A FIGHT FOR LOVE AND GLORY (AKA DEATH IS YOUR GIFT)
“So Dawn’s in trouble. It must be Tuesday.”
Foreshadowed in the fourth-season capper “Restless,” the fifth season of Buffy begins with the arrival of the Key, in the form of Buffy’s younger sister. For some, the arrival of Michelle Trachtenberg as Dawn was a welcome breath of fresh air, introducing a bizarre new element into the mythos, while others felt she was a glorified Cousin Oliver (and if you don’t know who that is, go look it up—we’ll wait). While viewers may have been puzzled over the sudden, enigmatic arrival of Dawn in the Summers residence, the show also introduces the season’s new Big Bad, Glorificus, or Glory, played by a scenery-chewing Clare Kramer, and Glory’s mellow distaff doppelgänger Ben, played by Charlie Weber.
Glory, a hell goddess exiled from her dimension, is intent on returning home. In order to do so, she needs the Key, which we learn was hidden by a band of monks in the form of Dawn. Unfortunately, the use of the Key will unlock a portal unleashing all the beasts of hell on earth. Realizing the Key would need to be protected, those cagey monks transformed it into human flesh, in the form of Buffy’s younger sister, created from the blood of Buffy, knowing she would give her own life, if necessary, to protect it. Which is exactly what she does in the moving season finale.
Meanwhile, Buffy was also confronting the departure of Riley, who has come to the sad realization that she will never truly love him, giving Spike the opportunity to pursue his lust, love, and obsession for the Slayer. And, in the most moving and shocking moment of the season, Buffy’s mother, Joyce, dies of a brain aneurysm in another of the series’ finest hours, “The Body.”
JOSS WHEDON
(creator/executive producer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
For season five, the mission statement was family. When you think you’ve moved on and grown up and moved out of the house and living your life, family comes back. You realize that they’re always a part of your life. Some of that’s good and some of that’s bad. Also a very strong message with me is you make your own family. Or sometimes it’s made for you by monks.
DAVID FURY
(supervising producer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
Season five was, in Joss’s mind, very possibly the last season, because his contract was for five seasons. Every year it was a question mark about whether the show would get picked up. Its ratings were at that time minimal. Right now it’d be a huge hit show, any network would be killing for the ratings we got, but back then it was not a highly rated show. The acclaim was there, but the network would play, as often they do, the political game where they cry poverty. They’re like, “We’re just not making enough on the show.”
This is to a large extent a negotiation ploy, but it was considered a bubble show and Joss was pretty upset with the way they’d play that it just didn’t perform well. Forget the fact that it was giving the WB a status it wasn’t getting from its other programming. It was hugely successful in terms of promoting the network. But as a last-year-of-a-contract thing, it kind of minimized the value of Buffy, which was upsetting to Joss.
MARTI NOXON
(co–executive producer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
It got harder every season. You’d come from a story meeting where we’re saying, “What about this?” “Oh, we’ve already done that.” “What about that?” “Well, we kind of tackled that,” or, “We did something like that on Angel.” Not only do you have almost a hundred story lines on Buffy that we’ve already done, we had another show where you’re doing twenty-two stories a year on that. Obviously, we can touch on the same ground, because they’re different shows, but you don’t want them to be too close. It just compounds the complications. So that in itself makes it harder to break stories—plus, you know, the exhaustion factor. That’s probably the most challenging part of the whole process.
JOSS WHEDON
The introduction of Dawn, the death of Mom, the meeting of Tara’s family—all of that stuff was very deliberate. We knew year one of college was freedom and not a lot of Mom. Kristine Sutherland, luckily, was spending a year in Italy, but it was that year, so it was perfect. We were like, “Perfect, then you’ll come back and you’ll be very heavy in season five and then I’ll kill you.” So that was the mission statement.
DAVID FURY
We went into the season feeling that we needed to find a way to get to the moment that defined the series and that’s what the last couple of episodes dealt with. It was great that in the end Buffy just becomes the girl who’s fighting vampires again. The introduction of Dawn was a way to explore that as well. A young girl that turns out to be more than you thought she was.
MARTI NOXON
Some of it was about bringing the Scooby Gang more together. They were a little fractured last year. So sort of “the gang’s all here” was part of our mandate, to make the relationships a little closer, a little less estranged. And then we’re gunning toward our hundredth episode, which is a pretty big landmark. One of our mandates was just to make it a hell of a ride.
