“So did anybody … last night, you know, did anybody, um … burst into song?”
The sixth season was far different than any season that had preceded it, since it focused on the personal demons of the Scooby Gang. It begins with Willow casting a powerful spell to bring Buffy back to life; she succeeds and is thrilled to have resurrected her closest friend, only to eventually learn that she didn’t free Buffy from a hell dimension but rather pulled her out of heaven.
The season is dark and largely depressing: Buffy is unhappy to be back on earth, Spike attempts to rape her to consummate his obsession with her, Willow wrestles uncomfortably (for herself and the audience) with her magic addiction, Xander abandons Anya at the altar, and Tara is murdered. Sounds fun, doesn’t it?
In addition, the Big Bad appears in the form of a troika of supernerds who don’t seem all that bad—the Trio: Warren Mears (Adam Busch), Andrew Wells (Tom Lenk), and Jonathan Levinson (Danny Strong, who has subsequently gone on to become one of the most successful TV and film writers in the business as the creator of Empire, a screenwriter for films like Lee Daniels’s The Butler, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, and the brilliant HBO telefilms Recount and Game Change). Of course, appearances can be deceiving.…
The series also moved from its previous home on the WB to the United Paramount Network following a fierce bidding war. The studio that produced it, Fox, ultimately chose to migrate to a new network home for a larger licensing fee to cover the cost of a series that had grown far more expensive over the years (the show had long gone from filming on Super 16 mm in the early seasons to the traditional 35 mm film stock at the time as well). And with Buffy having died at the end of “The Gift,” the WB did nothing to dissuade viewers from thinking that the Slayer was really six feet under and that they should, instead, watch Angel. Meanwhile, UPN embarked on an aggressive marketing campaign to let the audience know that Buffy was returning from the dead in a new home across the dial.
DAVID FURY
(co–executive producer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
Joss was a little fatalistic. He felt he was not going to return to the show. That after season five he would not be coming back. He needed a break, he wanted to do other things, and the network was playing that negotiation game. We had an idea that this might be it. Some of us didn’t believe it. They thought it’s impossible; they can’t possibly let this go. But in essence they did. UPN saw an opportunity, because of the way the WB was playing with the value of the show and wasn’t sure they were going to pick it up, so Twentieth Television went, “All right, we’ll sell it elsewhere.”
KEVIN LEVY
(senior vice president, Program Planning and Scheduling, the CW)
I remember when I was at UPN we had a great marketing campaign for it coming back, “Buffy Lives,” which I thought looked great and really did a good job of sending the message that the show was transitioning over to UPN.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
(story editor, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
UPN really took a bath on Buffy and the reason they took a bath is that they couldn’t come up with any product to launch off of Buffy. They had a great lead-in, but they couldn’t get the material to get their next hit, and Enterprise wasn’t really helping them, either.
KEVIN LEVY
We premiered America’s Next Top Model after the finale of Buffy and that was amazing, because that turned into a giant hit for us at UPN. I don’t think Top Model would have been as much as a self-starter had it not had that lead-in. When we got wrestling it was a big deal; when we got the new Enterprise, that was a big deal, but this was a really big deal from a competitive standpoint, because it was taking away a major piece from our prime competitor, which was the WB. So not only was it an addition for us, it was addition by subtraction for them as far as our perspective went. And then we got Roswell as well. I remember when Dean Valentine, who was our CEO, made that announcement to the assembled company, there was just massive applause when we got it. It was very exciting.
MARTI NOXON
(executive producer/show runner, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
Joss was really clear that resurrection could only come at a cost. That when Buffy comes back, it’s not going to be easy. I think that was sort of a genius twist in that we all assumed she had been in some sort of horrible place, and then we discover the reason the resurrection is so painful for her is because she wasn’t. That was what made it such a great revelation and made Buffy’s character a little more interesting.
When Angel came back from hell, he was twitchy for a whole different reason. But I do think Joss’s philosophy was right: if you’re going to defy the laws of nature in that way, you’re going to have to pay a real price. It had repercussions through the whole season.
DAVID FURY
The great thing about a show like Buffy is anything is possible. In a show with magic, in a show with dark magic, in a show with witches, bringing someone back to life is not a problem. It’s more like you don’t want to trivialize that they died. In other words, if somebody dies in an emotional way and then you bring them back and they’re fine, it would have been a total cheat toward everything we worked for in season five with Buffy’s death. Which is why Joss wanted Buffy to be less than herself when she came back. He wanted her to be damaged and sullen and unhappy. And the secret comes out in the musical where we find out she was in heaven and she was yanked out of it. She was happy, she was with her mother, and this is why I don’t know if I want to be back. “I was happier being dead.” That’s a huge thing to do.
MARTI NOXON
The way she came back was pretty much what people expected. Ultimately, I don’t think Joss wanted to waste a tremendous amount of energy in bringing her back. That’s not really what people cared about. It’s a show called Buffy the Vampire Slayer, so they knew she was going to be back. It wasn’t like we went out of our way for the audience to say, “Wow, we never saw that coming.” At our writers meeting, we simply discussed what would be the most likely thing to have happen now if you were in this fantasy world.
DAVID FURY
When Joss presented that idea and when Marti and I were discussing it when Joss wasn’t around, because he was off writing the musical for the first several episodes of the season, we knew this had to be a very painful birth bringing Buffy back, and we had to play into that. That’s what people were responding to. They were saying things like, “It’s not as fun as it used to be; Buffy is such a drag; it’s so serious.” That was all intentional. There was a lot of discussion about that. How much of the audience was going to be alienated and when are we going to snap her out of this? Obviously, the key was it’s going to be the end of the season when she needed to climb back out of her grave for herself to decide she wanted to live in this world. That was the biggest part.
MARTI NOXON
Once Joss found his hook in the story—that she had been in a good place—he was really committed to the idea that she would not be all cheery when she got back. It’s funny, because although the show is not theological in that way, we finally ran out of excuses. Joss has often said that there is no “heaven” as such in the Buffyverse. But if there’s a bad place, there has to be a good place. Maybe it’s not exactly heaven, but there are counterforces to all other forces, and Joss was finally willing to accept that. A recurring theme in Joss’s work and both shows is that life is hard and it’s people’s actions and relationships with each other that make it livable. He’s never said it was a pretty worldview.
JOSS WHEDON
(creator/executive producer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
Season six was basically about, “OK, now we’re grown-ups.” You take away Giles, because Tony wanted to go back to England. You see, the recurring theme is that whenever the actors are available, we work around it. But it made sense. We have no mentor, we have no mother, we have no parental figures.
