“Welcome to the story of the world! Things fall apart, Buffy. Evil comes and goes. But the way people manage is they don’t do it alone.”
After barely surviving high school graduation (literally!), the Scooby Gang heads off to college sans Xander, who continues living at home. As such, it was a season of major changes, on screen and off. Spike became a series regular after being abandoned by Drusilla, and is rendered incapable of harming humans due to a chip implanted in his head by a secret government organization that fights and studies demons known as the Initiative, its base of operations located rather conveniently in the bowels of UC Sunnydale.
And with the departure of Seth Green’s Oz, Willow meets a fellow Wiccan, Tara Maclay (Amber Benson), who will become an important love interest for the series and a groundbreaking lesbian relationship on television. At the same time, Xander begins an unlikely but charming romance with the acerbic Anya Jenkins, the former vengeance demon from third season’s delightful episode “The Wish,” in which Cordelia found herself in a world in which the Slayer never came to Sunnydale.
DAVID FURY
(producer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
Joss wanted to get Xander into a relationship, because Cordelia left to be on Angel. Anya was not meant to be a character that returned. That was a one-shot deal, but then he hit upon the idea of, What if it’s her? It’s always great when you can pull from the history of the show rather than just introducing a character. So you realize, “I can use that girl Anya for that,” and they were great together. That was a really fun couple. More so than Cordelia and Xander. She was so great. I loved writing for them, and there was a terrific dynamic between the two of them.
More pivotal, however, was the relationship between Buffy and new boyfriend, Riley Finn, played by actor Marc Blucas, a graduate student who is also a top soldier in the Initiative under the guidance of Buffy’s professor Maggie Walsh (Lindsay Crouse). The intent of Walsh and the organization is a merging of demons and cybernetics to create deadly supersoldiers, which eventually leads to the reveal of season four’s Big Bad, Adam. Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto?
SARAH LEMELMAN
(author, “It’s About Power”: Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Stab at Establishing the Strength of Girls on American Television)
The Initiative is introduced to the show in season four, which immediately follows Buffy’s “graduation” from the Council. Buffy gets involved with the Initiative when she discovers that her college boyfriend, Riley Finn, is a rising star of this secret demon-hunting government agency. From the instant she walks into its operations, she is ostracized. Buffy is one of the few females in the facility and sticks out like a sore thumb with the way she dresses and speaks.
When a room of Initiative soldiers and Buffy are briefed on a demon, or what they call “hostile subterrestials” (HSTs), Buffy is noticeably frowned upon by all of the soldiers, including Riley. She asks questions in a child-like and unprofessional manner (“Why can’t we damage this poke-a-things arms?”), and when it is suggested that she change out of her bright salmon-colored halter top into the camouflage suits that every other soldier sports, she declines, not wanting to look “all Private Benjamin.” Buffy’s deviation from the norm is both ridiculed and laughed at, as the camera pans the room of angry and amused faces of soldiers.
JOSS WHEDON
(creator/executive producer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
Season four was about, How do you keep the group together without being sort of 90210 about it, and believably? The answer is, you don’t. By season four, we were into mission statement. Season two was “Spike and Dru”—and then we realized we were doing the Angel thing—and then that became the season. Season three we knew we were going to do the Faith thing and graduate and there was going to be some growing up to do. We didn’t come into real mission statements until season four, because things were so different. What we said was this is the first year of college, the first year of college is about being able to do whatever the hell you want, completely losing yourself and trying on new identities and changing and obviously in Willow’s case changing a lot. Exploring sexuality, exploring freedom to fuck your boyfriend all day, which Buffy did for a while.
There are periods you go through where it’s, “My God, nobody’s watching and we can do whatever we want.” Giles had been fired and was completely at loose ends. The man had a sombrero on, for God’s sake. And the group kind of got torn apart by it. Plus the introduction of Riley into Buffy’s life, something that, no matter what, we knew was going to be difficult and strange. Add all that to “Let’s play our James Bond fantasies” with the whole idea of the Initiative.
DAVID FURY
It was weird. I remember writing a scene in “The I in Team” where I directly ripped off From Russia with Love where it’s obviously a training exercise and the lights kind of come on. We think it’s Buffy, but it’s actually just a training exercise. I’m a Bond fan. If we’re going to have a secret-agent organization, I’m going to do a little Bond homage.