DAVID FURY
That’s probably where the Dawn of it comes in, where it became a little bit more rooted in those people rather than something bigger than them. There was an effort to bring it back down to earth a little bit.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
(writer, season five, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
I was on Undressed for MTV. Each episode was three different story lines happening in high school, college, and postcollege with young adults in various sexual situations. It’s MTV, so it was all very PG-13. Created by Roland Joffé, who did The Killing Fields, strangely. I believe I was on my third or fourth season of that. I started to think, I’ve got a paying job. I have an agent. She was really sweet but kind of at the end of her career, so it would be a perfect time to write a spec and try to segue to another agency before she retires. Two of my favorite shows were Buffy the Vampire Slayer and NYPD Blue.
I had ideas for both of them. It was a couple of weeks of struggling. Do I write the NYPD Blue? Do I write the Buffy? Finally, I thought, “Well, I’ll write the Buffy.” I wrote a spec called “Xander the Slayer” in which the whole story revolves around [the fact that] Buffy’s powers are transferred to Xander. It was exploring why men can’t be the Slayer.
He becomes very aggressive and non-Xander-like. I wrote this and finished it. Unfortunately, I finished it right in the middle of staffing season, so no agency really wanted to look at it because they were busy with their clients. I had one friend who was repped at UTA. She graciously passed along my script. They read it and said, “Well, we like it, but not enough to rep it.” I’m like, “Oh, shit. Well, I’ve got nothing to lose. I’ll give it to my current agent.” She was in features. I think she knew like three people in TV. She read it and liked it and passed it along to her TV contacts. I went in to meet about working on the animated series they were developing. They said, “Joss has to read your script first and, quite frankly, he’s very harsh on Buffy specs.” They sent it to Joss, and I think it was like six weeks or something that I hear nothing. I’m just chewing my nails. I finally got a call, “Yeah, can you come over tomorrow? Joss would like to sit down with you.”
It’s half luck and half having the right material at the right time. I went over and met with him at the Buffy office. The Buffy/Angel offices were at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica. That’s also where the Buffy stages were. We talked about comics and movies for about a half hour. At the end, he said, “Look, I know you were talking about the animated show, but do you want to come do an episode of the live-action show?” I said, “Fuck yeah!” They hired me to do a freelance episode and that was “Blood Ties,” where Dawn finds out she’s not human. That she’s the Key. I know a lot of people were thrown by Dawn and confused, even though there’s that great scene where there’s a room that’s obviously used for storage. Then suddenly there’s a sister in it, which was obviously a tip-off something odd was going on. For me, I loved that season. Of course, it was my first season, so I had a very strong reaction to it.
JOSS WHEDON
The Dawn thing was off the charts. Michelle was just incredible. The only weakness I would say is that I don’t think we had enough time for some of the other characters.
MARTI NOXON
For me, not being a comic book fan, apparently this is not uncommon in comic books: that fantasy characters suddenly arrive. It happens. And it’s happened in other stories, but I’d never seen it before. I love comic books, but I mostly read the really twisted ones, the ones about death or suicides. I didn’t know there was a precedent. We were like, “How is this going to work?” People were really flipping out, but once we got into the idea that we were just going to leave people sort of disturbed for a while, it was kind of fun. I’d never done anything like that before. I think everybody was concerned that the audience wouldn’t go on that journey with us, but Joss just had confidence and that the payoff was going to be worth it. He knew what his role was in the whole season, too. He was just really sure of it, that it might throw people off for a while but it would keep them intrigued as well. My experience is that if he’s sure, we should be sure.
JOSS WHEDON
When I started doing comic book movies, people actually had to point out to me that Buffy was the X-Men and that I’d been making comic book movies since I started doing television. That everything had been designed for that sort of thing. I studied comic books as much as I studied anything else. And by studied I mean read, and tried to convince my parents that somehow this was going to pay off later so they wouldn’t tear them up. Every time you turn the page is an opportunity to go, “Oh shit!” Every time. And so you always want something wonderful to happen; instead of just having it be good, you want to be up all the time; you want constantly to have those page-turn moments.
DAVID GREENWALT
(consulting producer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
I liked Batman v Superman. Comic books weren’t a big thing to me, like it was to a lot of people I met on Buffy and Angel who have been real comic book geeks all their lives.
