversions of typical horror and drama tropes, and just an overall good time. I can’t tell you how many nights I’ve spent with Cheyenne where we just sat down and watched like three or four episodes straight because we just didn’t feel like stopping. It’s like candy, sweet and easy to consume, but it’s also got some real value to it. So, like, maybe raspberries, the candy of the fruit world? Sure. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is raspberries. It’s a show I recommend everyone eat. Er, watch.

I really, really love this show. It’s so, so good. I really can’t overstate the importance of this show, in terms of both television, horror media, and writing for film/television in general. It is truly one of those hallmarks of an era, a project that really takes all the possibilities that a medium has and runs with it. Nothing could really be the same after Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I mean, any kind of teen drama practically owes its existence to Buffy. Teen Wolf? The 100? Glee? Uh, Twilight, probably? In my opinion, all possible because of the explosive success and stellar production that is Buff the Vampire Slayer. I mean, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Supernatural, which showed up just a few years after Buffy ended, did so well. I mean, damn, the show went on for fifteen seasons, and it’s basically just Buffy for guys insecure in their masculinity and people who thought Spike and Angel would be better as brothers instead of the quarreling married couple they are. So, yeah, modern television owes a lot to Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

But why do I like it? What does it mean to me? That’s what a reflection is about, right? What have I got to say about this show that’s different from everyone else who’s talked about it? Well, I’ve got two things. The first is that I can tell you what my personal highs and lows are for the series, and what that means to me, and I can also tell you that I think season six is the best season of the show. Gasp! Goes half the Buffy-watching crowd, “You can’t be serious? Fuck season six!,” while the other half goes “we’ve got another one, boys,” as they prepare to induct me into their cult to recreate the exact emotional tension from season six for every television show ad infinitum. Or, at least, that’s the impression that I get. Also, spoiler warning for the rest of this post! Including the very end of the series! If you want to go in fresh, or ever think you’ll watch the show seriously, go watch the show now! All of it! All seven seasons! Right now!

Getting something out of the way first: fuck Joss Whedon. He sounds like an incredibly shitty person to work with, especially if you’re a woman. You don’t have to read either of those articles unless you want all the terrible details, but here’s a brief recap. Joss Whedon repeatedly verbally abused the actors and staff on the set of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spinoff, Angel. He would yell, scream, berate them, threaten them, and apparently accused Charisma Carpenter, who played Cordelia on both shows, that she got pregnant to sabotage the filming of Angel. Also, there was a rule that Michelle Trachtenberg, who played Buffy’s young teenage sister Dawn, wasn’t allowed to be in a room alone with Joss Whedon. Which is, frankly, unsettling at best (because why did they need that rule?) and straight-up horrifying at worst (why did they need that rule???). Even resident bad boy James Marsters wasn’t immune. And apparently Joss Whedon was just as bad on the set of 2017’s Justice League, being probably racist and maybe anti-Semitic. Which begs the question, what did the set of one of my favorite movies, Cabin in the Woods, look like, since it happened to have Whedon involved? What did the original 2012 Avengers look like, where Whedon was the fucking director? How did Disney not come down on this shit? Man, fuck that guy.

But, anyway, let’s move on and pretend he doesn’t exist. I’ve already been talking about the show for like five paragraphs now, but it just now occurs to me that a lot of people reading this (hi, mom) probably have no idea what this show is about besides “Daphne from Scooby Doo fights vampires.” Well, yeah, that’s the gist of it, but the show follows pre-Scooby Doo Sarah Michelle Gellar starring as the titular Buffy. Every generation, one girl is chosen to become the Slayer, a mystical martial arts superhero with super strength and speed and reflexes to fight off the undead legions of vampires, demons, mythological creatures, and the occasional, uh, alien, I guess? Shit gets wacky. But at the same time, she’s also just a regular high school and later-seasons-college-student who’s trying to fit in, find a date to the dance, make friends, and grow up. She’s assisted by her best friends Willow (Alyson Hannigan, of How I Met Your Mother fame) and Xander (Nicholas Brendon, of, ah, not a lot else), as well as her Watcher, Giles (Anthony Steward Head), who’s kind of a British scholar sent to train Buffy.