MARTI NOXON
In “Flooded,” we were like, “You know, the house is a metaphor for all of the adult problems she’ll be dealing with.” It turned out pretty well. But we also said, “You know what, not that exciting to have Buffy deal with bills.” Because it’s not Buffy the Debt Collector, it’s not Buffy the Credit Card User, it’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer. So we started toying with the idea of adult responsibilities and then decided we probably have to go to nasty sex instead. We tried out a bunch of those in “Flooded” and kind of dispensed with them, because then after an episode we were kind of like, “Well, we probably don’t want her worrying about the actual realities of adult life because it got boring.”
JOSS WHEDON
We were dealing with marriage and alcoholism and a really abusive relationship. We were dealing with someone who is practically suicidally depressed. It’s weird, but people didn’t respond to that so much.
MARTI NOXON
We both wanted to reflect the tumult of being in your twenties. Even though the show wasn’t as clearly defined by metaphor as it was when we were back in high school, it’s appropriate. The twenties are a much more murky period. I think we both wanted to make sure that it felt very real; that when you get to the age that Buffy and the others were, there’s supposed to be this really strong conflict between that desire on one hand to be young and taken care of and irresponsible, and on the other to really take charge of your own life. Those two things pull you in really different directions. For me—and I think for a lot of people I knew at that age—it’s kind of a war. Sometimes the grown-up is winning and sometimes the kid is winning. That’s what we really wanted to deal with.
JOSS WHEDON
Season six of Buffy saw a very dark turn for the series, as Buffy herself, recently returned to life, spent most of the year in a very unhappy place and involved in a decidedly unhealthy relationship with Spike.
SARAH MICHELLE GELLAR
(actress, Buffy Summers)
It was definitely tough for me. It’s so hard to separate myself from her, so it was tough for me to see these situations and think, “But Buffy wouldn’t do this.…” And I felt pressure from the force of the fans. I know Joss and Marti both particularly talked me down from a ledge a couple of times, because it just felt so far removed for me at the time. And maybe that was the point—maybe I was struggling in the same way that she was struggling to find who she was. It just felt so foreign to me.
DAVID FURY
The dynamic changes a little bit when you don’t have the show runner and visionary of the show around and part of you feels like we’re kind of floundering. As much as we’re moving forward and we’re trying to anticipate and go, What would Joss do here? it was difficult. Marti tried to rely on me a lot for that. I was flattered and appreciative, but I had also been doing a lot of work at Angel and kind of splitting my time between the two, so I feel like I wasn’t available enough to her, which I felt very badly about. We tried to work together and Marti tried to run the show just as she felt Joss would, but I guess there was always a feeling in the back of our minds, Joss is coming back, right? The show is still going on, he’s not just gone, he’ll come back eventually. And he did come back. He was living on the East Coast at the time. He would fly in for a few days and discuss what we were doing for those first couple of episodes and he’d give us thoughts, and then he would go away again.
Marti never really, to my mind, got enough time to really mold into the role of show runner. As much as Joss said he was turning the show over to her, it didn’t happen sort of. I was busy writing the second episode, she was writing the first, and when we were writing, we were really not together during that period. So there were a lot of times when she would convene the writers while I was writing or I’d get together with some of the writers while she was writing. We hadn’t quite found the way we were going to do it. Joss would come in and give his blessing on certain things, give his notes on scripts we’d hand in, and then disappear again.
JOSS WHEDON
I do remember there was a time when I said to Marti, “OK, I think Buffy’s been gone for too long. We’ve lost her, and it’s time now to win her back.”
MARTI NOXON
I remember that day, too. It was just a day when everybody kind of thought, “OK, we’ve reached the bottom of the pool. It’s time to surface.” Sarah told me, “I just feel like I’ve lost the hero completely in all this exploration.”
SARAH MICHELLE GELLAR
I always looked up to Buffy. I thought when I was younger I would have loved to have a role model like that. A woman who showed you that you don’t have to be the smartest and you don’t have to be the most beautiful, but you can protect your family and the people that you love and you can be a powerful woman. I think that’s what made season six hard for me. For all of us, but especially Joss, Marti, and me, we love her and it was hard for all of us to watch her suffer. I think it was a part of growing pains. It was a tough time, and that’s what came through in the end, which was great, because when Buffy herself resurfaced, we all resurfaced and found our voice again.
JOSE MOLINA
(executive story editor, Firefly)
I think the show kind of ran its course. The show was designed to be a high school show. And the high school show ended in season three. Then they went to college and the show changed pretty drastically right then and there. So it was evolving, and even season four had some of the best episodes they ever did with, among others, “Hush”; season five is another college season but it had “The Body,” which is probably my favorite episode of Buffy, hands down. But you can tell, even in those episodes, that it was getting a little grown-up and a little dark and getting a little away from the more fun escapist stories that were there earlier. Of course, the arc of “Becoming” is one of the most heartbreaking arcs in genre TV that I’ve seen to date. So it’s not like the show was ever a laugh riot.
MARTI NOXON
We started to say, “Yeah, we recognize that the season was dark,” and now it’s what everyone says. I’ve talked to a lot of fans who really enjoyed the season and didn’t have problems with it since, overall, there was still a lot of funny and a lot of good. However, we definitely went to a very dark place, particularly with Buffy and Spike. I recognize that. We took that elevator pretty far down. We got the message that people didn’t like a dour Buffy, and, you know, we absolutely agreed. You can’t stay in that place. But at the same time, it’s hard to hear people say, “Yeah, it just wasn’t to our liking.”
We’ve had criticism before. Season four also got a lot of hits, so it was a little cyclical. Season four had a great deal of great in it, but people didn’t like Riley, people didn’t like the Initiative, people didn’t like Maggie. It was a loyal fan base, but we heard people wanted stuff to lighten up a bit.
JOSE MOLINA
Marti’s sensibilities might have been darker than what the show was used to. And it was really her show. Joss was there, but season seven he was running Angel and Firefly. So the change of ownership, if you will, was a little jarring. And, as many good episodes as there are in seasons six and seven, the change in tone sort of left me missing what was there before.
