Buffy The Vampire Slayer

As you may already know, last month we had an influx of new Tarts. A number of these newcomers, I quickly discovered, are fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer - just as many of us old-timers are. Some of you may even remember that for two years I penned a column about the show, called "Buffy Bites". Since this year marked the 10th anniversary of the series, I thought we would be remiss to not mention it before the year was out. I’ve surveyed my fellow Tarts regarding series, but before we get to their answers, I’d like to point out that our fellow Tart, Margaret, had so much to say about BtVS that she ended up with her own tarticle on the subject: How I Almost Ignored Buffy - Remembrances of Vampire Slayers Past.

(Please note that there’s very little mention of Angel: The Series for a reason - namely, that we’ll dedicate an edition of this column to it when it has its own ten-year milestone.)

On with the questions!

Sequential Tart: Have you seen the original film? If so, before or after you started watching the series, and did you like it?

Mary Borsellino, Staff Writer: I saw it when it was first in cinemas, and I adored it. I was a ten-year-old fandom of one in my bike shorts and 90210 socks, reading the novelisation and listening to the soundtrack and wishing I was even half as cool as Buffy. I was overjoyed when I heard that there was going to be a television show.

Rebecca Buchanan, Culture Vultures Editrix: I saw the original film shortly before the series began. The film falls into my "Eh" category: not good, not bad; lots of unfulfilled potential - which was fulfilled in the series. :)

Alice Doyle, Contributing Writer: Yes, before the series was even made, since I watched it about a year after it was released. I did like the film, specially Donald Sutherland’s turn as the Watcher, and remember thinking it would be great if they’d had more time and space to enlarge on the story.

A few years later, presto!! My wish granted.

Jennifer Franklin Elrod, Staff Writer: I was a latecomer to the Buffyverse, but once bitten by Buffy, I remained in thrall. I watched the movie before I saw the series, and it took me a while before I tried the series, because I expected any series that was a spin-off from a movie would probably not be very good. I found the movie hilarious. What really drew me into it, though, was Paul Reubens playing the head vampire. I knew that was guaranteed to be funny. I did not realize until later, reading some of Joss Whedon’s statements in interviews, that his vision for the Buffy movie had been more ambitious in its goal of an empowering female character.

Carrie Landers, Asst. Art Director: I saw the original film a long time ago on VHS well before I ever watched the show. It wasn’t a fantastic movie, but it was really entertaining.

Layla Lawlor, Contributing Writer: I just saw the film within the last few months. It was mainly curiosity - I wanted to see how things changed from movie to TV.

Although the movie had a few entertaining moments, I thought the show was far, far superior. The one thing that really surprised me about the movie was how closely they matched the actress when they re-cast with Sarah Michelle Gellar. It wasn’t her physical appearance so much as something about the gestalt - the way she acted and moved. I kept forgetting that I wasn’t watching Gellar and then getting a little shock when they’d show a closeup of her.

Overall, though, it probably says a lot about the movie that my favorite part of the whole thing was the hilarious series of "interviews" that they had with various members of the high school body during the closing credits. If the closing credits were the best part of the movie ... yeah, not a good sign. I was actually amazed that such a mediocre movie gave rise to a show that was so entertaining and original.

Patti Martinson, Contributing Writer: I have not seen the original film.

Christine N. Scott, Contributing Writer: Yup! I believe I watched it after I got into the series, probably around mid-way through the first season. It’s so deliciously campy, I enjoyed it.

Wolfen Moondaughter, Staff Writer: I saw it on video, before the series started, at the behest of several friends. Whedon would hate me for saying this, but I didn’t think it was bad. Not fabulous maybe, but really pretty decent - enough for me to want to watch the television series.

ST: When did you start watching the series? Was there a specific reason you started watching? Have you seen the whole series?

MB: I started watching with episode number one, because I was already such a fan of the film. I’ve seen every episode of every season.

RB: I watched Buffy almost from the beginning. I think I missed the first episode, then caught it when it was re-aired a few weeks (?) later; and, by then, I was hooked. I think in the series’ entire seven-year run, I missed maybe half a dozen episodes. That right there is reason enough to collect the DVD sets.

AD: Coolness ensued when I started dating a guy and he had all five seasons of Angel. We now have a full set of all, but both prefer Firefly, which we also own.

JFE: I didn’t start watching the series until season four. Actually, I started watching re-runs of earlier seasons first. The only reason I started watching Buffy re-runs was that the X-Files re-runs no longer came on when I got home from work. I needed something to fill the gap. The Buffy series was a good thing that came into my life randomly, as good things often do. Happily, my husband soon got sucked into watching Buffy, too. Before long, we had caught up on all the past episodes, with a little help from the web. We then started keeping up with the current episodes religiously, until the series ended.