Quick side note: according to Anthony Head’s Wikipedia page, he’s played Dr. Frank-N-Furter several times in different productions of Rocky Horror Picture Show. Which, mama mia, I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to see anyone replace Tim Curry except for Anthony Head. That’s a thing I really want to see. I just had to throw that out there.

But, yeah, that’s the premise for the first season, and it kind of spirals out from there. New characters get introduced, new enemies show up, different romantic interests build and fall apart, a bunch of vampires die, they all go to college in season four, they stop the apocalypse a few times, characters leave or die, and the show goes on for seven seasons as some of the best television I’ve watched. Each season tends to be its own self-contained story arc, with one “big bad” per season that the Scooby Gang (the official terminology for Buffy and her friends; the meta-comedy of that name is absolutely not lost on me) has to fight, as well as a few smaller romantic or character arcs each season and monsters-of-the-week, a la X-Files. It makes for incredibly compelling television and creates just a big playground of opportunities for character development, which the show whole-heartedly capitalizes on.

For a lot of people around my age, or really five to ten years older, this show is really special because it was the show they watched as teenagers. I guarantee the same kids in school that watched shit like Supernatural (there it is again, hmm) or Vampire Diaries or Twilight or even something like Gravity Falls probably would have watched Buffy if they were born ten years earlier. But for me, it’s special in a different way. I only began watching this show when I started dating my partner, Cheyenne. We spent our first Valentine’s Day watching Buffy. We’ve watched the entire series together, from start to finish. Every episode, over the last two-plus years. Although, admittedly, we watched most of it since moving to Minneapolis. Cheyenne watched the show as a pre-teen/teenager and wanted to share it with me, and now it means something special for both of us as a kind of bonding experience. When I went to the high school in LA where exterior shots of the first three seasons were filmed, Cheyenne was so jealous. I think it’s really sweet, and it’s one more reason why I love the show. But I assure you, my recommendation of it extends beyond my emotional connection to it.

There’s just so many reasons to like it! It’s funny, it’s cool, there’s lot of neat action and romance, and the monsters are cool. Most of the enemies are your run-of-the-mill vampires, which in this show have bumpy foreheads instead of being shiny. But more often than not, the other demons that show up, even for like two minutes of screen-time, have incredibly original designs. The show never really steps over into outright horror territory (well, except that one time), but the monster designs are always interesting and inspired. It’s just a shame the cooler ones only get like thirty seconds before Buffy kicks the shit out of them. The Queller demon, this gross worm thing with teeth for a face, gets its own episode, which is neat, but in my opinion, some of the best demon designs are often unnamed and appear in cold-opens. I can’t think of any of them, because they’re only there for like three frames, but I remember thinking several times “wow, what a neat design! I hope it sticks around!” and then it doesn’t. Don’t get me wrong, the main demons have some really stellar designs, but I just wish there was more of them.

But the show’s not just shits and giggles, either. It’s got a lot of emotional depth to it, with some real tear-jerker moments. There is, of course, the episode where Buffy’s mom dies. Not killed by a demon or something. She just dies. She has an aneurysm, and then she’s dead. And the whole episode is Buffy and her sister, Dawn, dealing with the grief of that. It is, in so many ways, one of the most effective means of communicating loss I’ve ever seen. There’s also the episode where Buffy stops a student from committing suicide, which, if you’ve been here for a while, you probably understand why that hits pretty close to home for me.