DAVID FURY
I will say the show got extremely sexual in the last couple of seasons. It went there. I know Marti and Joss wanted to push the envelope. Joss wanted to make the show darker and he wanted to push standards and practices into letting him do some really twisted things. He wanted Buffy to be self-destructive in a twisted way, and it’s hard to convey that in a family show or something that is more network friendly. Marti was very into the relationship stuff; she was into the Spike-Buffy thing and the sort of self-destruction, the idea of Buffy being reckless with Spike and getting into a kind of, like, hate sex. It’s kind of sophisticated dark stuff, psychology certainly. That was largely the tone of that season, which was a shift from what we’d been doing on the WB. It seemed appropriate at the time. I think Joss was a little surprised that there was so much pushback, but he never regretted it or thought we made a mistake. He always knew it needed to be that way.
In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Harry is a cranky teenager. I told Joss that in season six Buffy is Harry. He needed to go through that. It’s part of the ritual of growing up into adulthood. It’s going through the process of being an asshole who hates everybody, because no one understands them. He agreed that’s sort of what Buffy was meant to be in season six.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
Joss knowing where he was going with that, knowing that they would bring Buffy back but she would come back with problems. There’s that wonderful moment in an episode I wrote called “Dead Things,” where the nerd trio accidentally kill one of their ex-girlfriends, where it turns really dark. Buffy has been carrying on with Spike and she has that wonderful thing with Tara where she says, basically, “Please tell me there’s something wrong with me.” Because if she didn’t come back wrong, then these bad choices are her fault.
SARAH LEMELMAN
(author, “It’s About Power”: Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Stab at Establishing the Strength of Girls on American Television)
Once Riley disappears from Buffy’s life, she faces much upheaval, especially since she dies for longer than a couple minutes when she previously drowned in the first season and is brought back to life by the Scooby Gang. This puts her into a deep depression, and she is seen as experimenting with her “darker” self. As a result, she finally gives in to the temptation of Spike, who had been lusting after her for much of the time that Buffy was with Riley. When she proceeds with her “relationship” with Spike, she continues to hold the power, as she had done with Riley, but to a much greater degree. She is certainly no passive female and, instead, dominates Spike to the point where she effeminizes him. This negative and extremely cruel treatment of Spike ultimately leads to his attempted rape of Buffy.
DAVID FURY
The Buffybot thing initially came out of the robot episode “I Was Made to Love You” [in which Spike asks Warren to make a robot Buffy for him]. We were told that Britney Spears was a huge fan of the show and we got word from her reps that she wanted to guest-star on Buffy. So the story that was conceived ultimately by Joss, “I Was Made to Love You,” was meant for Britney Spears to play the robot. I had a little daughter who was a Britney fan. I took her to the concert and she begins the concert with her face on screen, speaking in almost robotic way, along the lines of, “I want to please, I want to make you mine.” And robotically. I think Joss saw it, too, or he heard about it, but he got this idea that if Britney is going to be on the show, she is going to be a robot, a sex-slave robot, because that’s what she presents to her audience when you see her.
He presented that to Britney’s reps and she balked, because she wasn’t looking to do that. I think she was more looking toward being with the Buffy gang as opposed to being some kind of sex-slave robot. The obvious thing that came out of that was Spike making a Buffybot using the same technology from that and having a Buffybot made for him.
I always like when things from the past feed events and ideas into stories. You pull from some other past ideas, because it all feels much more organic that way. It came out of that; it wasn’t just random. It was pretty odd to see our heroine Buffy be reduced to that with Spike. But Spike recognizes it is not good enough for him; he is telling us it isn’t just external. It’s just infatuation, because he was getting that from the robot, but he wasn’t getting her real love.
JAMES MARSTERS
(actor, Spike)
That was perfect! That was in the vein of my idea all along of—This is it! This is exactly it! He should be in love with Buffy and just making an idiot out of himself in pursuit of that. The Buffybot is just so much more obscene than anything I could’ve thought of. It was the most pathetic stalker move imaginable.
DAVID FURY
To me, it’s all about a Hellmouth and the things that have come out: the demons, the ghosts, the monsters of your youth that you have to battle. When it become robots, you start going, “Wait a minute, how does that fit into the show?” Joss would say, “You’re just way overthinking it. The Hellmouth should be able to provide us with anything we want to do; the energy that comes out of it makes mad scientists out of humans who then go ahead and create something evil.”
MARTI NOXON
We had talked about the Spike-Buffy romance toward the end of season five. Joss and I were like, “You know, this is what has to happen. We’ve got to take this seriously, because he is by far the most sort of screwed-up guy around.” We just felt like that’s whom she’d be drawn to under the circumstances. Also, you know, he’s not unsexy. So we wanted to take advantage of that.
DAVID FURY
It became, “Does Buffy need a love interest?” Of course, it eventually came around to Spike, which was an unusual choice. It was one many of the fans embraced. I was a little less enthusiastic since I knew the vampires were demons essentially. The demons possess someone once they die. So the idea that Spike could love genuinely or Buffy could fall for Spike in any way was tricky for me. We were able to get there once Buffy came back from the dead and she was all messed up. Then she could become Spike’s love interest, because it was self-destructive. A lot of people still romanticize that. I myself had to come around to it as I eventually started writing episodes about the relationship and I had to believe in it. Those were the challenges that came when we removed Angel. Joss loved those challenges more than he would have loved keeping them together and keeping everything safe and letting the fans dictate, “Oh, don’t ever break them up; we love them.” He was all about pain.
SARAH LEMELMAN
After Buffy comes back from the dead, Buffy gradually spends more time with Spike, which comes to a climax in “Smashed.” She continues her demeaning treatment of Spike by yelling to him, “Look at you, you idiot. Poor Spikey. Can’t be a human, can’t be a vampire. Where the hell do you fit in? Your job is to kill the Slayer, but all you can do is follow me around making moon eyes.” The two engage in combat before Buffy kisses Spike, and after he declares his love for her. This results in a night of hard-core bondage and discipline/sadism and masochism (BDSM) sex between the two, which Buffy rushes to get away from in the morning, describing their engagement as a “freak show.”
Spike tries to make the previous night seem momentous, but Buffy downplays its importance and takes on a “man’s” role in the conversation, stating it was nothing more than “just sex,” because Spike is “convenient.” This degrading conversation makes Spike clearly uncomfortable, and he has to assure himself that he is evil and dangerous, which points to the beginning of his confusion over his identity.
In his frustration over Buffy, Spike also became involved with Harmony, now a vampire, whom he remained disdainful of throughout their short and tortured relationship.