CL: I started watching the series six months ago on DVD and I finished all seven seasons in a little over two months. Crazy, I know.

Pretty much all of my friends watched the show as it aired and couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen more than a random episode here and there. So since I was already a huge fan of Firefly and Serenity, I figured I’d give Buffy a try. Luckily my friend Shmoo is the kind of nerd who owns all seven seasons on DVD, so I borrowed his set and was instantly addicted.

LL: I started watching during season six. My sister had been a Buffy fan since the first season and had repeatedly tried to get me to watch it. The irony was that I finally started watching the show during probably the weakest part of the whole run. I half-heartedly watched an episode here and there, up until the season finale (Willow turns evil) actually interested me enough to go out and rent the first season on DVD. And that hooked me.

I never have seen season five, though. My husband and I watched the first four seasons on DVD, but by the time we got to the fifth, the show had ended its run and we’d burned out just a little bit. I keep looking at it in the video store and meaning to pick it up, but never have.

PM: I have seen all seven seasons of Buffy. I think the first episode I saw was "Earshot". I was intrigued and never stopped watching it since.

CNS: I watched the show from begining to end. I can’t remember a specific reason why my mom and I started watching the show together, other than "Ooh! Look! A female that kicks butt!" We were big La Femme Nikita fans, so this was another show up our alley. Unfortunately, school and work combined their nefarious powers for the last few seasons, so I was unable to watch episodes from seasons five through seven as they aired. *sobs* I think I’ve caught up, though.

WM: I started at the very beginning. I talked my folks into watching it, and it instantly became a ritual in our household. Even my dad, who is somewhat notorious for being a non-TV-watcher, watched it! And yes, I’ve seen it all, though I admittedly didn’t see all of the eps on their first run.

ST: Was there ever a point where you drifted away, and if there was, what, if anything, brought you back?

MB: I never drifted away completely, but I was most engaged for seasons three and five. They were the ones that took over my head.

RB: I never drifted away, but there was a point during grad school when the homework load was so heavy that I had tape the episodes for later viewing.

AD: Not really, I watched seasons one to six in the space of two years while I waited for season seven on DVD so it never got too boring to leave. Plus, there was nothing better on TV.

JFE: Although I didn’t always like the seventh season of Buffy a whole lot, I never drifted away. I always wanted to find out what would happen next.

CL: Season one was hard to get through. The production values and writing were spotty at first but in season two the show hit its stride. I never really drifted away because I had assurances from the people around me that things would get better.

LL: Well, like I said in the last question, I drifted in and out of interest in the show during the sixth season, and it was only the last season that I watched every episode. And I still haven’t seen most of season five, which my sister tells me is the best part of the whole series. A lot of things about the last couple of seasons caused me to lose interest the show; I’ll get into that a little later on in my answers ....

PM: I have seen all seven seasons of Buffy. I think the first episode I saw was Earshot. I was intrigued and never stopped watching it since.

CNS: See my previous answer about season five through seven. Never really drifted away, though.

WM: When I moved back to Chicago, into an apartment with some friends, I didn’t have a TV or a VCR of my own, and it was a while before I was able to afford one. I worked the closing shift, so I didn’t manage to catch more than a few episodes of the third season during its first run, and didn’t see most of the rest until I got the DVD box set a few years later. My mother would update me when we talked on the phone, but, to be honest, she’s an awful storyteller. Couple that with not being terribly engrossed with the few episodes I had managed to catch - I think I just had too much going on in my own life - and I pretty much decided to give up on the show at that point.

Then we got a few new managers in at work who were, as luck would have it, big-time Buffy fans. They began arranging it so that my lunchbreak (and those of a few other employees) fell during Buffy’s time slot, so we could all watch together on the TV in their office. This was during season four, when Spike came back, so though the initiative storyline was, well, boring, the bleach-blond vamp kept me hooked.

ST: What were your favourite eps?

MB: "Who Are You" and "Blood Ties" made - and still makes - me cry. "The Gift" is, for me, a very moving piece of storytelling. On the lighter side of things, I have a gigantic sparkly love for "The Zeppo".

My favourite episode overall is "Chosen", because every time I see that girl stand up and stop the hand from striking her I fall in love with Joss Whedon’s brain all over again.