MARTI NOXON
At first she seemed like a traditional annoying kid sister, almost stepping out of another TV show, but that was part of the intention. “What is this?” because clearly she isn’t that. She has conflict with her sister, she has real-life stuff, but there’s obviously more to her than this little pesky younger sister. So it was fun to introduce this character you’ve sort of seen before, but realizing there’s something really off about her. That was so inherent in who she was, because she had just appeared, so we could play her a little more traditional and let her emerge as a more layered character. Michelle was just an amazing actress.
DAVID FURY
I thought it was kind of brilliant, actually, because I knew that the initial reaction would be that we were trying to repopulate the show with younger actors. That’s the thing networks tend to do after a certain amount of years and just go, “Our teenage characters are getting too old; we need to refresh the show.” But that’s not what it really was at all. It was just a clever idea about how to introduce a new character in the show and change the history and memories of all the characters, and then not explain it for five episodes, which was just fantastic. I loved it when Joss pitched it. He pitched it toward the end of the prior season, because he had alluded to her in the earlier episodes, including “Restless.” There were all these clues written about Dawn’s appearance, which was a lot of fun.
I did get to name Dawn. We had a little brainstorming session where we’re like what do we call Buffy’s sister? We were all coming up with different names and at some point I just hit on Dawn. I was just thinking it seemed like a great name for Summers, Dawn Summers and how the dawn is the thing that chases vampires away. I didn’t know it was also the name of Joss’s sister-in-law, whom I’d never heard of or met.
The fifth season improbably opened with the introduction of the most famous vampire of all time making his first (and last) appearance in the Buffy universe: Count Vladimir Dracula himself. It was an episode that was challenging for the writers and, ultimately, satisfied few fans as well.
DAVID FURY
I can go with a modern Dracula. But it was just the fact that he was somebody else’s creation invading Joss’s creation. I thought it sort of diminished our rules, our universe. It’s like, “All right, let’s have Batman come in now and face Buffy.” It’s the kind of thing you’d go, “No, you can’t do that, because Batman is another character from another thing.”
MARTI NOXON
The only thing remarkable about that episode is that it’s one of the few that we’ve worked on that just wouldn’t break. We had the hardest time breaking that story. Even after it was shot, we had to go back in and reshoot a couple of things. I love the actor who played Dracula and he brought a lot to it, and I thought in many ways it worked, but I still look at it and feel like we didn’t quite hit it.
DAVID FURY
I was actually very bothered by that episode. I know that it delighted Joss. It delighted Marti, too, this idea of Buffy facing Dracula. I thought it flew in the face of the mythology of our vampires. It doesn’t play in the Dracula playground. The kind of logic I would apply to it is the thing Joss would say, “Who cares?” Well, I do. I care. We’ve created these rules and I don’t want to break our rules. And Dracula totally broke the rules. We just said, Dracula is some weird anomaly of a vampire, and seeing Xander become Renfield was all fun, but it was an episode I had difficulty embracing. I thought it sort of commented on how Buffy’s universe is kind of fictional.
When you start introducing another famous fictional character into our world, to me it bursts the bubble of this universe that Joss created and we created with him. Some people enjoyed it very much. I’m just not one of them.
MARTI NOXON
It’s hard to bring a character who’s that iconic into your universe; it lent itself to camp. At the same time, we were actually trying to do something deeper than that. We were trying to make it emotional and make it have some resonance. But it was a campy situation, and tone-wise we weren’t always sure where we were. Also, that character deserves maybe a longer arc. We tried to do a lot with him in one episode and then got rid of him. So we struggled for tone and we were tired coming out of season four.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
Things seemed to go well. I seemed to mesh OK with the team. The team, they had written some of my favorite stuff. It’s Doug Petrie, Jane Espenson, David Fury, Marti Noxon, and Joss, of course, and Rebecca Rand Kirshner were the writers at the time. I had loved all their stuff that I’d seen so far.
They invited me to come to the production meeting. Then afterward, Marti Noxon said, “Hey, can you stick around for a few minutes?” I said, “Yeah, sure.” I’m just sitting there all by myself thinking it’s going to be they want some kind of rewrite or some scene isn’t working. After about ten minutes, a PA [production assistant] pops up and says, “Hey, Joss and Marti want to see you down on the set.” I go, “Oh, OK. Great.” I go down and it was the Magic Box set, and the heavens opened, the angels sang, and I became part of the show.