MARTI NOXON
A lot of times when we’re searching for a character to serve a function in an episode from week to week, we’ll think of our cast of characters and see if there is someone from our ensemble who we can use as opposed to someone you’ve never seen before. Especially if you’ve had a good experience with an actor and you feel that they can pull it off. And we’ll go back and see if we can figure out who that person can be. If we can weave it back into the world, we try to do it. Harmony was a great example of that. So was Anya; she was supposed to be a one-shot; she moved up to that bar and yelled at that bartender about being two hundred years old or something, and we thought, “Oh, that’s kind of funny.” And she’s amazing.
MERCEDES MCNAB
(actress, Harmony Kendall)
He was really nasty and there’re times when you are an actor and sometimes you are not really feeling 100 percent committed or whatnot. Every moment is 100 percent genuine. But with those scenes in particular, it felt really in the zone. I felt he and I were both super in the zone and the scenes really translated well and we worked well together. For me, it was just that he was the bad boy, the unobtainable male that every girl tried to turn good, eventually. Which generally never works out.
MARTI NOXON
There was a lot of discussion of how we could get Buffy and Spike to the next phase of their relationship. We had talked about lots of realistic ways it could happen, and Joss was like, “It just has to be epic. It can’t be a little thing.” The whole notion there was that it was going to come out of the dramatic dynamic they had, which is as much about violence as it is about anything else. In my mind, Spike was always self-centered in his goodness. It’s always about his wants and needs. He’s not a moral guy and he is good when it serves him to be good. But I don’t know if we put enough emphasis on that. He was a little less ambiguous and a little bit more the hero. But he’s not a hero. People came to think of him as this softer, more righteous guy, but at least in my mind at his core, he did not have a soul. We still thought of him as a sociopath in the sense that he acts the way he thinks people want him to act in order to get what he wants. But if you’ve lived in the Buffy universe for years, the dude is just bad. It was the chip that kept him from being really bad.
JAMES MARSTERS
What I said to them actually was, “I know at the beginning of the season I was a little bit freaked out because you were taking Spike in different directions. I feel like I’m on a roller coaster, where, like, you get kind of freaked out the first hill you climb. As you start to fall, you start to scream, right? By the middle of the ride your head is back and whatever happens you just go with it.” That’s where I ended up with Joss, “Just do whatever you want. I’m never going to be nervous. Do anything. Put me in a dress—I don’t care. The one thing I ask you is give me two weeks notice if you want to take my shirt off.” He kind of got cocky. “Oh, two weeks, huh? Follow me.” I ain’t like Angel and I certainly ain’t like Riley none, so it was very interesting and a whole new thing.
SARAH LEMELMAN
When Riley returns to Sunnydale momentarily, Buffy reevaluates her life, as Riley reminds her that Spike is “deadly, amoral, [and] opportunistic” and that she is a “hell of a woman” who deserves better. Buffy decides to finally end things with Spike, and, for the first time, she treats him like a man rather than an object, when she closes their relationship: “I’m using you. I can’t love you … And it’s killing me. I have to be strong about this. I’m sorry, William.” Here, she uses his real name, instead of Spike, which puts the two on the same ground for the first time in their brief affair.
MARTI NOXON
It was the beginning of the most divisive story line we’ve ever had, which is Buffy and Spike boning. I’ve never seen such a strong reaction on both sides; people either loved it or hated it. To this day, people either truly believe that Spike is completely redeemed and he should be treated a lot better or they truly believe that Buffy was a fool for trusting someone who’s been so evil and how could she be so unheroic to let herself be caught up in this really sordid romance? So, you had the total Buffy-Spike shippers or the people who are like, I just don’t respect Buffy anymore. And it was fascinating to see.
You know, I slept with bad guys all through college and it was really hot. There were certainly a number of people who were like this who were really hot. I don’t even care who’s doing it or why. And neither of them are all good or all bad. It wasn’t black and white. I’ve taken a lot of heat from Internet folks, especially because I said stuff like, “You know that that relationship can’t work” or “with/without things changing” and other things that make them feel like we’re not responsible—or we’re sort of comparing it to the Angel-Buffy romance and saying that that romance was really idolized, and this one isn’t.
But to me it’s much more real. It’s like, if these two crazy kids could make it work, it’d be a lot more interesting than kind of a perfect romance with obstacles not of their own making. At the end of the year, Spike went and did something radical, but the violence of it upset people. It’s hard to say you’re the most feminist show ever and have people beating each other up all the time.
JAMES MARSTERS
I was just terrified. Like, when you do a movie or a play you can read the script beforehand and decide if you want to put yourself through that or if you want to show that part of yourself or if you want to go through the rigors of filming that. Or you can pass. You can say, “I don’t want to do that.” When you do a TV show, normally once you film one episode, you know what’s going to be asked of you, because most television shows are fairly repetitive, which is not a good thing. But when you work with Joss Whedon, all bets are off. You’re contracted to do anything that he comes up with to anyone that he wants you to do it to and whatever he dreams up. I started to be terrified of the new script. I’m going to have to experience anything that is thought of. It was scary, but that worked, because I think that Spike was terrified by himself, and it all kind of works. But yeah, it was a horrible realization that all bets were off.
In the fifth season’s “Fool for Love,” a crossover with Angel’s “Darla” episode, it had been revealed the fearsome Spike was originally a meek poet from 1880s-era London named William, who was the object of scorn and derision from his contemporaries and rejected by the love of his life, Cecily. Shortly thereafter, Drusilla sired him and he joined with Angelus and Darla as they traveled the globe on a reign of terror before he killed two Vampire Slayers, a Chinese Slayer during the Boxer Rebellion and a second in New York in 1977.
DAVID FURY
I bucked on doing “Fool for Love.” I had an opportunity to do the episode, but because I couldn’t buy into it, it went to Doug Petrie and he did an amazing job. He sort of almost kind of convinced me, because he did such a great job with that episode. I went “Gee, I wish I’d done it after all.” It still kind of weirded me out that Spike, a soulless creature, could fall in love. I kept saying, it’s just an infatuation. It’s only external, it’s only this, he can’t possibly be in love, he has no heart, he has no soul. But I came around; they beat it out of me.
JAMES MARSTERS
What that episode did for me is explain the dichotomy between someone who could truly love his girl and be completely sweet and loving to her and also be a soulless spawn of Hell. That was always to me the most interesting thing about Spike. It was never really addressed. I have thought sometimes maybe it’s best not to. I think they did about as well as you could. Spike’s progression is the progression of a lot of males, which is early years, not really finding yourself, not really finding your strength, and then finding something that really hooks you and helps you become yourself.
