Why Season Six is the Most Interesting Season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer

“And some brief thoughts on the other seasons, too.”

Perhaps I misspoke last week when I said that season six was the best season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I think there are pretty solid reasons as to why it’s the strongest season, but that doesn’t necessarily make it the best, or even the most enjoyable. And what does best mean, anyway? Most true to the show’s original intentions? Most fun to watch? Garnered the most critical acclaim? Was most commercially successful? Most unique? I don’t know, and that’s not a question I’m going to try and answer today or probably ever, because I believe that what counts as “best” is entirely subjective. But I do believe I misspoke in saying it’s the best season, because what I really mean is that I think it’s the most interesting season. Or maybe that makes it the best season? Who knows? Who fucking cares? It’s all semantics, anyway. At the very least I definitely misspoke in saying that I would be explaining why it’s the best in that same post. Clearly, I didn’t get to it. But at least I’ll be getting to it now! 

Because I am in an exceptionally poor mood on the day that I’m writing this, I am going to try keep it short. If writing this improves my mood, I’ll run longer. But as it stands now, I feel as though I have fallen into the pits of despair and shall remain among nothingness for the rest of my days. Melodramatic, yeah, I know. But the reasons for it have nothing to do with Buffy, so instead of a lengthy woe-is-me this week, I’ll give a quick recap of the preceding seasons of the show, followed by my thoughts on each one, and then at the end I’ll talk about why season six stands out. Followed by, you know, season seven, I guess. This means that, sure, you probably have to read a bunch of stuff about seasons one-through-five to get to my bit about season six, but on the other hand, it’s kind of crucial? Maybe? But it’s fun to talk about anyway, so let’s get a-rollin’. Or just skip to season six! That’s cool too! 

By the way, since I already wrote pretty extensively about the show, I’m not going to really go into a whole lot of explanatory detail about it or why it’s great or why it matters to me. And if you want a much more thorough breakdown (this will be kind of broad strokes), check out this article. You should also read last week’s blog if you want some background! Also, SPOILER WARNING for the entire show. Like, literally from start to finish. And the comics, too.

Season One: Finding Footing

For me, season one is great, and really sets the stage for the rest of the show, but it’s also kind of straightforward, compared to everything else that comes later. Sure, we get the monster-of-the-week mixed with serialized television format that the show championed for the rest of its duration, but there’s also nothing super memorable about it (at least, when compared to everything else; the show is, uniformly, pretty great). We get introductions of recurring characters, start developing relationship dynamics and whatnot, and we also get The Master, which is, admittedly, the most boring “big bad” villain for the series. I tend to judge each season based on the quality of its “big bad,” or the primary recurring evil, and while I thought the master was pretty cool when I first watched the show, it wasn’t until later that I really saw how great the rest of it could be. There aren’t any particularly high or low points that I can think of, but I also watched this season about two years ago. So there’s that, too.

Season Two: Becoming Buffy

Now this one, this one is probably what would generally be considered the “best” season of Buffy. It is, by far, the most consistent, with probably the best overall serialized plot that the series had, and a solid selection of monster-of-the-week episodes. The whole storyline of this season, revolving around the appearance of Spike and Drusilla, Buffy’s lover Angel turning into the season’s big bad, the evil Angelus, budding new relationships between the characters, and everything else that kind of gets thrown in there absolutely works perfectly to culminate in two of the most stellar season finale episodes in the series. Plus, it’s the season where we see things get real. Important characters die and Buffy has to contend with her once-lover now tormenting her, and eventually, she has to kill him to save the world. Maybe not the first big sacrifice she’s had to make in the show, but it sure sticks around as the most gut-wrenching. And it’s also not the last sacrifice, either. This season just really shakes up the formula, and I’ve gotta give it a lot of respect for that.

Plus, Buffy uses a rocket launcher, which is simultaneously incredible and fucking stupid. And yet, I love it.