When the episodes land, they land hard. Like, for example, there’s the very famous episode where no one can talk. I’ll be honest, I don’t remember liking it all that much when I watched it. It was neat, and a really memorable episode, but it wasn’t that great. That being said, it’s still a head above 95% of the rest of television, so there’s that. But there’s also the episode that suddenly becomes a musical. No, I’m not shitting you, they break out in song and dance and everything. And it’s diegetic. It has a vinyl record soundtrack. It is glorious. It is maybe one of the greatest fucking things I have ever watched. And you know what the craziest part is? It is one of the most crucial emotional turning points for that season. All the underlying emotional story arcs come to a head in this episode, all the secrets get revealed, and once the music’s over and the actual devil has left the stage, the characters are left to deal with the fallout. It’s absolutely genius, and also has one of the gayest fucking things I’ve ever seen in a musical, which is like a cherry on the, ah, taco. Considering Rent exists, that’s saying something.

But it can be scary, too! “Conversations with Dead People” is probably the most unnerving episode of the whole show, with a handful of others like “Killed by Death” or “Fear, Itself” coming in close behind. Or, at least, I remember “Fear, Itself” being scary. What I also remember is the ending being super disappointing because of an Deus ex machina solution to the problem. That’s actually a genuine problem I have with the show overall, though. Don’t worry, this post isn’t all gushing about how everyone should watch it. Ok, just one more: the show is so damn versatile, it’s funny, too. It can go from funny to scary to sad to cool and back again in the span of a season or just an episode, which sometimes makes for emotional whiplash but it mostly just deeply impressive. Like, Spike in the fight scene of “Pangs” is some of the funniest dog dang shit I’ve ever seen. I have not laughed that hard at television since Gravity Falls went off the air.

But (and check out this segue!) “Pangs” also represents some of the worst parts of the series, too. It is, without a doubt of mine, the most problematic episode of the entire series. In it, Xander’s construction team breaks through into an old Native American burial tomb and accidentally awaken old warrior spirits seeking revenge, who then plague Xander with syphilis and smallpox and violently retrieve their own cultural artifacts before staging a Cowboys and Indians shootout at Giles’s house. The characters spend twenty minutes bickering about how they feel bad destroying indigenous ghosts, but then make no coherent statement on anything and kill the indigenous folk anyway. It also features absolutely no mention of the fact that native peoples still exist and what I feel to be very out-of-character Giles yelling. There are reservations in California, no less. If you don’t see any problems with this, then you may want to watch the episode for yourself to decide and/or read up on the history of the United State’s treatment of native Americans. Spoiler: it isn’t good.

Kudos to them for even attempting such a thing in the 90’s, I guess, but the point is that in ways like this, this show has not aged well. Sure, the fashion and slang haven’t aged well either, but for the most part, the show holds up great twenty-plus years later. It’s just that it is overwhelmingly white, and in this very specific example, actively participating in indigenous erasure. It is, how do I say it, embarrassing, maybe? It’s fucking funny as all hell from a Three Stooges slapstick perspective, but that makes it even harder to stomach, and makes me feel really guilty about laughing at it. That, along with the fact that there are, more or less, five named characters of color in this show (six if you count the fact that the musical episode demon is played by a black man). One is evil, one dies in about three episodes to get replaced by a white girl, one serves only to compliment Giles, and one is just a repeated punch-line. There are probably a couple others I’m forgetting, but if I’m forgetting them, is that my fault or the show’s fault? Only one, Robin Wood, is a fully-developed character who sticks around for more than five episodes. Then again, Trick, the only named black vampire, is really cool (albeit severely underused as a character), and some props to the show for presenting an interracial relationship right at the end.

I’m probably not the best person to be espousing this criticism, since my skin is the color of aged cheese, but I feel like I have to say it here. Sure, not everything has to be about diversity (which is a dumb argument, but that’s for another day), it was the 90’s, they were progressive in other ways, we can’t hold the past to the standards of today, blah blah blah. That’s fine, that’s whatever. But however you cut it, the show is very white. I don’t think there was a single named character played by a Hispanic or middle-eastern actor. Maybe one, but only for an episode. It took seven seasons to get a single black character to stick around. That has not aged well. For all the show did for feminism and LGBT+ relationships in television (although in some ways it isn’t perfect for those two groups, either; the male gaze is strong here), it misses the mark in other ways. But I could go on and on. And no one wants to hear me talk about diversity and inclusion, and it’s probably not my place anyway. But! I have other criticisms!