The thing I finally understood when I think about Joss and the way he worked, he and Marti, I don’t think the cool is that interesting to them. I think that they can set it up and achieve it effortlessly. I think that it was usually a setup for something much more fallible and much more human and much more goofy and pained and tortured and humiliated. That’s what really great writing addresses, the human condition and all its frailty and all its vulnerability. At first, when they started taking my character down from the height of cool that they had placed me, it was a little bit scary. Eventually, I understood why.
And if the show hadn’t pushed the limits enough in the sixth season, in the episode “Gone” Xander uncomfortably walks in on an invisible Buffy having sex with Spike.
DAVID FURY
I got to direct my first episode, which allowed Sarah a little break from all the angsty things and to get giddy about being invisible, about the fact that she didn’t have to worry about being back in the world, because no one could see her anymore. That was a little attempt to lighten the mood a bit and take us out of being completely somber and to have her having a fight scene with the three invisible nerd villains. It was part of season six which was a definite shift, which unnerved a lot of people. They just didn’t understand what we were going for in season six. Buffy was always funny and you’re trying to work in the funny, but Buffy is not getting any of the funny. She’s not going to be the one quipping. It was a lot trickier to do.
That episode was fun to do, because it was so ridiculous to stage a ridiculous fight with invisible characters. It was a bit of an attempt to find something more fun and to go a little more comic. It was Joss’s idea and it needed to be there to cleanse the palette from all the darkness. Her feeling that her invisibility allowed her to be who she was, to be a little bit more lighthearted and reckless, but reckless in a much more fun way.
MARTI NOXON
Yeah, that was something that Joss and David Fury just got all excited about and I was just like, “Ewwwww!” It was disturbing to me … and still is. It just shows you that even I have my limits.
JAMES MARSTERS
In a way every year I felt he was so completely different. When they brought me on the show, the two things that I thought were the linchpins of the character was, one, an extreme pleasure in hurting people; and, two, real love for my girlfriend, Drusilla. When they brought me back on the show [in season four], I had neither one of those and I was like, “What are we going to play?” And they found it.
MARTI NOXON
He would’ve hurt people if he could, in certain circumstances. But, you know, if you’ve sort of lived in the universe of Buffy for years, the dude is bad—and it was the chip that kept him from being really bad. This guy is not to be trusted. If I were Buffy, I could trust him with anything sort of related to me, but I wouldn’t trust him in the big scheme of things. In my mind, Spike is always self-centered. It’s always about his own wants and needs. It’s always about Buffy or doing something for Buffy. But anyplace else, he’s pretty much amoral. He’s not a moral guy. He’s good when it serves him to be good. He’s not really a hero. He would never eat Dawn. He probably wouldn’t eat any of the Scoobies … maybe Xander. But, and I feel that this could be the fault of us, people came to think of him as a sort of softer, more kind of righteous guy.
JAMES MARSTERS
I remember one time we were blocking a scene in Buffy’s house and Xander was bleeding out in the corner, having been mauled by some demon or something. The cast was gathered around him, gnashing teeth and wailing and keening. I was over in the corner, up against the wall looking bored. The director came up to me and goes, “James, you gotta go over there and care. I know it’s early in the morning, but you’re a cast member, he’s a cast member, he might die. You gotta go over there and express concern.” I was like, “No, I don’t.” And he was like, “Don’t you care about Xander?” “Nope, don’t care at all. Could live or die—check with Joss. I don’t care at all.” He was like, “Really? What about the rest of them?” I was like, “Buffy, definitely. Buffy’s mother, yes. But the rest of them, no, not at all.” So yeah, if you were Buffy or if you were part of her immediate family, then I cared about you. If you weren’t, then you were on your own.
Dawn was effectively Buffy’s daughter, I think. As far as Buffy’s journey, you know … her mother dies, and very quickly she gets this little sister whom she now has to take care of. So she’s just quickly a single mom. Since I love Buffy, Dawn becomes my stepdaughter, emotionally speaking. I kind of approached it that way.
MARTI NOXON
It got so dark and so intense and then even darker still when Buffy just beats the hell out of Spike. Some people had a real hard time with that and I dig on that one. I understand where they’re coming from. It was something that, you know, just went to a real dark place and this is where people started to feel like, “OK, like the episode, like the show, but what’s going on?” You know, what’s going on with Buffy? What’s going on with Spike? I get that. She beats the crap out of him. I can understand why people were starting to wonder. I wouldn’t say that we were floundering at all, but I would say that at that point in the relationship we didn’t know where it was going and all we had was just her raw emotion. That’s what got expressed: just complete confusion and the fact that she kept taking out her pain on him and that he would take it.
JAMES MARSTERS
Every year, I felt like I was playing a new character. I started as the boy toy for Dru. I was cannon fodder and I was going to be done away with and Dru was the main thing. Then I graduated to villain. Then I guess I was the wacky neighbor for a while. Then I was the forlorn man in the corner loving the woman who didn’t give anything back. Then I was the lover. Then I was the unhealthy boyfriend.
DAVID FURY
I believe that Spike was a monster even when he was convinced he loved Buffy. He was still a vampire. Yes, he had a chip in his head which kept him from killing, but I think ultimately the vampire’s a monster. Unless they have a soul like Angel they can’t be anything else. Spike is a demon. There’s this demon inside him, so the attempted rape of Buffy. As frightening and awful as that may seem, people were still romanticizing Spike and Buffy, and that was the problem I was having. I don’t think their relationship should have been rooted for at that time. At that time, I thought this is a wrong, twisted thing.
JAMES MARSTERS
It all came to a climax in the bathroom in “Seeing Red” when Spike is convinced that if he and Buffy make love one more time they’ll come back together and everything will be all right. I don’t like those kinds of scenes. If I know that a movie has a rape scene in it, I don’t go see it. If something like that comes up on television, I turn it off. It’s too upsetting for me. I passed on a lot of roles that have that in it.
But in Buffy I was contracted to do whatever they came up with, and that came down the pipes. One of the reasons I think why Buffy resonates to this day is that Joss found nine of the best writers in Hollywood and he discovered them all. He found them when they were unknown and young and hungry. He’s given Hollywood a whole new generation of writers who are now some of the most influential producers in Hollywood. But what he asked them to do was to come up with their worst day. The day that they’re ashamed of. The day they don’t talk about. The day that keeps them up at night. And then slap fangs on top of that dark secret and tell the world about it. It was a sustained act of bravery and vulnerability every single week. The writers would not tell you what the life experience was that led to the episode, but we were always guessing.