Season Three: My Actual Favorite Season

Mayor Wilkins is and always will be my favorite big bad from the series. He’s just so funny, for one, but also weirdly human? I mean, he technically is human, one of two of the season’s big bads to be so, but there’s just something about him that’s weirdly relatable. Everyone knows a guy like the mayor, with a charismatic, charming exterior hiding a cutthroat, brutal interior. But he pulls it all off with a smile, and his plan to ascend from human to “True Demon” is a constant threat that Buffy and pals can’t actually do anything about until a very satisfying final episode. Plus we get some of the more out-there episodes, like the alternate reality ones, and some of the ones that hit me a bit closer to home. We see the deepest roots of Buffy and Angel’s relationship before Angel leaves to film his own TV show, we see the weaknesses of Xander and Cordelia’s, there’s the parallels and differences between hotshot new slayer Faith and Buffy, and by extension the Mayor and Giles, and there’s the “Class Protector” scene, too. It’s just all very, very good. It would have made a very good final season if Buffy had only ran for the length of their time in high school, but either way, it is probably the high water mark overall.

Then again, I’ve read two articles that put it as both the best season and the worst season, so clearly there isn’t much of a consensus here.

Season Four: The One with the Government

Listen, in case you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m all here for the big government conspiracies regarding supernatural entities. From the SCP Foundation to Control, I can’t get enough of that shit, no matter how fucking stupid it can be. That’s why, despite season four generally ranking pretty low on most people’s lists, I give it a pass. Sure, it has Buffy moping over some random dude for three episodes for no good reason, and it has Riley, who is the most whitebread male character this show has, and it has the episode where Buffy and co murder indigenous ghosts, but it’s also got the return of Spike! And a creepy biological impossibility as the big bad! And it introduces a positive LGBTQ+ relationship! And it has the cheese man! Ok, yeah, this season kind of tries a little too hard with branching into the shadow of the X-Files, but it does a pretty good job of a David Lynchian dream sequence, so it’s got at least one thing going for it.

Season Five: Glorious Sisterhood

A lot of people consider the ending of season five to be the best season finale, mainly because it represents a satisfying smash-up against a previously unbeatable enemy (sound familiar?) and a major sacrifice from Buffy (also sound familiar?). But while I can appreciate the fact that beating the shit out of Glory, who is an actual god, is pretty cool, I otherwise found her existence pretty annoying. She didn’t have the character stakes Angelus did, nor the uniqueness of the Mayor, but she did make for a pretty imposing big bad. In fact, the show’s most imposing so far. But this season also saw the introduction of Dawn, Buffy’s younger sister who was magicked into existence by a secret society of monks. I gotta give the show credit for flipping things on its head by introducing a new character out of the blue who is, for the first five episodes or so, implied to have always existed in the show. And Spike becomes a lovable doofus, too, so there’s that. It also features the death of Buffy’s mom, Joyce, in what is, as always stated, one of the hardest episodes to watch. There are a lot of high points in this season. But for me, the big bad just doesn’t carry that same weight.

Season Six: The Most Interesting Season (and why)

Alright, now we’re at the real meat of things. Until now, I’ve been kind of just taking a high-level overview of what makes each season good or bad, mostly just listing the highs and the lows. But this is gonna be serious, because I’ve done more than five minutes of thinking about this part. Ok, this is the thesis of why season six is the most interesting. Are you ready?

Buffy the Vampire Slayer season six is the most interesting season because of how it plays with power creep.

In video games, power creep tends to refer to new additions of content becoming more powerful than previous content. But in fiction, at least in certain circles, it refers to the notion that, to keep something interesting, you have to not only continuously up the stakes, but also up the power of the assumed foe. It’s absolutely not true; minor grievances or simpler stakes can be just as compelling as “end of the world” situations, and focusing on those tend to make for more human-focused media. In, say, a horror movie, one ghost can be just as frightening as the devil himself if you do it right. Your unknowable anomaly doesn’t have to be all-powerful to be scary. Or, maybe, one Alien is better than a hive of Aliens.

And yet, power creep is kind of cool, and once it gets its thorns in, it’s hard to shake. I don’t watch anime, but even I know that Dragon Ball went from martial artists and aliens fighting over wishes from a dragon god to the rulers of entire planets fighting gods of death that can destroy a universe at the flick of their wrist. The same thing happens in all sorts of media. As more territory is tread, there’s a natural tendency to make things bigger and badder until, eventually, you kill God and replace him with an over-the-road trucker (*ahem,* Supernatural?). Or maybe the most powerful being in your online creative commons open-to-all sci-fi horror site starts out as an unkillable lizard you keep in a vat of acid, but ten years later it ends up being a minor player among several dozen actual gods. I mean, once you get to godhood, where do you go from there?