To me, that time I spent on Buffy and Angel was such a defining moment in my career. Not just to start the climb up the ladder, but to get the opportunity to work with Joss and Marti and such a phenomenal group of people. I can’t tell you how much I learned. The great thing about Joss is that he really wanted to train show runners. He had you on set, in editing, in casting, in all the meetings. He really wanted you to know, from the ground up, how to build a show, which a lot of show runners don’t do.
It was also fantastic because this was the early 2000s. We were shooting here in L.A., both series. That’s another thing I feel very lucky about, is that both of the one-hour dramas that I started out on, we shot Buffy in Santa Monica and we shot Angel on the Paramount lot. To have that, to have it be here, was just such an invaluable experience. It was just absolutely amazing.
Directing her first episode was Marti Noxon, joining the ranks of writers who stepped behind the camera throughout the series’ run. “Into the Woods” would be the first of two episodes she would direct that season, the second being “Forever,” before her new show-runner duties in the sixth would prevent her from directing additional episodes.
MARTI NOXON
It was really a thrill. It was something I’d often dreamed about doing, and, of course, when you go down to set and you think, “Well that wasn’t the way I saw it. It’s good, but it’s not how I saw it.” You know, it’s that little voice in your head that says, “I want to rule the world.” Joss may have talked about doing it. That year I spent quite a bit of time on, oh, getting married. And before that, I was working on a feature that took a bunch of my time. I kept putting it off, but finally the decks were cleared. It was a really amazing, very overwhelming, and exciting experience. In some ways easier than I thought it was going to be, and in some ways much harder. It was also more collaborative. There’s a part of it where you really have to know where you want to go and steer that ship, but on the other hand you also have to be really open and flexible.
Once I realized that there was always someone there you could turn to, and ask a question to or get help from, it stopped being quite so terrifying. It was still terrifying, because the pace is so fast. It’s like a two-million-dollar school play; there’s no stopping it. We had goals we had to meet every day, and some days it got away from me, but every day I felt like I learned a lot. I also learned what a great crew we had and how wonderful the people we worked with were. It’s different when you come down and see people maybe twice a day, or twice a week, than when you’re with them 24-7 for eight days. I just learned how lucky we were to have the people we did to work with. And the actors were awesome. It was beyond my wildest dreams. I feel like the episode turned out really well. I was also training at the hand of a master; I think Joss has turned out to be a world-class director, and he can teach me everything I need to know to make a movie some day.
I also wrote the episode. It’s pretty Buffy-Riley-arc heavy. It falls into line with a lot of the shows that I’ve written, which is that it definitely revolves more [around] relationships.
SARAH LEMELMAN
(author, “It’s About Power”: Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Stab at Establishing the Strength of Girls on American Television)
Another reason Buffy fans and scholars were so rabidly drawn to the show is the fact that it was one of the first shows ever to normalize a lesbian relationship, as well as to depict a lesbian sex scene on network television. An important aspect of this relationship that the show stresses in the relationship between Willow and Tara is that Tara is a person, and it is about love between two characters, just like any other relationship on the show, instead of the fact that she is a girl, and that it is a same-sex relationship. This emphasis on love between two people, who both happen to be females, was unprecedented.
DAVID FURY
It turned out to be so significant to the fan base that we were presenting this healthy gay relationship for Willow. It’s one of the greatest legacies of the show. I don’t think we thought about it being that. I don’t think we thought we were making some huge statement. I’m not sure Joss was making a huge statement. The fact of the matter is we all had lesbian friends, we knew lesbian couples. It didn’t seem that extreme. It seemed sort of appropriate for Willow at the time. Especially as we saw her in “The Wish” and the whole Wicca, female-empowerment kind of thing, it all seemed to fall in nicely having her falling in love with another woman.
ANTHONY C. FERRANTE
(writer, Fangoria magazine)
It was a very daring thing. And also, keep in mind, Willow was a witch, not a vampire, so her sexual orientation never had a “vampire” sexuality to it, except when they did the alternate-reality-timeline episode. Joss Whedon opened a lot of doors and broke a lot of taboos with how he handled that story line. He really made it feel organic and not a stunt. And in its wake, you’ve seen a much stronger, more organic way of integrating LGBTQ characters in mainstream TV shows, both dramatic and genre.