RB: In roughly chronological order: the season finale when Buffy stabs Angel through the heart; the Christmas episode, when it miraculously snows on Sunnydale; the first appearance of Faith; the prom episode, in which the students show their appreciation of Buffy; the graduation episode, when the students fight back against the demonic mayor; the "Hush" episode, in which everyone in Sunnydale loses their voice (great pantomiming); the Jonathon episode, in which he casts a spell, making himself the most beloved person in the world; and, duh, the series finale.

AD: "Hush" is my favourite for the truly scary baddies and genius writing that allows an entirely silent episode. Of course, I also love the musical episode for sheer sense of fun.

JFE: My favorite episodes were "Ted" (season two, episode 11), "Hush" (season four, episode 10), "Buffy vs. Dracula" (season five, episode 1), "Once More with Feeling" (season six, episode 7) and "As You Were" (season six, episode 15).

"Ted" was the episode in which John Ritter played Buffy’s mother’s robotic, Bluebeard-like suitor. Buffy can’t warm up to him, although everybody else is charmed by him, thanks in part to his tranquilizer-laced cookies, which Buffy never eats. She never touches any food made by him, though he is always cooking. Willow is charmed by Ted’s free software, Xander by his mini-pizzas. Even Angel advises Buffy to accept Ted. Immediately after resolving to try to take Angel’s advice, Buffy and Ted get into a confrontation when Ted catches Buffy cheating at miniature golf. He overreacts, playing the authoritarian father figure and threatening to slap "that smart-ass mouth of yours" when she won’t accept him in that role. The clues to his true robotic nature begin to drop. "I’m not wired that way," he says as he’s lecturing her. "Nobody beats the machine," his co-worker tells Buffy, when she goes to his workplace to spy on him. The conflict between Buffy and Ted escalates, and Buffy thinks she has killed him.

She is honest about her actions with the police. While the police investigation is underway, the Scoobies explore Ted’s house and find a hidden basement that is decorated fifties-style. In a closet of the basement, they find Ted’s first four wives. Meanwhile, Ted comes back. He had only been temporarily shut down. After the beating he took from Buffy earlier, he is glitching out hilariously, saying stock small-talk phrases that a salesman would say, like, "Hell of a day. Makes you feel like you were eighteen again," in the middle of trying to intimidate Buffy and woo Joyce. He is about to carry off Joyce to his fifties-style basement, after knocking her out, when Buffy stops him. At the end, there is a final touch of humor when we learn that Willow has kept some of his robotic parts to learn from. Xander cracks that what is she trying to learn, how to build serial killers? It was the humor in this episode that I loved. It was just perfect, down to the casting choice of John Ritter to play Ted, the lampoon of a salesman and most of all the satire of "strict father" social conservatism. The overall plot-arc of a retro-fifties, serial-killer robot threatening the keep the vampire slayer from doing her job by disciplining her to get good grades and to respect his authority, while tranquilizing her mother and friends with his baked goods, is funny enough. As usual, the small, witty touches that are the signature of Joss Whedon are what I savor the most about it.

"Hush", of course, is a favorite of many Buffy fans, and I won’t go into as much detail about it. The drama takes place against a backdrop of communication issues that the main characters are having. Buffy and Riley are hindered in their desire to become more intimate, due to the secrets they keep. At the same time, she complains that they never get past the babbling they do. Anya complains to Xander that they don’t talk enough. Giles has a friend visit him from out of town to have a tryst with him. "That’s enough small talk, don’t you think?" she says before he takes off his glasses and they kiss. While the characters experience their silences in various ways, the Gentlemen come into town. They are fairytale monsters who steal the voices of all of the residents of Sunnydale. They have exquisite manners as they go about collecting hearts. Buffy and Riley finally learn of each others’ secret lives when they fight the Gentlemen together. When Riley smashes the box in which the voices are stored, Buffy screams, causing the monsters’ heads to explode. Alongside the elegance and ingenuity involved in making a silent episode with expressive body language, what I most love about "Hush" is the humor in the scene in which Giles is briefing the Scoobies with slides and drawings. For instance, there is a slide that says, "Buffy will patrol tonight." It has a childish drawing of a girl holding weapons and wearing a dress. The drawing is already hilarious-looking, but it is even funnier when Buffy makes motions to indicate that the drawing is fatter than she is. The drawings of the monsters cutting out hearts are also funny, with their childish depictions of the blood and gore contrasting with the horror inherent in the monsters’ actions.

In "Buffy vs. Dracula", it was a treat to see the uber vampire myth juxtaposed with the Buffyverse. I liked Xander complaining about being made into Dracula’s "butt-monkey", and I liked Buffy saying that she thought the thrall had gone out of their relationship. I liked Giles succumbing to the three sisters and trying to go back in after his shoe after Riley pulled him out, and the crack about him nuzzling them to death, in response to his insistence that he was fighting them off. At the end, Buffy tells Dracula peevishly, "I’m standing right here," when he tries to rematerialize once more, in a cloud of smoke, after her last staking of him.