And that is exactly the problem that Buffy’s season six set out to rectify, I believe. This series has always been about saving the world; by my reckoning, Buffy averts two-plus veritable apocalypses in seasons one to five, plus kills probably a dozen monsters that, if let loose, have the capacity to kill thousands, if not millions of people. And you can basically plot this powercreep on a chart. First season? One abnormally-strong vampire and his cultists. Possible damage: Thousands of people over a few years. Second season? A regular vampire who happens to be Buffy’s ex-love and who has the keys to opening a portal to hell. Possible damage: probably most of the United States. Third season? The mayor is gonna turn into a giant snake and eat Los Angeles. Possible damage: most of the west coast, maybe the Earth if no one can stop it. Fourth season? Government-made murder machine that Buffy can’t beat up on her own with a power-up, along with an army of more murder machines. Possible damage: topples the United States government, turns all humans into part-demon-part-machine hybrids. Fifth season? An actual god with the capacity to destroy the known universe, made flesh, who Buffy can’t beat up on her own without several convenient debuffs to the big bad and a big hammer. Possible damage: everything. The line just keeps going up. Where the hell do you go from there?

And this power creep parallels the power creep of a particular member of the Scooby Gang, too. Willow, who starts out as an awkward computer nerd, turns into a veritable super-witch by the end of season five. Willow’s storyline is awesome, and her development is great, but I kept asking myself, several times, “why can’t Willow just deal with it?” Her magic got to be such a kind of deus ex machine, that once that Pandora’s box of easy-ways-out got opened (more so than the rest of the show already had), they had to do something to close it. And boy, did they close it in a very dramatic way.

Where other shows might follow up this kind of power creep by sticking to their guns and keeping that flow coming, Buffy’s season six does almost the opposite. See, Buffy dies at the end of season five. Season six starts with the Scooby gang, months later, trying to resurrect Buffy from the dead, thinking she was trapped in hell. In doing so, they inadvertently pull her not out of hell, but out of heaven. Buffy is, understandably, pretty bummed after that. Willow starts relying on magic for everything, treating it almost like a drug and ostracizing her friends, and causing her long-term girlfriend, Tara, to break up with her. And then what’s the big bad after a god? Three college dropouts who rob a bank to buy a Nintendo 64’s and who, initially, only provide comic relief.

There’s a lot going on in season six. Not all of it works, of course. Willow’s storyline about magic being a heroin-ish drug is really hamfisted, especially if you look at it as a convenient way for the show to cut off that route of easy answers, but her tale of loss and redemption by overcoming addiction is pretty moving. I mean, she gets into a car crash while high on magic, almost killing Buffy’s sister. It’s not subtle, but it is effective. This gets thrown out the window (for reasons I’ll explain momentarily) near the end, but I wouldn’t say it’s as bad as it could have been. But there’s also Buffy’s coming-back-from-the-dead thing, which is a huge plot point for, like, eight episodes, and then it kind of drops off the map and they never talk about it again. Oh! And Xander and Anya, who get engaged at the end of season five, fall apart when Xander leaves Anya at the alter for no apparent reason. I don’t know how I feel about it overall, but as a writing device, it is really effective at pushing character development and storylines in interesting ways. But don’t get me started on Spike and Buffy. Their relationship was interesting, but I found it a bit hard to follow. Except for that scene. Fuck that scene. I’m not linking to it here, but you know the one I’m talking about if you’ve seen the show. That scene is the one thing that, for me, doesn’t work. It’s out of character for Spike, it’s horrifying overall, and just really gross. Sure, I could get it as an extension of “making their lives harder,” but I still hate it. Either way, yikes. Let’s move on from that.

Here’s the thing: in writing, you’ve got to kill your darlings. Everyone says that, anyway. From what I gather, it means (at least to Stephen King), that you should make your character’s lives as miserable as possible to get them to develop into something interesting. If you always take the easy way out, where’s the growth? Where’s the challenge? Season six has this in spades, and to me, that’s what makes it special. It throws such a huge curveball, with the heightened emotional intensity surrounding every single fucking character, and absolutely resets that powercreep to a more manageable level. To me, by dropping the stakes from world-ending to friendship-ending, the show creates way more engaging character dynamics.