In that instance, the story was broached by one of the female writers who in college got broken up with by her boyfriend and convinced herself that if they made love one more time, then everything would be fine. She went over to his place and really kind of forced herself on him and he had to push her off and say no. This was a crushing blow to this young woman in her college days and was something she thought about a lot. I think the thought was that since Buffy is a superhero and could defend herself, that you could flip the sexes and it would work. My feeling was that the way the storytelling works is to give the audience a vicarious experience and to have the adventure. You climb behind the eyes of the lead. When anyone watches Buffy, they are Buffy, and they get to have that adventure as if they’re Buffy. That’s how storytelling works. And so I was going to try to rape the audience, and they’re not superheroes. It is a vastly different thing to have a man do that in a scene than a woman, just as an effect on the audience. It was the worst day of my professional career. It was very painful. I remember being in the corner in a fetal position just kind of shaking in between takes.
It led me into therapy, which turned out to be a very good thing. I’m a lot happier having gone through successful therapy than I was before. So it all came out to a good thing for me in the end. But it was a hard day. What I will say is that, as an artist, I don’t want to be in my comfort zone and when I’m too comfortable it’s probably not as interesting. I was certainly not in my comfort zone at that time. It propelled all the characters in the right way, and it all worked. But it was a hard episode to film.
DAVID FURY
This is a monstrous person who is now obsessed with our hero who is in a very vulnerable place. But don’t forget: he is a monster. They went, Spike is so funny, and he quips, and he can’t kill anybody; he’s so sweet and cute and I want [him] and Buffy to get together. The attempted rape was Steve DeKnight’s episode, so blame him for it, by the way. It was an attempt to remind the audience Spike is bad; don’t root for this relationship. The people who were for the relationship felt betrayed by Joss and us. It was very specific, because we’d say you shouldn’t be rooting for him. It’s the typical thing of a girl attracted to a bad boy. An awful wife beater, a guy who is a scumbag and some women go for him and we’re not supposed to root for that. That’s what this was, so I didn’t have the problem everyone had. The people with the problems were the Spike-Buffy shippers who really wanted them to get together.
JAMES MARSTERS
When I got on the show in the very beginning I was told that I was going to die quickly, and I didn’t want that. I wanted to live. I wanted to stay around, because they were paying me more than I had ever been paid in my life and I was a young father. As a storyteller, you always have to find the love, whether you’re sculpting or painting or telling a story or singing a song. If you can find the love there, you find the gold, as I say. Whether it’s love denied, love crushed, love blossoming, wherever that is is where the real power is. So I decided to play Spike with a soul right out of the blocks. I’m like, “Sure, Joss, I’m a soulless vampire. You got it, buddy. No problem,” and I immediately went to the scripts like, Where’s the love? In the beginning, the love was with Drusilla.
DAVID FURY
That weird incestuous sort of relationship they had was creepy, but I think it was because of his sensitive soul he didn’t wholly turn into a monster, which is probably why he loved Drusilla. There was a part of Spike that wanted to love. She was crazy. She was doing anything she could. Spike was creative as a monster, but ultimately we realized there is this sensitive poet inside of him.
JAMES MARSTERS
Some of the scripts read kind of like he was making fun of Drusilla a lot, and I decided to undercut that. I remember there was one scene where she is looking up at the stars, but we’re indoors. She’s laying on the table. I’m in the wheelchair looking at her and I say, “It’s not the stars, love, it’s the ceiling.” I make some crack about the fact that she’s being crazy. I remember being like, “OK, well that’s the line of the bad boyfriend that the audience will be glad to be rid of.” So instead I just decided to kind of rest my chin on my hands, looking at her adoringly and just saying, “No, that’s the ceiling, honey, not the stars,” and just undercut that.
DAVID FURY
In “Grave,” the episode where Spike is in Africa going through this test and it’s revealed so he can get his soul back, because he knew he was a monster after what he did to Buffy and realized the only way he can love her is if he stops being a monster and gets his soul back. I totally bought into it. I understand it from a story standpoint. I’m offended that they were rooting for the relationship before that. Maybe we made a mistake in some cases by making Spike so sympathetic at times. But even the worst of us can be sympathetic at times. Even the worst human being can be sympathetic sometimes. Except maybe Donald Trump. So the rape was very controversial and I just don’t agree with the interpretation people saw in it. We were not supposed to like Spike’s relationship. When he got his soul back, some people didn’t like him. I had lots of arguments on the fan boards about it. I said the fact that he got his soul back makes a difference. They didn’t see that it did. And they said it’s overrated, why do you need a soul? We had these weird arguments talking in theological theory. If we’re saying that love comes from the soul, then that’s really the only way that Spike can … experience real love. People to this day probably still curse my name for making that argument.
Most people didn’t care about it like I did. I was the one who was not a shipper of Spike and Buffy, because of the soulless thing. So when he got the soul, for me, I could embrace it now. But what was nice is when we introduce him, he’s still pretty fucked up. He’s not, “Oh, I’ve got a soul now I’m a well-adjusted vampire.” He’s a guy who is pretty messed up and we did that with Angel as well. When we got to do flashbacks or at least part of the lore, it wasn’t like Angel got a soul and he’s like, “I’m better now, I’ll fight for good.” It was him living on the streets eating rats and stuff. He was pretty messed up, so it takes a while to make that adjustment from going from soulless vampire to soulful vampire. For me, it at least allowed me to root for Buffy to love him as imperfect and flawed as he was. Then he was someone whose love was more genuine. I always kind of rationalized it that he was more fixated on Buffy than he actually loved her. But with his soul, I went, “It was genuine.” It just made it that much more painful, of course.
JAMES MARSTERS
I have to admit I was playing it with a soul from the beginning. Then it was terrifying to get a soul, because I had nothing left. I was like, “What else do I do? I’ve been doing a soul the whole time. I don’t know what I’m going to add now.” Luckily, the writing filled all that in. I didn’t talk about it. I did not alert anyone to that one. That was going against the show. I didn’t feel like I had a choice, though.
DAVID FURY
What I came to justify to myself is that Spike is an anomaly; that somehow that poet that’s in him … retained a small part of his soul. A romantic part of his soul. And that is from being a very bad poet; someone who was full of all those emotions that allowed him to retain some part of himself that could love Buffy. That’s how I rationalized it. I bought it, and I had to buy it because I wrote him in the relationship episodes and eventually in “Lies My Parents Told Me,” telling the backstory of his mother and he’s just an anomaly. He’s the only vampire who could love even though he is almost entirely soulless. I argued that the chip that was in his head was conditioning somewhat and was messing with him. There’s so many ways to rationalize it.