"Once More with Feeling" was a lot like "Hush" in that a lot of secrets came out, when an entertainment-loving demon impelled everybody to sing and dance. It was a lot of fun seeing Buffy rendered as a musical, though there was a poignant moment when Buffy revealed in her song that Willow had ripped her out of heaven when Willow brought her back from the dead with her magic spell at the beginning of season six.

The last episode that I picked as a favorite, "As You Were", may not be a popular choice, but I actually liked it, though it was painful to watch it in a way. It was a very low point for Buffy, in a season of low points. It begins with a vampire asking Buffy, as she patrols in her Double Meat Palace scented clothing, "What’s that smell. Gee, Slayer, is that you?" Poor Buffy is working at Double Meat Palace, wearing a hat with a cow on it. Her mother is dead, and she is trying to keep little sis Dawn from being taken away by a social worker. Giles is gone. Willow is in recovery from her addiction to overusing magic. Nothing goes right. "It’s not that I don’t appreciate it. I do. It’s just that I can’t eat this stuff another night. I’m sorry," says Dawn, as Buffy brings her home a bag of dinner from work. The next morning, Buffy misses the garbage truck, and she learns that her application to re-apply to college has been rejected. Her co-worker will not stop giving her heavy-handed political advice, seeming oblivious to how ridiculous he is to be quoting Machiavelli in the context of climbing the career ladder at Double Meat Palace.

Suddenly, things seem to take a turn for the better when her old flame Riley shows up at the counter of the Double Meat Palace. "I need the best. I need you, Buffy," he says in his black garb and James-Bond-like gear. She will even get paid for helping him. She walks out and is suddenly out of the mundane life that is in some ways even more horrible than her old life, but there are still little signs that things are not going so well. All of her jokes fall flat. When Riley tells her about the demons that they will be up against, he doesn’t laugh at all when she cracks, "So, they’re like really mean tribbles." Then a demon that they encounter walking home throws Buffy into the wall. Still, Buffy seems excited to be in the presence of Riley again, and there are moments of flirting and sexual tension. Buffy feels good when she kills a demon. These feelings don’t last. Riley’s wife, Sam, shows up. She is beautiful, she and Riley obviously love each other, and she can fight as well as or better than Buffy. She crushes Buffy’s confidence further when she reveals that even when Buffy killed the demon, it wasn’t really the best move to make, because they were tracking the demon. Their high-tech sophistication and James Bond air contrast with Buffy’s rough-and-ready style, making her seem a little pathetic, though they try to be tactful and gentle with her, which makes it even worse in a way. Of course, Buffy’s friends love Sam. Sam gives Xander wedding photography advice and makes Willow feel good about having enough strength to quit magic. What makes it even harder for Buffy to process her feelings about Sam is that Sam idealizes Buffy. Buffy is legendary to her. This makes Buffy feel even worse because of its contrast with the reality of her life.

The final humiliation is that while Buffy is lying naked in bed with Spike in his crypt, Riley bursts in. His reaction is even worse than if he had been upset to see Buffy with Spike. He is not emotional at all.

He only cares about getting the job done. He’s after one thing, and that’s Spike’s demon eggs. Not only has Buffy not really helped Riley and Sam get the demons (other than leading Riley to Spike), but she has been sleeping with the enemy. Maybe Spike’s relationship with Buffy by this time is much more complex than simple enmity, but Spike has still been trafficking in the very demon-breeding operation that Riley has recruited Buffy to defeat, and Buffy has not been doing her job as the slayer. Yet, Riley still idealizes her. At the end, she chooses to dump Spike, deciding to try to live up to the image that Riley and Sam had of her. Underneath all of this, there is another side to it.

I think the reason why I like this episode is its bathos of improbable things making Buffy feel small as she struggles to cope with both being alive and with being an adult. It seems to me that it is a caricature of how it can feel to live in the adult world - the "real world". Entry-level jobs are mundane and full of petty humiliations, like hats with cows on them. There is no longer anybody to depend upon, just as Buffy no longer has either her mother of Giles. The world grows bigger, and we grow smaller in it, like Buffy’s Sunnydale world seeming a little small and foolish compared to Riley’s and Sam’s international, high-tech, well-organized, James-Bond-like world. It can seem as we grow up that the world weighs more heavily on our consciousness. It’s not as easy to take everything lightly. We’re reminded of the seriousness of Buffy’s life when Buffy’s jokes fall flat. It’s sad to see this happen to Buffy, who used to make wise-cracks in the face of every horror, with her friends there to laugh with her. Then there is the knowledge that she has hit bottom and that her depression might lift in episodes that come after this. It has become tiresome by this time for Buffy to be down all the time.

