Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Why ’Buffy’ Still Slays Us

With the final, seventh season now on DVD, we look back and salute our favorite slayer

"Buffy the Vampire Slayer" was TV’s most unlikely pop-culture phenomenon since "The X-Files." It is a series with humble beginnings (the movie, starring Kristy Swanson, was a minor cult hit and a critical failure in 1992), a tongue-in-cheek title and a premise that reads like a comic book. So how did a snappy fantasy about vampires, demons and a high-school cutie born to dispatch them between homework assignments evolve? How did "Buffy" move from a whip-smart collision of hormonal turmoil, supernatural soap opera, apocalyptic adventure and sly humor to the most human exploration of death, grief, sacrifice and self-actualization on TV?

Creator Joss Whedon’s inspired mix of horror-movie revisionism, pop-culture vamping and wrenching tragedy uses the exaggerated trials of its teenage vampire hunters (Buffy and her friends, aka "the Scooby Gang") as a metaphor for the everyday troubles of its young (and not-so-young) audience.

But a metaphor is only as good as the writing behind it, and "Buffy" is smartly written and dramatically inventive, using the fantastic to explore the hard choices and journeys made by the human behind the hero. More than simply acrobatic butt-kicking by a delectable action babe, "Buffy" became a mythology for the modern media age, a celebration of female empowerment and friendship with a supernatural setting and pop-culture flair. This metaphor has a vibrant life all its own.

The show lasted an epic seven seasons on TV and, with the release of the final season on DVD this week, now lives on indefinitely on home video. Here is a guide to this unlikely hero’s journey through the years.

Buffy battles the Master (FOX)Season One

Picking up practically from where the movie left off, the first episode finds Buffy (a then-unknown Sarah Michelle Gellar) relocating to Sunnydale, a sleepy little SoCal town that just happens to be built on a fast-track to the underworld known as the Hellmouth. With her crisply British "Watcher" Giles (Anthony Stewart Head) as trainer, taskmaster and increasingly paternal guardian, and new friends Xander (Nicholas Brendon), the jovial class clown, and Willow (Alyson Hannigan), the delightfully nerdy school brain, she begins the unending battle against the supernatural menaces that infest the town like vermin, drawn to the evil of the Hellmouth like vampires to a virgin throat. Never happy with the movie (a victim of studio interference), Joss Whedon got a rare opportunity at a creative second chance and relaunched his vision as a hip, youth-skewing series for the fledgling WB network. Debuting as a mid-season replacement with a complement of 12 episodes, it launched almost fully conceived. Sure, characters grew and relationships shifted (like Xander’s initial school-boy crush on Buffy), but while this is decidedly more lighthearted than later seasons, the essential mix of supernatural weirdness, sharp writing, snappy dialogue and high-school heroes saving the world from evil on a weekly basis is fully formed from episode one.

Highlights: Angel (David Boreanaz), the brooding vampire with a soul, debuts in the second episode "The Harvest" (originally the second half of a two-hour pilot) and reveals his cruel dark side in "Angel." Buffy faces death, literally, in the season finale "Prophecy Girl." On a lighter note, Buffy, Willow and Xander massacre a scene from "Oedipus Rex" in the hilarious coda to "The Puppet Show."

Season Two

Buffy and the Scooby Gang returned for their junior year with a full season’s complement of episodes of vampires, demons, homework and the usual teenage melodrama surrounding a butt-kicking heroine in love with a centuries-old bloodsucker. It takes the promise of the first season and ups the stakes with an uncompromising level of dramatic bloodletting, beginning with the devastating transformation of Angel in the two-parter "Surprise"/"Innocence." Here, a dreamy romance transformed into a harrowing nightmare when true bliss revives Angel’s repressed vampire alter-ego, the casually cruel Angelus.

Amid this adolescent symphony of guilt, obsession and emotional sucker punches, however, are some lighter notes: Willow gets an admirer in Oz (Seth Green), a rock band guitarist with an annoying hair problem during the full moon; Xander finds true lust with snotty high school queen Cordelia (Charisma Carpenter); and vampire lovers Spike (a platinum blonde James Marsters, keeping the image of Billy Idol alive ... in an undead sort of way) and Drusilla (Juliet Landau) blow into Sunnydale with destruction on their evil little minds.

Highlights: The devastating two-parter "Surprise"/"Innocence," surely the most harrowing consequences of pre-marital sex a teen ever had to confront, is a brilliant example of the show’s balance between the mythic and the mortal. Also, John Ritter is chilling as a perfectionist who dates Buffy mom and starts to transform her life in "Ted." Willow begins to study magic in the two-part season finale "Becoming," where Buffy slips back in the darkness with a sacrifice that will haunt her through the next season.

Evil Willow appears in ’Dopplegangland’ (FOX)Season Three

There’s a new slayer in town, but wild-child Faith (Eliza Dushku) is only one of the latest complications in the life of Buffy, now in her senior year of high school. Also new on the scene are a demonic Mayor (Harry Groener) with a wholesome "Father Knows Best" sense of decorum and social niceties; the prim, proper and utterly ineffectual new watcher Wesley (Alexis Denisof) sent to replace the increasingly independent and protective Giles, and the introduction of vengeance demon Anyanka (Emma Caulfield). More importantly to Buffy is the painful rebirth of the soulful vampire Angel, who has been to hell and back — literally. For all of the tongue-in-cheekiness of the show, there is nothing comic in the touching paternal bond that grows between the Mayor and Faith as her impulsive, violent ways draw her from the light to the dark. And don’t worry, Whedon pulls out another apocalyptic climax ... and this one is for every viewer who remembers the misery of high school. Many fans consider this season — the last to co-star Angel (he left for his own spin-off series) — to be the best of the series.