JOSS WHEDON
That’s pretty much season four. Let’s have the cool night-vision goggles. Of course with our budget we had, like, three walls and a shrub—but it was cool in our minds.
DAVID FURY
It was exciting for Joss to challenge himself. For the rest, it became trickier because high school was the perfect allegory for the show. Once we blew up the high school and moved to college, things became less universal. A lot of people don’t go to college, so trying to find that allegory in the stories became a little bit more challenging. We were able to latch on to a few things. One of the things was Xander being the one friend who doesn’t go to college and feels left behind. But trying to find what is the commonality in college was trickier.
I got to do a haunted frat house. This was about Buffy and her friends venturing into adulthood, which eventually led to Joyce’s death and all these other things that were not part of the show’s makeup initially. That said, the creation of the Initiative that Joss had brought to the show, we were somewhat confused by initially. We were trying to figure out what was the allegory. What we came around to believe is there are forces beyond us and as we get into adulthood, we start to understand how complex the world really is and how governments work and it’s not about petty little things. It’s about a much bigger world. That’s sort of what we latched on to.
MARTI NOXON
(supervising producer)
When they read my first script for season four, Joss and David left a message on my answering machine saying my script “didn’t cut it,” before revealing they were joking and loved it.
Significant additional changes came from the fact that Charisma Carpenter’s Cordelia Chase and David Boreanaz had departed the show for the Angel spin-off, with the titular hero now seeking redemption on the mean streets of the City of Angels, far from Sunnydale.
JAMES MARSTERS
(actor, Spike)
What changed Joss’s mind about bringing me back is he needed a new Cordelia. He needed a character to come in and tell Buffy, “You’re stupid; we’re all about to die.” Cordelia went off to the Angel spin-off, so they needed a character to fill those shoes. Joss told me that Sarah actually said, “What about Spike?” Joss thought for a second, “That might work.” So, yeah, I was the new Cordelia. In fact, that’s why I think I eventually went over to Angel, because they lost Cordelia and they needed a new one. I’ve been following in Cordelia’s footsteps ever since.
A major plot point that would reverberate for the rest of the series and set up a far more substantial character arc for Spike in season five was that chip inserted by the Initiative that would prevent him from harming a human (a la Isaac Asimov’s three laws of robotics in automatons). Only this chip kept bloodsuckers from biting down on humans like Big Macs.
JAMES MARSTERS
Spike was designed to be a villain, but they decided to keep me around, so they needed to find a way to make Spike a little more recognizable, to put him through experiences that people might actually identify with and kind of take him down off that pedestal of supervillain. It was really important to stop trying to kill Buffy, because if he kept doing that, he was going to either be killed himself or he was going to become pathetic in failing so many times. That was my worry. I didn’t see how they were going to fit me in. My fear was that they were going to have to soften him so much that it wouldn’t work. But in a way, the situation heightened his frustration and he was even more evil now because he was mad about it.
I was having such a fun time playing the Big Bad, so I was uncomfortable with them taking away my cool. But that’s the only way to keep me alive in that universe. In a lot of season four, though, especially the beginning, it wasn’t working. You’d see Spike come in in a burning blanket on fire. That was just to get me into the room with the Scooby Gang so I could deliver the line, “Buffy, you’re stupid. We’re all about to die.” It was very cumbersome to get me into the room. It took special effects and everyone was gagging from the fake smoke and I could tell that this just couldn’t go on that long. I was not going to be the new Cordelia. I thought, “You know what, they gave me a chance. It’s not my fault, but it’s not going to happen. I’m probably going to get killed off.”
DAVID FURY
Spike was off the show for a while and I don’t think there was any intention to bring him back until we wanted to mix things up. To do that, the interesting thing was to put Spike on the side of the good guys, but without selling him out at that time as being a vampire. He’s not Angel—he’s not the vampire with a soul. How does he become a good guy? So the idea of putting a chip in his head and forcing this creature that wants and needs to kill humans and can’t, so he can only get his kicks from killing other demons and vampires, was a way for him to be a reluctant ally and keep him in the mix. It was a very clever way to do that and it provided the means for him to eventually become a domesticated vampire, which would allow him to eventually realize he was in love with Buffy.