CL: Woo, ok here goes!

There are of course the universal favorites: ’Hush’ in season four and ’The Body’ in season five. ’Hush’ was great because it changed my mind about the show - I’d felt from episode one that Buffy was all about the dialogue, which was getting a little tiresome. Clearly ’Hush’ proved the show could soar without speaking a word. ’The Body’ was so perfectly honest - I don’t know how much sense that’ll make to someone who hasn’t seen it, but I can’t think of any other words to describe it. It’s also the only episode of a television show to make me cry uncontrollably for a solid hour.

Some other favorites include: ’Innocence’ in season two because we see the consequences for Buffy and Angel’s love. ’Faith, Hope and Trick’ in season three because it introduces my favorite Buffyverse character Faith and because we learn a lot about the nature of the Slayer. ’Band Candy’ in season three because it’s just plain ridiculous fun. ’Wild At Heart’ from season four because it’s such a great character building episode for Willow and Oz, plus the more we see Seth Green naked the better. ’Once More With Feeling’ from season six because, c’mon, it’s a musical! ’Seeing Red’, ’Villains’, ’Two To Go’, and ’Grave’ from season six because although it was really sad, it was great to see a major character in the magical, demon-filled Buffyverse die by something as mundane as a gunshot wound and watching Willow go off the deep end was really fascinating. ’Lies my Parents Told Me’ from season seven because we get to see a lot of Spike’s past and I find Spike infinitely interesting. And finally ’Chosen’ from season seven because it was a perfect ending.

Overall season six was the best because I loved that life itself was the bad guy.

LL: I loved the episodes that played with really crazy ideas - the Halloween episodes (especially the one where their costumes came to life; that was hilarious and very fascinating to see how they all reacted), the amnesia episode, the one with the alternate reality where they’re all vampires, the one where all the adults were behaving like teenagers. This was a show where you could really get away with doing a lot of bizarre stuff to the main characters and their reality, and I loved seeing that. Also, since my favorite character was Giles, I really loved the episodes in which he played a central role, especially the ones that dealt with his rather checkered past.

PM: "Fool for Love", "Superstar", "Selfless", "Hush", "Passion". All very character-focused, emotional episodes.

CNS: "Homecoming," "Band Candy," "Superstar," "Hush," and "Once More, With Feeling." "Homecoming," "Band Candy," and "Superstar" because they amused me. Each episode had its choice moments. "Hush" and "Once More, With Feeling" because they were incredibly innovative.

WM: Overall, "Fool For Love" and "Once More With Feeling" are tied for first in my heart, with "The Gift" and "The Body" tied for a very close second. I’m also very fond of "Pangs", "Something Blue", "Hush", "A New Man", "Intervention", "Tabula Rasa", "Smashed", "Beneath You", "Never Leave Me", "Touched", "Chosen" (though I did have my quibbles with that one), and "Becoming, Part 2", the end of which always makes me bawl, even though I never ’shipped Buffy/Angel. Overall, season five was my fave, with season two my second.

ST: Who were your favourite characters?

MB: Every time I watch the series through I find a new character to love. At this particular second I’ll say Faith, Dawn, Tara, and Xander. A whole gamut of coping abilities in one short list!

I’m especially fond of Faith, because Sunnydale is the kind of narrative space that functions best if everybody in it stays inside their prescribe roles and areas - don’t ask why a one-Starbucks town has an international airport! don’t question that everybody stays living in this place with a gargantuan mortality rate and multiple apocalypses! - and then Faith breezes into town and throws everything askew by not fitting comfortably into any pattern or binary.

RB: Faith, because of her combination of toughness and vulnerability, and the fact that her story is ultimately about redemption. Oz, the tortured nice guy, who lost the girl but found himself. And Glory, because she was just so wonderfully over the top bad.

AD: Buffy started out as my favourite thanks to great dialogue lines and attitude. By the end of the series Willow and Giles I identified most with and liked Spike, again for his great lines and the development of the character.

JFE: My favorite characters are Buffy herself, Willow, Xander, Faith and Angel. I also found the trio of Jonathan, Andrew and Warren to be entertaining.

Buffy is appealing as a sort of anti-victim who deconstructs the characters and narratives that we had grown accustomed to seeing and reading about women and monsters. Although her supernatural powers are not relatable, her emotional choices are.