JAMES MARSTERS
The thing is, I didn’t know Spike was getting a soul. Even filming the scene where it happens, there were three different versions of that scene I had to memorize and the one we finally filmed was a fourth. I didn’t know what the hell was going on. I didn’t know why I went to Africa. I didn’t know if I was going there to get something to kill [Buffy] with. I had no idea. [Spike] kept saying, “I’m going to give her what she deserves.” So Joss completely fooled me. I didn’t even have the line, “I will give you back your soul!” and they’re rolling. It was cut and move on and I’m like … James looks around in complete confusion. “Angel 2, yeah!” But that was the immediate problem is you cannot go where Angel has gone. You don’t follow up the banjo act with a banjo act.
SARAH LEMELMAN
Susan Brownmiller explains that in most media representations “a good heroine is a dead heroine … for victory through physical triumph is a male prerogative that is incompatible with feminine behavior.” However, this is not the case [in] Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which shows a new version of womanhood, where females can and will fight back and do not have to be [the] victims [of] violent men. Buffy’s engagement with Spike is not used necessarily to satiate the desire of viewers to have her in a relationship, but it seems as though it is meant to show the growth and strides Spike makes from his malicious first appearance on the show in the second season. His final act of attempted rape is what triggers him to embark on a quest for redemption, in which he retrieves his soul, but, nevertheless, the time the two spend together is still worth analyzing, as Buffy is able to give strength to females in abusive relationships.
Despite much of the criticism that was leveled at season six as well as the divisive reaction to Spike’s and Buffy’s sadomasochistic relationship, the season also had its share of standouts, including The Twilight Zone-ish “Normal Again,” in which Buffy is institutionalized after insisting that she’s a Vampire Slayer, which her therapist, played by Hill Street Blues’s Michael Warren, insists is a psychotic delusion, also marking the brief return of Kristine Sutherland’s Joyce.
SARAH LEMELMAN
Buffy is often seen as yearning to have an ordinary teenage girl life. While this [yearning] is mostly prevalent during her high school years and not openly vocalized once she enters college and beyond, it is perhaps still a wish she desires be fulfilled, as it becomes prevalent in a hallucination after she is poisoned in “Normal Again.” This episode does not come until the end of the sixth season, after Buffy has faced much upheaval in her life, including the death of her mother as well as herself, raising her younger sister, and trying to financially support herself, all while carrying out her Slayer duties.
MARTI NOXON
That was the episode that also tripped people out. That was something that was written by Joss’s former assistant. It was a pitch that he sold to us and then wrote. Diego [Gutierrez] worked as Joss’s assistant for a couple years and he and Joss broke that story together. And it was always something we sort of saw as a stand-alone; it could fit in almost any season at various times. But the idea was really strong and I think the episode turned out really nice and moody and kind of intriguing. The question that seemed to bother people was whether we were actually saying that the whole series was in her mind. I think that we were teasing that, but nobody was coming out and saying, “Don’t believe it, it’s all fake.” It was just a little bit of a tease.
We made a lot of jokes about the snow globe and St. Elsewhere. But it’s not the truth.
It was a fake out; we were having some fun with the audience. I don’t want to denigrate what the whole show has meant. If Buffy’s not empowered, then what are we saying? If Buffy’s crazy, then there is no girl power; it’s all fantasy. And really the whole show stands for the opposite of that, which is that it isn’t just a fantasy. There should be girls that can kick ass. So I’d be really sad if we made that statement at the end. That’s why it’s just somewhere in the middle saying, “Wouldn’t this be funny if…?” or “Wouldn’t this be sad or tragic if…?” In my feeling, and I believe in Joss’s as well, that’s not the reality of the show. It was just a tease and a trick.
The other fun thing about that is that it was directed by Rick Rosenthal, who was my mentor and boss for many years. He gave me my first big job after [I was] a waitress at a diner in Brentwood. I was writing on the side and he and I struck up a conversation one day and he said, “Geez, you seem like you could have some smarts. You should come pitch on the show that I’m working on.”
SARAH LEMELMAN
In Buffy’s telling hallucination, she finds herself in an insane asylum, where a doctor conveys to her that her Slayer life and friends are figments of her imagination. Her hallucination shows both her mother and father, alive and together, as wanting to help Buffy repudiate the false alternative reality that she has created in order for her to return home to her loving parents and a normal life. In the end, Buffy is able to fight off the allure of the hallucination, signaling her final rejection of the nuclear family and the securities that it can provide. It may have taken her over six years to realize that she does not need a normal life with a structured nuclear family, but her utterance of “good-bye” to her mother in the hallucination makes Buffy’s rejection of familial patriarchy a poignant statement of independence.
But the fatalistic despair of “Normal Again” was positively chipper compared with where the series would eventually end up in its final episodes, which would take the series to its darkest depths yet.
JOSS WHEDON
We were dealing with what [had been] a metaphor, sex, has become very graphic and real sex. What was mystical demons have become three nerds with guns. Very real death, very mundane house payments—the idea was to break down the mythic feeling of the show, because there is a moment at childhood when you no longer get that. Everything isn’t bigger than life; it’s actual size. It’s a real loss. At the same time, the darker side of power and Buffy’s guilt about her power and feeling about coming back to the world and getting into a genuinely unhealthy relationship—that was all about dominance and control and, ultimately, deep misogyny.
How lost did we get? Well, our villain turned out to be Willow.
MARTI NOXON
“Wrecked” was the beginning of what was going to be the major arc of the latter part of the season. You know, it seems like it’s sort of a resolution, but in fact it’s just the beginning. And we all knew that. The part of it that I think is sort of funny is that people were like, “Oh, you know”—that was sort of literal, about Willow being a magic alcoholic. Magic—crawling around the ground and stuff. And it is, in fact, sort of literal, in the sense that we’re trying to set up that she doesn’t have any control. She’s really fucked. But we also knew that this wasn’t the end of the story line.
So even though people were like, “Ah, this isn’t satisfying. It’s just so ‘Touched by a Marti,’” you know? But we were like, “Oh, you don’t understand.” It was one of those ones that was frustrating, because people would react a certain way and we’d be like, “You don’t understand. It hasn’t even begun.” But there’s stuff in that episode I really liked. The hallucinations and stuff were really trippy and fun. There was stuff in there I really liked, but I can see why the criticism would be had.