JAMES MARSTERS
I didn’t like the chip. I recognized that there was a problem to be solved: if you include Spike as a cast member, how do you get him to stop trying to kill Buffy? Because if he keeps trying and you have to fail, that’s going to become repetitive and the character’s going to be pathetic very quickly. Of course, he can never succeed, obviously. I wanted to have a way that Spike would decide himself to stop trying to kill her for some reason. I felt like the chip was a bit of a deus ex machina, a weak dramatic device and a cop-out. It’s an easy way out. I called it “deus ex chip” because there was this machine that was making the decision for us, which I thought was less interesting.
That was the point when I was convinced that it wasn’t working and the character was not going to be able to last very long in the show and that they were just cannibalizing him for cheap laughs before he was killed off. I was just in fear and paranoia, so it was horrible. It was all because of my own demons and my own weakness that I was in fear, but I was. I didn’t share that with anybody. I was just thinking, this is it. I just didn’t see it. It was wonderfully written and part of a great arc and it was all perfect. I was just too scared to appreciate it fully.
But that was a short amount of time, like a month or two. I am an actor who just loves his job. I’m the nerd on the set going, “God, guys, isn’t this fun? This is cool, huh?” Other actors couldn’t look at me and just say, “We’re tired.” Whenever they call action, there is a fun to that. So it was never all bad, but it was a little harder to have that fun in Xander’s basement.
DAVID FURY
That was not something that Joss knew he was going to do; it’s something that sort of came out of a lot of different things, including staff suggestions, Marti’s influence, and things Joss recognized long before things aired that he felt weren’t working as well as he hoped. And how do we mix things up? What could we do that would be really cool and surprising? The great idea was to bring back Spike and make him part of the Scooby Gang.
JAMES MARSTERS
My idea was that Spike should fall in love with Buffy. Of course, she never reciprocates because he’s way beneath her, but he should fall in love with her and he should try to be good and constantly fail, to comedic effect or to horrifying effect, whichever episode you’re doing. But you can go a lot of directions with that, and that will work really well. That wasn’t their idea. So, for me it became, How do you do severe migraine without messing up your hair? I stole a page out of William Shatner’s book. If you notice, we do “severe headache” very similarly which is we put our knuckles to the side of our head. We don’t put our hands through our hair. If you mess your hair up, it’s going to take another hour to reset that.
I guess about mid-season, I was hungering for some swagger. I was like, “Spike, is getting really soft here.” Even my brother, who is so supportive of everything I do, was like, “Dude, you need to get some balls.”
DAVID FURY
The other big change was David Greenwalt was no longer around as Joss’s number two. David was a big part of the first three seasons. Joss relied on David very much to be his sounding board for him to test out his ideas. So on those earlier years where I was freelancing for the show, it seemed to be more directed through David and Joss’s imaginations rather than the staff. I don’t think until season three Joss started to rely on his staff a bit more and started to find some more surprises. Things that surprised himself for the season was through his staff.
So when we got to season four and David had moved on to Angel, it was just a different dynamic. Marti moved up into the second sort of position and Marti brought a different thing to the show. She brought a much more emotional angle to it. Often a more romantic angle to the stories that weren’t there in the earlier years. All the little heartbreaking things, whether if it was stuff with Tara and Willow or with Xander and Anya.
It was season four that Joss really took Marti under his wing. Joss wanted to mentor Marti into growing into that role. It was a different dynamic where he opened it up more as a staff in terms of relying on them to find some of the ways to get to where he wanted to go.
JOSS WHEDON
We did a lot of things in season four that were different. Some of them met with approval, some less so. Because we get bored. We didn’t want to watch the same show every week, and we don’t want to make the same show every week. Not having David [Boreanaz] anymore made it easier, because it meant we had new places to go. What had become tough was how could we wring any new changes out of that relationship? Well, we no longer had that problem. Then they were going to college. It was actually an embarrassment of riches.
DAVID FURY
I know it was creatively freeing for Joss. Joss really likes to keep things moving. He likes to challenge himself. The Angel-Buffy relationship had played out. He went to the place where she kills him. That’s really more or less what you can do with him. You certainly have the fans and stuff saying this is the love of her life and how can the show go on without Angel? But I’m sure Joss just felt it would open things up in so many different ways.