Willow is also a refreshing character in that we have in her a girl nerd for a change. She is also a very well-developed character who explores a different kind of power than the power that Buffy has. As she gains in her Wicca power, we see her looking more, not less feminine in her long skirts.

Xander is lovable for his humor and loyalty. His character really added to the appeal of the show, almost making you feel like you were watching a show about your friends.

Faith is like Buffy’s double in a way, the dark side of the slayer. Buffy sometimes seems too good. Faith was something more. She allowed us to explore more of the fun side of the power of being a slayer and a bad girl at the same time. Buffy sometimes seemed not to have enough fun and to make too many sacrifices. Faith helped to compensate for this.

Angel was the most poignant character, with his issues of guilt and redemption, crime and punishment. He was worthy of a Dostoevsky character.

The trio entertained me with their at-first comically villainous plot twists, such as creating a Buffybot for Spike and accidentally turning Buffy invisible.

CL: Faith is my all time favorite because she’s so complicated. She’s been through a lot, things that would drive most people insane, but she’s come out the other side not much worse for the wear.

Spike is a close second for pretty much the same reason. His history with Angel and Drusilla is so fantastically rich and twisted, plus he’s totally hilarious.

LL: Giles. Giles, Giles, Giles. Did I mention Giles?

I just love "reluctant hero" types and characters who are more than they appear on the surface. Noncombatants who are actually quite good at fighting are one of my very favorite things. It didn’t hurt that he was also very easy on the eyes.

I liked Buffy’s best friends, too - Xander was such a total doof you couldn’t help loving him, and Tara was a lovable dork in her own way. Buffy ... my interest in her as a character waxed and waned as the show went on. I really liked the Buffy of the first couple of seasons, but the more competent, confident and (frankly) bitchy she got, the less I liked her. I enjoyed Buffy a lot as an awkward teenager struggling with powers she didn’t want and couldn’t really control. Buffy the adult, though, wasn’t someone that I liked very much.

To my own surprise, I developed a real soft spot for Anya as the series went on. I’d hated her when I first saw her (in season six), thinking she was vain and shallow. And, well, she was ... but the more I found out about her past, the more I enjoyed seeing her try to fit in with the humans. Again with the "reluctant hero" thing - I really loved the little moments when she’d surprise herself by caring about someone or something.

I’m probably the only female-type person on the planet who didn’t care for either Spike or Angel. I found Angel very dull, and Spike was lots of fun as a baddie but much less enjoyable as a good guy - partly, I think, because the writers couldn’t figure out what to do with him and he waffled strangely between being evil and being a soppy, sentimental mess. Not that what they wanted to do with him was necessarily a bad *idea*, and not that it couldn’t have been done well; I just didn’t feel as if it was.

PM: Spike for his complicated characterizations throughout Buffy and Angel and he’s attractive to boot. Oz because he is just so cool. Faith, again a complicated character you love as well as hate.

CNS: Oz and Anya. I really liked Willow in the early season, but when she went all dark-magicky, I didn’t like her because I never felt it was a natural progression for her. Oz and Anya were hilarious and in two different ways. Oz was dry-humor personified and Anya was blunt and innocent humor.

WM: Spike, as our long-time readers know all too well. Initially, I adored him just because he was so damn funny, but when he started to fall for Buffy, I found myself rooting hard for him to get the girl. What can I say, I’m a sucker for redemption stories! And I love Buffy, of course (I was already fan of Sarah Michelle Gellar before the series), then Willow, Giles, Tara, Xander, Dawn, and Oz (like with Gellar, I was a fan of his from before his addition to the show), in that order. Not that I didn’t like any other characters - villains included - but that’s the top of my list.

ST: Was there anything that happened in the show, or an aspect of the series overall, that bothered you?

MB: Nothing that I hated so much that I stopped watching, but there were certainly choices which upset me. I wish Willow and Tara and Xander and Anya had been allowed happier endings, but Joss Whedon’s notorious for hating those for romantic couples.

RB: Well, I was terribly confused at first by the appearance of Dawn, but I didn’t hate that story line and it ultimately made sense. I was disappointed when Riley ran off to fight monsters with the military, though, instead of staying in Sunnydale with Buffy.

AD: The whole Riley thing I never quite got used to. Even though it was resolved very well.

JFE: The sixth season of Buffy was my favorite due to the rich development of so many themes, from Buffy’s struggle to adjust to her adult life, to evil Willow, to Xander’s leaving Anya at the alter, to the trio’s schemes, to Spike’s character development and his relationship with Buffy. Yet, I did not like the Big Bad of season six.