Mostly those criticisms boil down to the fact that this show relies heavily on a sudden surprise reveal or secret weapon or unexpected character return to tie things neatly. This show is absolutely lousy with contrived weapons, spells, demons, or just circumstances in general that make it a little too convenient to end. Sometimes this is passable. For example, that “Fear, Itself” episode has the last-minute reveal that the demon causing a veritable haunted house of horror is just really, really tiny, so they smush him and the episode ends. Sure, this saves a lot of time that would have been fighting and allots it instead to the much cooler spooky house stuff, but it’s a dumb fucking ending. Or, the series finale has a really satisfying ending part where Buffy and friends upend the entire formula of “One Slayer Every Generation”(tm) by turning every girl around the world who could be a Slayer into a Slayer. That’s cool! It’s a super great way to end the show! But then they also give Spike a magic amulet at the last second that makes him explode, and he saves the day. Hurray?

I get that the whole “hunt for a mystic super weapon” trope was tired even by the 90’s, but come on, the deus ex machina always seems to be this show’s fallback when the writers have written themselves into a corner they can’t seem to get out of. Don’t know how to kill this seemingly unkillable demon robot? Let’s throw a random spell together we’ve never talked about before! Xander’s turning into a fish-man for some reason? Better punch the demon in the throat, that’ll fix it real easy. Big bad lightning-man zapping people? Fucking rocket launcher.

Sure, yeah, the deus ex machina stuff is at least interesting or creates interesting consequences (see: demon robot killing spell awakens sleeping ancient dream spirits), and the show is just as likely to instead opt for a more interesting option for a problem (sometimes even at a character’s expense), but every once in a while it’s just kind of like “Oh, look, they pulled something out of their ass again to save the day. How convenient.” Thankfully, this is largely a minor complaint.

There’s more, of course. Weird moments that seem really out-of-character for someone that may or may not drastically impact the show, or plot holes and slid-under-the-rug changes to continuity that make for a more convenient narrative. And a handful of other things that bother me mostly because I’m a writer and narrative consistency matters to me more than the average viewer, because I’m kind of lame and like to nitpick media to make myself feel better. Although the line-by-line writing is uniformly clever, it is not always the smartest show in the world.

But I could go on. Sure, I’ve got my criticisms, but the overwhelming love I have for this show tends to quiet these things down. And I come to this love from a place not of nostalgia, but as someone genuinely watching the show for the very first time. And after now having seen the whole damn thing and bringing it to the close, I’ve realized something important. This show is going to stick with me for a long time.

Every so often, you come across a show or a movie or a book or a video game that leaves a meaningful impact on you, either through some powerful emotional convergence, resonance of beauty, or just sheer amount of time sunk into it, and you can recognize it right away. Sometimes something can be all three. For me, at least right now, Buffy the Vampire Slayer represents something that is a little bit of all three. I saw Alyson Hannigan hosting a magic show and I screamed at Cheyenne “SHE’S HOSTING THE SHOW BECAUSE SHE’S A WITCH!” and the only reason I said that was because of Buffy. Sometimes I see construction workers and think of Xander. I have once again renewed my fascination with pithy one-liners and the way that dialogue can be constructed in linguistically-interesting ways. I watch this video on repeat and chuckle each time. The soundtrack from that musical episode is on my Spotify playlist in its entirety. And when I go to sleep, sometimes I replay scenes from the show in my head because something stuck with me, for one reason or another. Buffy the Vampire Slayer will live in my head rent-free, as it were. And overall, I’m happy about that.

Oh, I almost forgot about explaining why season six is the best season! Or the fucking insanity that is the continued comic book stories! Seasons eight through twelve are wackadoodle. Damn, that’s a whole other story. Tune in next week for even more writing about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for some reason! I have been cooking up this season six explanation for months and I am not going to just sit on that. I’ll prove my point, damn it! Except I’ll prove it next week!