Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Buffy Summers, Buffy the Vampire Slayer

The Setup:

The episode "Normal Again", the Trio unleashes a demon on Buffy that causes her to suffer severe hallucinatory episodes. She suddenly imagines herself in a mental institution, where she is told she has spent much of the last six years in a catatonia. Her doctor and her parents, who are still alive in this world, take advantage of this rare lucid moment to advise her how she can escape forever. The way to do this, however, is to allow all her friends to die, which is ultimately not something she can do. Returning to Sunnydale and taking an antidote to the demon’s attack, Buffy commits to her vampire-slaying life as the real one. But did she choose correctly?

The Case For:

Well, that demon who attacked her did have hallucinatory powers. It’s also questionable whether she could plausibly develop such a strong connection to the people she knew in her supposed fantasy world, and you’d kind of think the reality of the mental institution would have intruded just a little bit in the preceding six years.

The Case Against:

But all of those supposed arguments are countered and dealt with in the episode itself. And if she did just hallucinate the whole thing, then who exactly is issuing into existence the last scene of the episode, where the doctor sadly informs her parents that Buffy is gone forever? That happens after she took the antidote, so her mind should no longer be creating anything in that reality.

Chances That She Really Escaped:

50%. Because, in the end, it doesn’t really matter which world is real and which is an illusion. What really matters is that Buffy chose the world she wanted to be real, and so the answer can remain safely ambiguous.

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