SARAH LEMELMAN
After Buffy’s heartbreak with Angel, it is a long time before she lets anyone in again. It is clear that no other relationship affects her and is as meaningful as her relationship with Angel, but she still strives for some semblance of love in subsequent seasons. Once she graduates high school and enrolls in college at Sunnydale, she meets Riley, who appears to be the perfect all-American boy. They begin a relationship, and it is quickly discovered that Riley is not just an ordinary college boy, but he works as a soldier for a secret government organization known as the Initiative, which hunts down and experiments on demons. Still, he is a far cry from Angel, and Buffy is seen as straddling the fine line of trying to maintain a normal human relationship while still being a powerful Slayer. This puts the two of them in several awkward situations, as Buffy is seen as a stronger and better soldier in Riley’s eyes. As a result, a crisis of masculinity is presented where Riley often sees his male status threatened by Buffy.
DAVID FURY
Obviously, the one thing you want to do is make Riley the new love interest for Buffy, but it became kind of clear that the fans weren’t reacting. We weren’t finding him as interesting a character as we would have liked. Marc Blucas is great, but the chemistry wasn’t entirely there. Initially, the excitement of bringing in this cool secret agent to be Buffy’s love interest was something Joss was really thrilled with. Marti also had something to do with Marc’s casting. I think she just went gaga over him. But the character never quite gelled in the way we wanted.
MARTI NOXON
For my personal taste, and this says a lot about me and my dating history, I liked Riley a lot better once he started to get fucked up. I liked him much better once there was stuff going on with him that I didn’t understand or couldn’t put my finger on. When he was soldier guy, he just lacked that darkness that is so appealing in our characters. Most of our characters have two sides to them; they’re relatively complex. Part of what we were playing with him is that he is presented as the anti-Angel. He was supposed to present kind of a problem to Buffy because he wasn’t the scary guy, and could she deal with that? Could she deal with someone who was really there for her and not dangerous?
At the same time, unfortunately, for the audience that was not as interesting. So even though it’s a real-life dilemma, it didn’t work for some people. Some people loved him unabashedly, as they should have. He’s a fine actor and a great-looking guy, but if you’re a little twisted like me, it didn’t get interesting until he was cheating on her, basically, and going to the dark side of town and getting bitten. That’s when I started to feel, “Now I want to know more about him.”
DAVID FURY
The fact of the matter is characters become far more interesting when they go dark anyway. Riley was such a good guy, a nice, pure, Captain America kind of guy, and it didn’t seem to fit in that world. It didn’t make us go, “Wow, what a cool guy.” It was “What a Boy Scout.” Kind of dark was a way to give Marc more to play, to make the character more dimensional. The whole Initiative thing was always a tricky thing to play and the idea of that super-secret-agent monster killer. You take Buffy, which was such an intimate show about friends and family, and you start to make it a little too big. Riley was outside of that world and we were trying to bring him into it, but it just never quite worked.
CHRISTIAN KANE
(actor, The Librarians)
Poor Marc Blucas; he’s a great guy. I can’t say enough about Blucas. He’s another one of the nicest guys in Hollywood. He’s a dear friend. Nobody in America was ready to accept the fact that Angel was gone. It had nothing to do with Blucas. Nobody was ready to accept that Angel was gone and Angel and Buffy weren’t going to be a thing. That’s why Blucas got hammered. I don’t think that anybody in that role stood a shot. You could’ve cast Brad Pitt. OK, maybe that would work, but other than that I just don’t think anyone would’ve had a shot, because America loved Angel.
MARTI NOXON
When challenged as an actor to go to more dramatic places, Marc stepped up. He’s really fine in dramatic scenes. Once he got a little twisted, I was in. The irony of that is we used getting him twisted to sort of launch him out of the show. Ultimately, does the character work? Yes, because we knew where we were going with him and we knew that it wasn’t going to go well. I think that maybe there was a long period of time where he was just sort of there, being her sidekick. Some people didn’t respond to that and I could understand why. I think people missed him more when he was gone, as you often do in real life when that happens. I felt like in terms of Marc’s contribution, he did a tremendously fine job and if there was ever any problem with that character, it was the fault of the writers and not him.