I hated the characters of Glory and Ben. I also disliked the associated plot-line involving The Key, as well as the character of Dawn. I felt that Glory was annoying and not as much fun as some of the previous villains had been. I think monsters who look and act more like monsters are more fun that petulant Hell-Gods who pout in their lingerie. I disliked the character of Dawn, too. She seemed almost constantly huffy with Buffy.

In a way, Dawn was a helpless female that was a pawn of horror monsters, the kind of female that Buffy’s character had been created to deconstruct. I sometimes suspected that after Buffy ended, a series might be created around Dawn’s character, because she was young and it might be thought by studio executives that she would appeal to "young people".

CL: By and large season four was a complete bore. The whole commando subplot was just plain dumb. I had a hard time caring about "the big bad" of the season, a cyborg army guy named Adam, because he was just so uninteresting.

LL: I had one big peeve with the series as a whole, and that was the plasticky sameness to the looks of most of the characters. I know that this might sound a bit strange and I also realize that it’s a total hangup of mine, but most of the extras and the minor characters (Faith, Harmony, etc) had this ultra-skinny, plastic, whitebread sort of beauty to them that I detested. There are some shows on which the characters, major and minor, are different and varied and entertaining to look at. I did not find Buffy to be one of those shows. Even among the main characters, the skinniness of the women (Buffy and Anya, for example) was just creepy and disturbing to look at.

As far as the plotlines go, there were a lot of things about the latter part of the series that I didn’t much like, despite the fact that it was the first part of the series that I saw. Making Spike one of the good guys was one of those things, because I never really felt like the writers wanted him good - it felt more like they caved to fan pressure and then didn’t know how to write him as a good guy. And I didn’t like the way that Buffy was written towards the end; she went from being a character that I liked and sympathized with, to someone I really didn’t want to know. I also felt that the latter couple of seasons lost a lot of the sparkle of the early ones and got weighed down by overly heavy and serious plots. So ... yeah. I had such issues with the end of the series that it ended up overshadowing my enjoyment of the early parts, which is sad.

PM: The attempted rape in "Seeing Red". Spike chaining up Buffy in "Crush". Those two eps came the closest to driving me away from the show.

CNS: Dawn. I really disliked the introduction of Dawn and her continued role in the series. She always came across as a whiney brat. It seemed the addition of Dawn was an attempt at bringing in younger viewers

WM: Like Mary, I would have preferred happier endings - I think tragedy is trite.

In particular, "Seeing Red" had me ... well, seeing red, both because of Tara’s death and Spike’s attempted rape of Buffy. I could have seen an earlier Spike doing that, but having the attempted rape happen then just seemed out of place in the character’s arc. It all seemed very forced and manipulative of the audience’s emotions - it shouldn’t be so glaringly obvious when a storyteller wants you to lean in a certain direction.

Actually, season six as a whole was a let-down in many ways; I consider it to be the second-weakest season (four being the worst, save for the Spike bits, simply because it was uninteresting overall). Six was rife with missed storytelling possibilities and, well, a great deal of character assassination. There was a lot of screaming in the anti-Spike camp about his actions in "Seeing Red", but Buffy was basically made into a veritable rapist herself over the course of the latter half of that season, using Spike for sex and abusing him. And hey, Willow wasn’t exactly likable that season, even before she became the Big Bad. Giles’ way of handling things didn’t seem like handling anything at all. Even Jonathan got raked over the coals in characterisation. Really, did anyone come out of that season worthy of the same respect they’d had going in? (Tara doesn’t count, seeing as she didn’t actually come out of it at all.) It was like an exercise in seeing how much they could make us hate the characters and still be able to bring them back from the brink! (Rather like the writers of Lost last season, ey? *Whistles innocently*)

And there were times when the portrayal of Wicca made me clench my teeth. (FYI, Whedon, a practitioner of Wicca is a "Wiccan"!)

ST: Has your interest in the series extended past the show?

MB: I’ve read quite a few of the comics - Tales of the Slayers and Tales of the Vampires are my favourites of them - and a few of the novels. I have a Faith action figure, and a history of shamefully dodgy fanfiction behind me.

RB: I’ve read a few of the Tales of the Slayers collection (largely depressing, considering the ultimate fate of every Slayer) and I loved the Tales of the Slayers graphic novel; I wish Dark Horse would produce some more.

AD: Read Tales of the Slayers and enjoyed the writing as individual, separate stories. Never got into the comics or novels as it wasn’t the same as watching the series. Have a Buffy doll I got for a birthday present but wouldn’t have bought one myself.