Highlights: Anyanka turns Sunnydale into a demonic bizarro-world lorded over by evil vampire Willow when Cordelia rashly makes "The Wish." Then, evil Willow — leather and all — gets an encore in "Dopplegangland." Buffy gets a taste of the wild side in "Bad Girls" and then takes on Faith and the Mayor in the two-part finale "Graduation Day."

The Gentlemen in ’Hush’ (FOX)Season Four

Buffy and most of the Scooby Gang go to college and discover the next generation of demon fighters: the Initiative, a platoon of monster-hunting Marines located in the basement of the Sunnydale college. While Buffy falls for its boyish platoon leader Riley (Marc Blucas), Willow discovers feelings she never knew she had, Xander skips college, gets a job and falls in love (with a former demon, no less), and a now-returned Spike gets the chip on his shoulder replaced by a chip in his head. Even die-hard fans will admit that this is the weakest season of the series, which in this case means it is merely very good, hampered largely by a flat Frankenstein villain named Adam, an Initiative super-soldier that goes AWOL in a big way. Yet it also contains one of the most memorable and best loved episodes, notably the Joss Whedon-penned and directed "Hush," an episode that is silent for half its running time, and even reveals the wicked past and even more wicked nickname of lovable old Giles: "Ripper."

Highlights: Cadaverous killers, The Gentlemen, float through Sunnydale quieting voices and stealing hearts in "Hush," one of the most inventive and eerie episodes of the series. Faith returns in "This Year’s Girl" and "Who Are You" and the Scooby Gang dreams of things strange, wonderful and cheese-y in the season coda "Restless."

Season Five

Dracula takes on the Slayer in the season opener, but the kicker of the episode is the introduction of Buffy’s little sister Dawn (Michelle Trachtenberg). She was pushed on Whedon to open the show up to a younger demographic, but he turns it into an ingenious opportunity. While Buffy takes on Glory (Clare Kramer) — her most powerful "Big Bad" (Buffy-speak for really nasty nemesis) yet — Spike, the now-harmless vampire with a chip in his head, finds himself playing big brother to an identity-rattled Dawn and discovering feelings for Buffy that the undead aren’t supposed to have.

Less dramatic but more central to the backbone of Whedon’s vision, however, is the growth of Xander, the "useless" member of the gang who finds his calling and his heart this season, and establishes himself, quite subtly, as the emotional equilibrium of the Scooby Gang and the entire series. While never losing his boyish goofiness, Xander becomes a man.

Highlights: Xander confronts himself, literally, when he’s split in two in "The Replacement." Buffy makes the ultimate sacrifice in "The Gift." However, the season will be best remembered for "The Body" (written and directed by Whedon), which brings the reality of human mortality into clear and profound focus with an affecting exploration of death and grief.

Spike and Buffy (FOX)Season Six

The strangest and, in some ways, the most fascinating season is a time of transitions and painful transformations ... and not of the supernatural variety. As the Scooby Gang grows up, it also acts out: Brought back from the dead in a botched ceremony by Willow, a disoriented Buffy tries to lose her misery in a purely physical affair with the vampire bad-boy Spike. Willow becomes a magic junkie, Xander struggles with self doubt, and Dawn resorts to petty crime and attention-getting tricks. The crises are only amplified when a trio of tech-geeks, who dabble in the dark arts, decides to form a super-villain team aimed at tormenting Buffy. It’s a game that turns dark and deadly. Apocalyptic endings are nothing new to the Buffy-verse, but the dimension of grief and rage that erupts in the final episodes here gives it an all-too-human grounding.

Highlights: True to the tone of the season, even the dazzling musical episode "Once More, With Feeling" (yes, the cast really sings songs penned by Whedon) is sown with misgivings and frustrations. And true to the musical theater tradition, unspoken feelings finally find voice in song. Everyone gets amnesia in the comic "Tabula Rasa" when a spell goes wrong. Buffy gets a glimpse of a normal life in the poignant "Normal Again." Spike’s obsessive love for Buffy takes a terrible turn in the uncompromising episode "Seeing Red," which ends on another traumatic mortal death and proves again Whedon is never afraid to kill off an important character.

Buffy slays vamp (FOX)Season Seven

The final season of "Buffy" comes to a brilliant, ambitious and satisfying end. As the Scooby Gang tentatively tries to put itself back together after the traumas of season six, the First — a shape-shifting form who may or may not be Satan but is most definitely the source of evil in the universe — declares war on Buffy and all the slayers of the world. The trembling potential slayers of the world travel to Sunnydale and turn Buffy’s house into a permanent slumber party. Meanwhile, Spike returns with a soul and a soul-crushing guilt that drives him stark raving loony, and renegade slayer Faith appears to redeem her past sins. Meanwhile Xander, the sole mortal human among the supernaturally enhanced fighters, again proves himself the heart and soul of the group. Joss Whedon enriches and deepens the slayer mythology in its final season with a level of feminist commentary, sexual politics and mythological reclamation that resonates long after the final episode is over.

Highlights: The First taunts the heroes in the guise of casualties and lost loves of past seasons in "Conversations With Dead People." Dawn and Xander bond in "Potential." Faith arrives in "Dirty Girls," along with the First’s hateful henchman Caleb (Nathan Fillion, star of Whedon’s short-lived series "Firefly"). And, finally, "Chosen" ends the series with the ultimate expression of empowerment.