SARAH LEMELMAN
Time and time again, Riley is seen as dented by Buffy’s immeasurable strength, from nearly knocking him unconscious in a spar to making him look like a foolish child at a demon bar. When Riley begins to see that the Initiative may not be all the good he believes it to be, he is then faced with not only a crisis of masculinity with Buffy but also an identity crisis, as his whole life’s mission is turned upside down. Once again, Buffy is put in a more powerful position, as she is seen comforting Riley while he is sick from the steroids that he had been taking unknowingly from the Initiative. At 6'2", he is seen as utterly helpless, as he is curled in the fetal position, shivering and whimpering.
Buffy’s Slayer strength and speed is not the only way in which Riley feels inadequate and emasculated next to her. He also feels that he cannot measure up to Buffy’s ex, Angel, and that he does not truly satisfy her physically and emotionally. In “The Yoko Factor” Angel makes an appearance, and the viewers see a huge standoff between the two men. When Angel says he is “going to see an old girlfriend,” Riley attacks Angel, but Angel easily knocks Riley out. Despite the fact that the fight is clearly uneven and Angel pulverizes Riley, Riley still comes after Angel to stop him from talking to Buffy. When Buffy, Angel, and Riley all end up in the same room, Angel and Riley engage in what Buffy calls a “display of testosterone poisoning.”
JOSS WHEDON
I actually think it was a very strong year. There were things that were difficult. The Initiative, budget-wise and figuring out motivation-wise, you’re dealing with a lot of people who aren’t your core group. Ultimately, my heart is always with my core group, so that was sort of tricky trying to get the feeling of a huge government conspiracy when we have a shrub and people are saying, “We’re going to patrol past the shrub!” Eventually you begin to feel that you’re just playing dress-up, but we did manage to pull some epic scope on that.
Some people also got kind of twitchy that Buffy was involved in a happy relationship, where she actually gets to have sex. For some reason, that made people very nervous. By and large, the more nervous I make people—as long as they’re still watching—the better I feel, because that’s what the year was supposed to be about: “We’re all redefining who we are, we’re sort of falling apart, we’re doing what you’re supposed to do in the first year of college. We’re experimenting.” I think some of the best single episodes we’ve done were fourth season, and we ended so bizarrely.
DAVID FURY
I had to say we sort of stumbled our way through it a little bit. There were some great things that came out of it, but it was a very tricky thing. It did result in some brilliant episodes. We got to do “Hush.” Just brilliant stuff in the midst of it. But it was a little bit of a new animal, Buffy season four. There was always going to be a little bit of trying to find the right mix.
While few would contend that the fourth season of Buffy was one of its best, no one would quibble that a true standout was “Hush,” an episode with only seventeen minutes of spoken dialogue over a forty-four-minute running time. In the episode, the enigmatic Gentlemen arrive in Sunnydale and steal the residents’ voices so that no one can scream when they cut out the hearts of their victims. Directed beautifully by Whedon, “Hush” is the only episode of 144 to be nominated for an Emmy Award in Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series, as well as Outstanding Cinematography for a Single Camera Series. It lost in both categories.
SARAH MICHELLE GELLAR
(actress, Buffy Summers)
It was one of those moments where I thought, “Oh, this is great! A whole episode with no lines!” I was like, “This is a breeze!” And boy was I wrong.
JOSS WHEDON
Writing it I was terrified. I was more terrified than [I was] with the musical that I just couldn’t pull it off. When we were shooting it, everyone knew their action, but there were no lines, there was no rhythm, there were no cues, so everyone would do everything all at once. We had no way to communicate a rhythm.
Making his Buffy debut was versatile actor Camden Toy as one of the Gentlemen that preyed on the mute citizenry of Sunnydale. He would return several times to the series including as the skin-eating demon Gnarl in “Same Time, Same Place” in season seven.
CAMDEN TOY
(actor, a Gentleman)
By the time we got called in to audition for “Hush,” they still weren’t sure what these characters were going to be. I think they were still called “The Laughing Men.” Because there was no dialogue, there was talk with the producers, “Well, can’t we just get an extra to do this?” Thank goodness Joss said, “No, we need some physical performers to actually bring these to life.” Because of that, they were auditioning really last-minute. I got the call that afternoon from my agent, who said they want to see you at 5 P.M. that night. Usually there’s a day or two in advance. And I’m, like, “Tonight? What about the script?” And they said, “There’s no script; just go.” So, I’m like, “Uh, OK.”