SARAH LEMELMAN
Before the series ended, Whedon was able to actually show a sex scene between Willow and Kennedy, which was the first of its kind on network television. Throughout the entire show, all the other heterosexual couples are seen as having sex, and in some, very explicit scenes—Buffy and Riley and then Buffy and Spike—while Willow and Tara’s relationship was forced to be largely subtextual and perceived as innocent. Nevertheless, by the series end, and with the help of UPN, Whedon was able to truly break barriers by his normalization of the relationships between Willow/Tara and Willow/Kennedy, giving fans, scholars, and the gay community another reason to appreciate and study the show.
JOSS WHEDON
The network actually called me and said, “You know, we have a lot of gay this year. We’re kind of gayed out. Dawson’s and this other show…” I said, “I don’t know. I don’t watch those shows. We’re going to do this thing. It’s what we’re going to do.” And then they were totally fine. They were like, “Do you have to have the kiss [in ‘The Body’]?” I was like, “OK, I’m packing up my office.” I never pulled that out except that one time. I’m like, “I’m packing up the office” and they were like, “Nope, it’s cool.”
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
It is tricky, especially because it was very groundbreaking, that relationship. I remember Joss had a lot of battles about letting them kiss with the network and the studio. I completely understand about how that would really hurt the viewers who were emotionally invested. Joss always strongly felt that the story comes first. You’ve got to tell the story that you feel like you want to tell. That was the story he wanted to tell, and I think it was the right story.
DAVID FURY
The greatest controversy was us killing Tara in season six. That was a much bigger controversy than presenting their relationship. That was interesting. And that was the one where we went, “Really, we’re killing her?” People’s reactions to it were so strong. But the actual relationship was very sweet and romantic. We were all down with it.
SARAH LEMELMAN
It’s worth mentioning that Joss may have always wanted there to be a gay character on the show. This goes with the theme of Joss supporting the “outcasts” in society, because he’s said before that he felt like one during high school and wanted to create a show that would resonate with those who also feel like outcasts/misfits in high school. I think Willow is a perfect character to experiment with, because she really doesn’t know what she wants or who she is. In high school, she wants to please others, but it feels like she forgets about herself sometimes. She takes orders from others and forgets to assert herself.
In season four, we have a change, where Willow begins to become independent, and with this independence she understands her sexuality. This all coincides with her becoming a more powerful witch, which is the epitome of feminism and a rejection of the patriarchy. I think Willow’s self-discovery really resonated with the audience, especially the LGBTQ community, because it reflects the struggle of introspection that some people in that community have faced. Willow is an especially important character for this community, because it came at a time when America really was not supportive of the community.
AMBER BENSON
(actress, Tara Maclay)
Joss kept Willow as a lesbian, rather than saying, “OK, now she’s done.” I’m really pleased with how that continued on, that she had somebody else, that she continued to be who she was; she stuck by her guns. She wasn’t just a flip-flopper, you know what I mean? I don’t think anyone realized how intense the reaction to [Tara’s] passing away was going to be. I’m just really pleased that we got to do it. That we got to have that relationship and whether it goes on or it doesn’t go on or it ends up in a comic book somewhere or ends up on a porn video somewhere.
Perhaps even more nuanced was one of the most realistic depictions of death ever portrayed in a TV series. Ironically, in a series about myriad supernatural threats, Joyce’s death came from a more mundane killer: a brain aneurysm. Written and directed by Joss Whedon shortly after the death of his own mother, “The Body” remains a towering achievement and a highlight of the season and the series.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
I came in halfway through the fifth season. In that first meeting with Joss when he was talking about the season, he talked about how Joyce dies and he wanted to do a whole episode about the aftermath, called “The Body.” I’m like, “Holy shit, Joyce dies?” I just loved that. Buffy, to me, is very emotional and also very funny. To take that risk of doing an episode where the main character’s mother dies, not from a vampire or anything supernatural, and do an entire episode with no score, that’s just really, really gut-wrenching. I go, “Man, this is definitely the place I want to be.”
SARAH LEMELMAN
Unlike “Once More, with Feeling,” “The Body” is an episode that uses no music at all in order to express a realistic portrayal of death. Throughout the fifth season, Buffy’s mother, Joyce, is in and out of the Sunnydale hospital, as she has a brain tumor. However, the viewer—along with the show’s characters—is led to believe that Joyce will live on, as her surgery is successful, and she is depicted as a cancer survivor for several episodes, before Buffy comes home one day to find her mother’s lifeless body on their couch.