Except, funny thing is, remember those college dropouts who become the season’s big bad? They’re just regular dudes who happen to have access to an inordinate amount of technological know-how. They aren’t gods or giant snakes or even supernatural in any way. They’re like the three stooges, but with a freeze ray. Except somehow they are also the most frightening yet, and they do the most damage. Warren, the leader of the group, is a violent sociopath who kills a woman in cold blood. And then attempts to kill Buffy, almost succeeding. And then kills a major character. While trying to kill Buffy a second time, he whips out a gun, shoots her, and then accidentally shoots Tara, killing her instantly. Tara’s death is the first major character death since Joyce died in season five, and the only one since season two (I think) that gets carried out by a villain and isn’t reversed. Somehow, this trio of clowns manages to do more damage to Buffy and friends than a giant snake-man, army of cyborgs, and a god combined.

It’s a total rug pull moment, and it sends Willow, who’d been magic-clean for five or six episodes, into a magic-fueled frenzy. She then flays the dude alive, in what is far and away the show’s most graphic scene (well, maybe second-most-graphic if you count Xander’s eye), and starts gunning for his accomplices. Suddenly, for a season that didn’t seem to have an overarching evil, here is one, and it’s a character we’ve known all along. What follows is a messy and convoluted set of moral bible-thumping by Buffy and bizarre half-baked solution by Giles that ends up letting Xander and Willow’s relationship shine through above all else. The last three episodes or so are such an absolute gut-punch that it’s almost hard to watch.

Like I said, everything doesn’t always work well here. The stuff with Willow is kind of messy, too, because it’s very heavily implied that she’s not actually in control of herself, and the magic-drug analogy is a convenient way to bring her back, harmless and healed, for season seven. She never really has to take responsibility for her actions, and there isn’t much of a deeper conversation with what it means to grieve, take vengeance, and turn “to the dark side.” She’s also totally sidelined for season seven, which is super lame. To be honest, that’s kind of a lot of this season; big ideas and lofty questions but, ultimately, not a lot of answers. And yet, I still think it’s the most thought-provoking season that the show has to offer.

Between how the show plays with power creep and its high-brow intentions, I can’t help but give season six a lot of respect for being, for my money, the most interesting season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It tackles a lot, and falls short quite a bit of the time, but I’ll be damned and drained of my blood if it isn’t different. It comes out of the gate spitting and foaming at the mouth and never really lets up. It’s a study for both what to do and what not to do in a serialized television show, especially for kinds that like to deal with bigger and bigger stakes (ahem), and I think it deserves some recognition for that. And, as always, it has the musical episode “Once more with Feeling.” That alone bumps it up above at least seasons four and seven, in my book.

Season Seven: The End…?

Oh yeah! You didn’t think I’d forget about season seven, did you? If season six was different, season seven was also different. Mainly, it has the least number of monster-of-the-week episodes, instead opting for taking the show out in a bang. Season seven has one goal, and one goal only: get to the end. And I give it credit for its single-mindedness, with nearly every episode serving some purpose towards the big, climatic battle, but I still can’t help but feel like it loses something. The show has a hard time seeing the forest for the trees, at this stage in the game. And the ending is cool, and making every girl a slayer is real neat and a satisfying conclusion, and Spike exploding is sad, but season 3 still has a better finale. It’s hard to beat Principal Snyder getting eaten by a snake. Also, Kennedy is my least favorite character in the entire show. She stinks.

Well, that’s about it! I’m not delving into the comics at all because I haven’t read them except to skim the last one, but I’ll tell you that, once the comics come around, anything and everything gets thrown out the window. There is no sense of baseline anymore. They started coming out ten-ish years after the show ended and were formatted as more canon seasons, with seasons eight, nine, ten, eleven, and twelve all being managed by that asshole Joss Whedon. I don’t know if they’re any good, but I know that Season Twelve’s big bad is a slayer-turned-vampire from the future who comes back in time to stop someone else from stopping him stopping himself, Terminator-style. It sounds fucking stupid. Also, Xander and Dawn end up together, which is kinda creepy considering that, for the majority of the show, Xander’s a twenty-something adult and Dawn is, like, fifteen. I don’t like it.

I had a lot of fun writing, it turns out, so I am in a better mood. But that’s about it! How do the seasons stack up for you? Is my take on season six something interesting or hot garbage? Are you as frustrated with Amy’s continued existence as I am? Does none of this make any sense because you’ve never seen the show? Either way, leave me a comment and let me know! This show may have its faults, but being boring was never one of them.