The casting director and Joss were the only people in the room. They weren’t recording any of the auditions. That was kind of what Joss did—he was in the room and he made the decision. They asked me to do an improv where you float in, you cut this young man’s heart out, and then you float back out with the heart.” I’m like, “What? OK.” “Oh, and they’re smiling the whole time.” So, I do this kind of illusionary thing physically, where it looks like I’m floating. I try to sort of glide in smiling and I cut the heart out.
I finished the audition and Joss kind of starts waving at me, turns his back and goes, “OK, thank you. Oh God, I’m going to have nightmares now.” At that point, I thought either I’ve gotten the role or he thinks I’m a total psycho. I was worried I blew it, but the next day I got a call from my agent saying they wanted me and that’s the episode where I met [actor] Doug Jones.
The design for the unsettling Gentlemen was created by Whedon and realized by the series makeup team of makeup supervisor Todd McIntosh and Optic Nerve’s John Vulich, a veteran of Babylon 5, who passed away in 2016.
CAMDEN TOY
There were six of us actually, all together. Two of them were stunt guys and the other two were Charlie Brumbly and Don Lewis. Charlie was the wisecracking guy on Baywatch Hawaii. When we were shooting, he was constantly cracking us up. Don Lewis was well known in the physical community, because he did puppetry and shadow work. He did all the shadow puppetry work in Coppola’s Dracula. All four of us had a really strong background in physical theater: clowning, mime, martial arts, puppetry. I think that’s really why those characters came to life so much.
Interestingly enough, it’s only Doug Jones and myself that have our real mouths where we can smile. The idea originally was they were just going to have a plastered-on smile. I remember thinking after auditioning for the role, this is so wrong. They hired me because I scared Joss with my smile. But I thought, “Hey, shut up, it’s not my place to say,” but as they were getting Joss to give the final sign-off on the design, he was like, “Whoah, wait a minute. We hired Camden and Doug because they both scared me in the room, in broad daylight, with no makeup, with just their smiles and now we’re covering them up? No, no, no, you can’t do that. You actually have to have their smiles.” They were like, “But we’re shooting like the day after tomorrow.” And Joss said, “No, not for Camden and Doug. You can do it for the other guys, but Camden and Doug, we have to have their smiles.”
They made it so they’re like little veneers that fit over our actual teeth, so it’s our actual mouth and they mostly focused on us, because that’s much scarier than a plastered-on smile.
Said Whedon at the time, “I was drawing on everything that had ever frightened me: Nosferatu, Pinhead, Mr. Burns—anything that gave that creepy feel. We got into a lot of reptilian monsters and things that look kind of like aliens, and what I wanted from these guys was, very specifically, fairy tales. I wanted guys that would remind people of what they were scared of when they were children.”
CAMDEN TOY
The very first scene that we shot as the Gentlemen was that scene where we knock on the door and the young man opens the door. We float in, cut his heart out, and our—I think we called them “the footmen”—are holding him down. So we shoot the actual door opening later, but the actual scene where we float in, we shot first. And, of course, it’s one of the few cases where, as an actor, I don’t have to worry about hitting my mark. I’m either on a platform that’s on wheels, that’s on tracks, that they’re pulling or pushing on wires. I remember after the first take the props person or someone went, “Oh my God,” after they yelled cut. They said, “I can’t believe the dialogue you guys are having and you haven’t said a word.” That’s when Doug and I were like, “I think it’s working.”
It was also Amber Benson’s first episode as Tara, and she thought we were even scarier in person. The cast literally wanted to have nothing to do with us. After the take, they would just sort of walk away. Only Marc Blucas would say, “Hey, how’s it going? Great to have you guys.” Everybody else was scared of us. Amber Benson’s mother told us to leave her alone, that she was really scared by us. We would literally sit with crew or sometimes with Joss to eat, but the rest of the cast would not come near us. It was pretty wild.