While all the characters are shocked about the loss, Anya, the ex-vengeance demon, perhaps demonstrates the suddenness of Joyce’s death best: “But I don’t understand! I don’t understand how this all happens. How we go through this. I mean, I knew her, and then she’s—there’s just a body, and I don’t understand why she just can’t get back in it and not be dead … anymore! It’s stupid! It’s mortal and stupid!”
ANTHONY C. FERRANTE
“The Body” episode, in particular, is absolutely fascinating, dealing with the death of a family member. It wasn’t a situation where her mom, who died, came back the next episode through magic. It was finality—and it was handled in a very unique and emotional way. For all the horror, monsters, and vampires in the show, this was probably the most daring thing the show ever did.
DAVID FURY
That was fantastic. That was, again, one of those things where your jaw drops. Joss was very specific that every act was going to be one scene and there would be no music in it. And you’re going, “Really?” It’s such a heavy episode. And he said, it’s going to play more real without any score. So yeah, it was incredibly powerful and brilliant.
Joss was always looking for a different way to tell a Buffy story. With “Hush” without dialogue and now with “The Body” doing it without music. Keeping it almost like a stage play and pulling it off in a huge way. It’s a classic thing from Superman, which was with all my powers I couldn’t save my father. And very much the same with Buffy, you felt like, “I can always protect my mother from things that will kill her,” but the helplessness of not being able to save your loved one, your mother, despite all [your] powers—it’s a very powerful story.
SARAH LEMELMAN
While critics and fans alike believed that this episode would easily garner an Emmy nomination, it instead only received wide acclaim and was snubbed by the Emmy committee.
CHARISMA CARPENTER
(actress, Cordelia Chase)
I was just disappointed that it was never a Golden Globe winner or that it never got the Emmy, because I thought the themes were so important and I felt Joss and Marti and everyone who was involved on every level deserved it so much. I’m so grateful the makeup people were acknowledged, but it was so high level, in so many different departments. I think the title may have hurt the show in that regard, because you can’t take it that seriously. You can’t give an Oscar to Julia Roberts for Pretty Woman where she plays a hooker.
DAVID GREENWALT
Joss moved forward, and we moved forward every year, and the characters grew and changed. Then one year she gets this sister that no one has ever seen or heard of before. Her mother died in the episode “The Body,” which is probably one of the best episodes in television ever made. Joss made these ballsy choices and also shooting weird camera angles, just like an experience of grief with long shots of the dead body, shots out of focus and out of frame and no music. That was a wallop.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG
(actress, Dawn Summers)
Being a fan of the show from the very beginning and then being on it was very surreal for me. When I read the episode, it was like I was losing a part of myself, to be honest. I think it really allowed the audience to connect with Dawn for the first time. I wasn’t stealing things or whining.
DAVID GREENWALT
People talk about “Hush,” also incredibly brilliant, but this show was amazing. And now Joss’s own mother died—they had a country place in upstate New York where as a kid there was no TV allowed. You could read, you could do stuff, but there was no chatter allowed during the day, either. She was a really well-known feminist teacher. She was killed when he was twenty-eight driving back from school. So he made this show, “The Body,” and it was totally unflinching. You just kept looking at the body over and over again in this weird framing. And the balls to have no music to beg the audience to feel any goddamn thing one way or the other.
We were up in the editing room, and this is to illustrate the kind of relationship we had, Joss and I, and you know, a bunch of the other writers are in there and people are in tears at such an amazing episode, and I go, “God, Joss, what a great episode. It’s going to be so great when you show it to your mother. Oh, oops, never mind.” He loved me for that. If I could make him fall out of his chair and spit his drink out, you know, that’s how we rolled with each other. He knew I adored him.
SARAH MICHELLE GELLAR
The big thing for me with the show was it was always so amazing to be a part of something that was constantly breaking the rules. We were constantly doing things that had never been done. We were constantly challenging both our audience and ourselves.
JOSS WHEDON
When I made “Hush,” part of it literally was, “You know, I’m kind of turning into a hack.” I felt like I was starting to phone it in and not challenging myself. So I thought, “OK, if I had a story I could only tell visually, that would be much harder.” The idea of not using music partially came from what I was trying to evoke, but also partially from me realizing, you know what, I have to take something away from myself. I have to bare myself the same way the actors have to.
DAVID FURY
He just would do things that were always spot-on. How did he think like that? I don’t know. Especially when you work in television, there eventually becomes what you think is a formula to what you’re doing. It’s always like, this is where this is going to happen, and, of course, act four is the big fight scene. Act five is the coda scene. It’s all very specific and Joss tried to go, “What if you don’t have to do any of that? How can I turn this thing on its head?” That’s what makes him great.