JFE: I have never read any Buffy novels or comics or played any Buffy games, but I have read some of the Buffy fanfiction on the web. I find the web subculture spawned by Buffy to be very interesting, complete with its own language.

CL: I have a keen interest in the Fray and Tales of the Slayers graphic novels. They’re both on my Amazon wish list. Since I came to the Buffyverse so late it’s a little hard to find action figures, but I have a couple from Angel.

LL: No, I haven’t.

PM: I’ve collected numerous Spike related merchandise, gone to Buffy/Angel focused conventions, continued friendships long after the show was over.

CNS: I’ve borrowed some of the novels and comics from the library and from friends. I sort of collected the trading cards (and by "sort of" I mean "I bought two packs and my friend who collected them all gave me her extras.") I’ve also read some Buffy fanfiction, but that’s as far as my interests have gone outside the show.

WM: I too have read a number of the comics, including the gorgeously-illustrated Fray, and some of the books, though I haven’t read much of either of late. My mother still collects the magazines, so I read hers - I used to buy two copies all the time, one for each of us. I have a smattering of the action figures, the Spike bust-ornament, a matchbox car of Spike’s Desoto, a mini-lunchbox, trading cards, a framed poster of Fray, and have worn a few of the shirts into cheesecloth state. I also wrote Spike-centric fanfic, including two series where he had a vamp-dog sidekick named Cerberus. I devoured the "Spuffy" fanfics of others. I did fan-art. And I still maintain a fansite dedicated to fan-encounters with James Marsters (the actor who plays Spike, if you hadn’t sussed that out already).

ST: How far did the series touch your life? Did you watch with friends and/or family? Have you gone to conventions because of it, or joined online forums/communities? Have you made new friends because of it?

MB: I had friends in high school who were obsessed with it. They liked Buffy best and I liked Faith best, so we used to argue a lot. I met quite a few of the people I’m still close with online through the Buffy fandom. I’m going to my first Buffy-related convention later this year, actually.

RB: I’ve made friends online, but, no I haven’t joined any fan clubs or attended any conventions. The effect that Buffy had on me was more intimate and personal: she taught me to be strong.

AD: Never joined a forum or went to a con just for the Buffy content. It did introduce me to Joss Whedon and now I’ll buy/read/watch anything signed by him or Jane Espenson.

JFE: Buffy has touched my life mainly by entertaining me, but I have not forgotten Buffy as easily as I do most TV shows. Buffy has taken on an aspect of modern mythology, living in my imagination longer than just the six years that it was aired. The main person in my life with whom I have shared Buffy has been my husband, who, like me, became an avid watcher of Buffy (and then Angel). He would not normally enjoy watching something so heavily geared to exploring emotions and relationships; but I believe that the drama, action and humor that were combined with the histrionics kept him engaged in the show.

CL: I’d say the series strengthened my friendships with those friends who couldn’t believe I had never watched the show beyond a few episodes here and there. I understand the Buffyverse related jokes now.

Also, about two weeks after finishing the series I met Joss Whedon while walking the convention floor at the San Diego Comic Con and got a picture with him. I would have dripped fangirl all over him by way of praise for the show, but I literally couldn’t speak. It was simultaneously my most proud and least proud moment. Hee hee!

LL: Well, it was a social thing with my sister, since we could finally talk about it and enjoyed bantering about the latest episodes. Aside from that, though, it didn’t have much of an effect. I liked the show, but it wasn’t one of the ones that I got fannish about.

CM: See my answer for the question above.

CNS: I’ve watched it with family. My mom, mostly. Sometimes with friends. One way I can recall it having an effect on my life is my entire Girl Scout troop knows the songs from "Once More, With Feeling" and we all can start singing those songs at the drop of a hat.

WM: Like I said before, I watched it with my parents at the start; after I moved, that became a huge topic of discussion for us on the phone. It also became a nice way to bond with my coworkers.

I started writing the fanfics after season five, and got to know people online through that. By the end of the series I had about ten Buffy-related message boards I posted at regularly at one point or another, and I still touch base with people from some of them. (I’ve even gotten reacquainted with one fan recently through the Stargate SG-1 fandom).

I started going to conventions to see members of the cast, Marsters in particular, and met a lot of people that way. Many of the best experiences of my life have been at conventions. (You haven’t lived until you’ve sung along to "Once More With feeling" with a couple hundred other people!) I started writing for Tart after the first time I went to a convention, and started writing "Buffy Bites" soon after. Then I started getting other work in the industry because of the work I did for Tart. So in a roundabout way, Buffy opened a lot of doors for me - and for that, Mr. Whedon, I’ll be forever grateful!