In addition to shooting on the Santa Monica stages at Bergamont Stages as well as Westwood’s UCLA, which doubled for UC Sunnydale, the episode filmed several days on location at Universal Studios for Sunnydale exteriors as the ominous Gentlemen made their way through town … very quietly.
CAMDEN TOY
In the beginning, we shot at Universal Studios, where we were floating down the street for a few days. We were also on a college campus down in Alhambra. The last scene we shot, we were floating down the hall. If you see our feet, we are actually on wires so they had to do that in studio, because they wanted a wider-angle shot. So as soon as they would pull back, we would be on wires—when it’s like a headshot or a shoulder shot, that’s when we’d be on platforms, because the wires were very difficult. Those were tough. Even Joss talked about that on the DVD commentary. He says, “Oh, yeah, the tall one there is Doug Jones and the shorter one’s Camden Toy. The two of them scared me so much, in broad daylight, with just their smiles. So I knew they were going to be great.”
One of the season’s biggest surprises was the sudden death of Lindsay Crouse’s Professor Maggie Walsh at the hands of the nefarious Adam, who seemed destined for a more sizable role.
JOSS WHEDON
A lot of our great shocks come from things that we can’t control. We were basically told by Lindsay Crouse’s agent that she had to be done by Christmas. We knew that was going to be the progression, that she would create Adam and Adam would destroy her, but we weren’t sure how it would completely unfold. Given the situation, we decided to do it abruptly, and that charmed the hell out of me. It’s always fun to do something a little startling. To an extent, the characters are telling us what they need, and to an extent the situation dictates what happens.
DAVID FURY
I don’t know if Joss has said this, but she is at least partly inspired by his own mother. His mother was a college professor and she was a very big feminist. Very strong-willed. I think she had a huge impact on Joss’s life. Certainly the fact that he is an ardent feminist himself. I think his mother can take credit for that, but she was a very strong-willed, very strict woman. But one that Joss respected very much. I believe that Professor Walsh was at least partly inspired by his mother in the sense of being this very good, strong-willed professor that students were scared of. The idea of a mother figure was interesting. She was sort of Riley’s mother. She was Adam’s mother. When she had scenes with Buffy, it was very much like Buffy was dealing with a mother-in-law character.
Joss was very interested in seeing this girl that he presented in high school who struggles to be normal, knowing that she has to rise to the occasion and save the world, suddenly being wholly terrified of this woman and totally intimidated by her. Lindsey did a good job. It was a tricky character. The whole Initiative thing was very tricky, and, of course, what she represented allegorically might be the most personal thing about it for Joss. I don’t think the rest of us could latch on to it as clearly as he could. There might have been some things being worked out there.
Another milestone for the series was the season capper. After defeating the Big Bad in the penultimate episode of the season, Joss Whedon wrote and directed the stylish and surreal finale in which the Scooby Gang confront the First Slayer in a series of dream-like vignettes more akin to an episode of Twin Peaks than Buffy, providing a remarkable coda for an uneven season.
JOSS WHEDON
It was about combining the totally surreal with the totally mundane. Obviously, things had to get worse at the end of each act—people had to be in peril, because this thing was trying to kill them in their dreams. But beyond that, there really was no structure. I was basically sitting down to write a forty-minute tone poem.
ARMIN SHIMERMAN
(actor, Principal Snyder)
I was very surprised when my agent called and said you have another episode of Buffy. I said, “Buffy? I’m dead on Buffy.” And with all due respect to all the other episodes I did, I think the very best work on Buffy, perhaps in my whole career, was in that last episode, “Restless.”
JOSS WHEDON
The last episode was all dreams and it’s just about as strange as it needs to be. It was a very fun episode and it sort of summed up everything that everyone had gone through, what it meant to them and where it was. It was divided into four acts that are four dreams, one each for Giles, Xander, Willow, and Buffy. It’s basically four short stories about how these people feel. We came to realize that we’d taken them to a pretty interesting place.
ARMIN SHIMERMAN
It’s a terrific episode, and I’m particularly pleased with my work in that one. There was a note in the script from Joss to me saying, “Armin, have you ever seen Apocalypse Now? You need to see this.” As a person who lived through the sixties, ironically I had never seen Apocalypse Now. So I studied the film and Marlon Brando’s performance in particular and I’m really happy with it.