Introduced in “The Wish,” Emma Caulfield, who played Anya, had many scene-stealing moments, perhaps none more memorable than her monologue about the nature of the death as this former vengeance demon ponders the nature of grief. “I don’t understand how this all happens,” she says. “How we go through this. I mean, I knew her, and then she’s—there’s just a body, and I don’t understand why she just can’t get back in it and not be dead anymore. It’s stupid. It’s mortal and stupid. And, and Xander’s crying and not talking, and, and I was having fruit punch, and I thought, well, Joyce will never have any more fruit punch ever, and she’ll never have eggs, or yawn or brush her hair, not ever, and no one will explain to me why.”
EMMA CAULFIELD
(actress, Anya Jenkins)
I had a real Anya moment and I’m not proud of it. I was asked by a fan, “What were you thinking during your monologue, because I cry every time.” I’m like, “Honestly, I was really hungry and I had to go to the bathroom.” I was very, very lucky to have that monologue and to be a part of that episode, because it really was a beautifully done episode, from top to finish. Sarah’s performance, the writing, and the directing were really flawless and should have won an award.
DAVID FURY
The loss of the character of Joyce the mother is the child stepping into real adulthood. The idea of taking Joyce out of the picture was like the end of Buffy’s childhood. We had explored it through five seasons of high school, and with her mother dying and her father being out of the picture, you really feel alone for the first time in your life. You feel like I’m the adult now. It was a significant step, especially as we were preparing for Buffy’s death and the end of the season, that Buffy needs to make that transition into full-fledged adulthood.
Joyce’s death helped us get there. It came at a completely unexpected and arbitrary time, which is the way death usually comes. We played with her health before, so everyone just went, “Oh, well, that story is over. There’s nothing to be worried about anymore.” Then suddenly, for Buffy to come home and find her on the sofa dead was devastating, but it’s exactly where the character needed to be.
But despite the high-concept appearance of Dawn and later the sudden death of Joyce Summers, the season still needed a “Big Bad,” the recurring antagonist for the year, which was epitomized by Clare Kramer’s Glory.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
Glen or Glenda. It almost had that kind of thing with Glory where she’s really the male doctor. It was bizarre. It was weird. Then you throw in the knights from the old times who were trying to track her down. I thought it was an incredibly interesting idea.
DAVID FURY
Joss had a very clear idea about the whole buildup to the eventual reveal of the Ben-Glory connection and what that meant, which was another brilliant idea. The idea that Ben, who was this new potential love interest, was also our villain [and that] this goddess Glory and they were one in the same was a neat idea. That was transgenderism at its peak. It was a really interesting way to go and we did have lots of discussions about gender identity during that.
CLARE KRAMER
(actress, Glory)
What happened was when I went in to audition for the role, they just had two pages of dialogue, no character description. They didn’t indicate that she was going to be bad, even. Or if it was just for one episode. I decided to play her a certain way—the Glory way—and as they went with my story line, they would decide things two or three weeks ahead. So I didn’t even know she was going to be the Big Bad until after a couple of episodes in. I certainly didn’t know she was going to be a god.
DAVID FURY
Clare Kramer was great as Glory. She relished the part. She was beautiful and she played the evil quite well. It was fun to play this character that all of these people were suddenly coming under the thrall of her, which I introduced. I really got to introduce Dawn in the second episode of the season and that was when she went to the homeless man who is babbling about Glory. I thought it was very interesting.
CLARE KRAMER
I definitely wanted people to like my character, but I remember after my first episode aired I went on one of the message boards to see what everyone’s reaction was. Some people hated my character and some people liked my character, but more people didn’t at that point, because they were like, “Who is this person trying to fight Buffy? What’s going on here?” So I thought to myself, as an actor, I really need to not read that people don’t like me, otherwise I’m going to try and change my performance and change myself to make me this or that. I knew I had to just trust Joss and the show to deliver the kind of character the audience would want. And so from that day on, I didn’t worry about it anymore.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
I remember my first real day of being hired to do the show. We all piled into a Winnebago and went to Santa Clarita, because Marti [Noxon] was directing an episode there. We were talking about Glory. Then there was a lot of talk through the season about: What does Glory want? What’s the plan? She wants the Key, but the problem with wanting Dawn as the Key is that basically her evil plan is to go home, which isn’t really that horrible. We struggled with that.
CLARE KRAMER
I don’t think she was evil at all. She just wanted to go home, and she was just trying to achieve what would get her there. It’s not her fault that the monks hid the Key in Dawn, but I also think as the actress, when you approach the character, you can’t approach it like, “Oh, she’s evil. I’m going to play an evil character.” You have to approach it like any role where you don’t pinpoint the good or the bad; you just look at the dynamics of that person. Even though she was a god, she was still a person, and it had to be approached that way. So I never saw her as evil; I knew she was the Big Bad, obviously, and she served a purpose on the show and for the season.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
I came up with the idea that when she opens the dimension to go back to her hell dimension, all the dimensions open up and basically bled into Earth. That’s where you get the dragons and the monsters that basically destroy the planet. First, I pitched it to David Fury and everybody and they go, “Yeah, you should pitch that to Joss.” I remember pitching that to Joss and he goes, “Yeah, yeah. That’s a good idea.” Then I pitched him another idea that he hated. I got one win that night and one, “No, that’s stupid.”
MARTI NOXON
I felt like the season was revitalized; there was a lot of energy and we were back where we had Buffy in a really interesting place emotionally. That’s always easier to write. The stuff with her mother and Dawn gave really clear emotional stuff for her to play. That gave us a really good, rich season. We started to feel a real updraft; that the show was moving in a positive direction.
Not that we’d felt we had a crappy season, but season four was transitional in a lot of ways. Season five felt like we were into a groove and a lot of the episodes turned out great. It was wonderful to be on a show heading for a hundred episodes and not feeling done—feeling like there was still a lot of life in the show and stories we wanted to tell. Stuff happening to Buffy that year opened up a whole bunch of new possibilities for her. All of that made us feel like we were going into the sixth season with a lot on our plate.
In “Restless,” the First Slayer had prophesized to Buffy that “death is your gift.” In the fifth season finale, “The Gift,” Buffy learned what that actually meant when she sacrificed her life to save Dawn and the earth. And if there was any doubt that this time Buffy’s death was for real, the final episode to air on the WB ends with a shot of Buffy’s gravestone: “She saved the world … a lot.”
JAMES MARSTERS
(actor, Spike)
That’s the whole challenge of acting; to build an imaginary world in your head that you can release into and play in and seems real. I think Sean Penn calls it “the cage.” Meryl Streep calls it “the playpen” or something, I call it “the sandbox.” If you build that world in a detailed way, it’s kind of like playing house as a kid. You know, if you have a cardboard box it’s pretty good. But if you go to a friend’s house and they have an actual little house with a skillet with plastic sausages and stuff, and it’s more detailed, you can play better. So, you know, acting is about providing yourself with all those details.
When you’re in a TV series, you have a long time to build that world. And believe me, in my head there’s a little tiny Sunnydale with a very tiny Buffy and very tiny Spike. And little tiny Spike loves little tiny Buffy, and that’s all real. And so you just escape into that. So yeah! She was really dead, man. She was dead; she was not coming back; and I was very sad. For real.
DAVID FURY
This was it; this was the end. There was a lot of discussion about how we were going to end this up. Despite the fact that most of us were skeptical that the show could end given its popularity, I think we were still locked into this idea that Buffy will die and this may be the end of the series at that time. We had to build it right and get to the eventual climax the best way we could. If the show did not continue, I have to say it would have been a big bummer. But I don’t think we were really convinced Buffy would not continue, even if the WB was threatening to cancel us.
JAMES MARSTERS
The biggest challenge was how do we all truly believe she’s dead? How do we sell this seriously? She’s dead. I think it’s only cheesy if you hold back. The answer to that challenge is if we believe it ourselves, the audience can get caught up in that moment and believe it, if only for the time they’re watching the episode; they can believe it, too. Then, you know, they turn off the television and say, “Wait a minute! Is this show canceled? No, it’s not canceled; she’s coming back.” But while they’re watching it, they get fooled by the commitment of the performance.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
The death of Buffy, that’s tricky. When you hear Buffy sacrifices herself, of course, the first reaction is, “That’s bullshit. They’re bringing her back.” It’s tough to pull that off and make it feel real. Although the tombstone seemed to have done a major job of doing that, didn’t it? It was epic … and weird … and bizarre. I think it ended in a really interesting place where Buffy sacrifices herself … which led into season six.