DAVID FURY
It’s always fun to start playing people who are damaged or flawed. Actors relish the idea of playing villains and people with character flaws. If you’re playing somebody that’s just sweet, nice, and great all the time, it can be very boring for an actor. Since Willow had become a witch, the idea of that becoming addictive was an obvious allegory for drug addiction. It was about giving Aly an opportunity to play Willow differently and to have that being something that drives her relationship with Tara and eventually drives them apart. That was more or less what we were thinking at the time.
In “Doublemeat Palace,” in the wake of her mother’s death and the Summers family’s depleted finances, Buffy has to get a job at a fast food restaurant, where she discovers there’s more going on than just “do you want fries with that?”
MARTI NOXON
“Doublemeat Palace” is one of the craziest episodes we’ve ever done. It’s just insane. The monster looks like a penis and we knew that. We had to paint it, because initially it was penis colored. It wasn’t even a metaphor: it was just a big giant penis. And then we had to paint it brown and … it looked like a brown penis, and we just kind of went with it, because the whole episode was so crazy. It was so weird, and I personally really liked it. I just think it’s just out there. It was let’s try to just have a little fun in a crazy season. And it just got baroque. We tried to go with the feeling of a Coen brothers movie. It was weird and to some degree it succeeded; others not so much. But we got the giant penis.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
I have very fond memories of season six. I know a lot of those are centered around that one episode, “Dead Things,” which in a side story is one of the fastest episodes. It was the week before Thanksgiving and it started out I was in the room with the writers and then one writer went back east. Then another writer peeled off. By the end of that week leading up to Thanksgiving, literally, I was sitting in a room by myself. Everybody had left. The story wasn’t broken. I went down the hallway and knocked on Joss’s door and he was in there with Marti talking about the season.
He pops it open and I go, “Uh, everybody’s gone. What do you want me to do?” He goes, “What do you mean everybody’s gone?” I go, “They all left for Thanksgiving.” He says, “All right, come in. Let’s talk about it.” We went in and talked about it for like a half hour and had a very loose break. He said, “OK, go off and write it. We need it by Monday.”
Literally, I spent I think it was like three and a half days, no sleep, just kind of feeling my way through this episode that it didn’t really have an outline on. Came back in Monday all ragged. Joss read it, and, in one of the best compliments he ever could have given me, he said, “You know what? I should have you locked up in a room and every now and then just slide food under the door for you.” It turned out to be my personal favorite episode that I wrote, in that kind of fever dream, Thanksgiving crucible. I had a blast on that season. I enjoyed working on it.
MARTI NOXON
“Dead Things” was one of our more chilling, frightening episodes of the season actually. To me, it had some classic Buffy good stuff, which was, you know, playing the whole joke of turning Katrina into a sex slave and then that turning out to be no joke at all and not funny. And not funny to make girls your sex slave. In the Buffy universe, that’s not a big joke. To play it for comedy and then just turn it on its head, I thought was really inspired. That was, again, a Joss pitch.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
It was just so complicated, heart-wrenching, dark, and emotional. I just thought it was a brilliant thing that Joss did, knowing that he took these three nerds from previous episodes.
MARTI NOXON
I was talking to a friend about how to write Andrew and one of the other writers on staff was just like, “Go into Doug Petrie and Drew Greenberg’s office, because they love to talk about this kind of stuff.” I can talk about The Partridge Family and Three’s Company and Archie comics, so I’d have to wander down to their office and go, “What would you say here?” and they’d say something about Han Solo.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
The Trio were kind of goofy, kind of funny, but knowing they were going to do this really horrible thing and go really dark and bad. Knowing that eventually they were going to kill Tara and unleash dark Willow. If you look at that entire season, there’s a lot of light and fluffy and fun with the nerds. Then it just all turns sideways, which is something I always loved about the show.
MARTI NOXON
How many times could you go, “It’s the end of the world as we know it”? So we tried to do something a little different. We had to come up with a different way to create a threat. I wasn’t really party to that criticism. I wasn’t really hearing it. In retrospect, obviously, I have. I just was so into them; we just thought they were so funny. Maybe they amused us more than others. But we just thought they were so fun and their motivation was so interesting. You know, what I think people were objecting to was that there wasn’t that typical momentum of the season like, “Here it comes, here it comes, here it comes. Here comes the Big Bad.”
To be honest, maybe we were being a bit experimental. We were all tired of running that same scenario. You can only say, “It’s the worst thing ever!” so many times without feeling like you’re just the biggest liar in the world. We needed a break, so we just structured the whole season differently than anything we’d ever done. I just enjoyed that. It was like, oh God, we’re faking left and then it’s going to be Willow and people may intuit that. But even so, it’s just so refreshing not to have to keep saying, “Here comes the apocalypse. Fishes are going to fall from the sky and there’s gonna be blood in your bathtub, and boy, it’s never been worse than this.” It was very nice to not have to ramp up for a whole season.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
Joss had the idea of how it happened and he knew that that was going to incite Willow to go all Dark Phoenix. I’ll never forget. He said, “Listen, I’ve got this one scene in my mind. It’s kind of in the coda of the episode. She’s in her room; Tara’s talking to Willow. There’s a gunshot from outside, and Willow’s splattered with blood. Tara’s last words are, ‘Your shirt,’ and then she dies.” I’m thinking, “Holy shit, that’s brilliant. That’s awful … and brilliant … and tragic.” Joss would have those cornerstone ideas and a lot of great detail. Then he would rely on his writers to kick it around, flesh it out, pitch it to him. Then he would make adjustments. That’s really the way it worked. Joss almost always had the big idea.
DAVID FURY
Clearly people were upset about a beloved character, Tara, being killed. Absolutely. Especially when it’s a romantic character. If it had been Angel who had died during the height of the Buffy-Angel thing, that would have been a controversy. But the real controversy was that Joss had provided the world with this wonderful, sweet, and romantic lesbian relationship and killed one of the couple. It’s frustrating, because you should be able to kill whoever you want, but unfortunately people read so much into it. Or so much into the fact that, “Oh, you had to kill the lesbian.” I’m like, “My God, we killed everybody.” We killed so many people on this show, why not the lesbian? Because that’s heartbreaking. It needs to happen so Willow can be sent to the dark side. It just made sense story-wise. People are very sensitive about it. They’re sensitive when a character of color dies. Well, no, anybody can die. And hopefully we’ll get to that point where people don’t get so bent out of shape, because we’re not looking for symbolism in everything; we’re just looking for characters we love, of different diverse races or genders or anything else, and we’re not going to make a political point of, “Oh, you killed the gay person.”
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
It’s a touchy thing when you kill a character, especially if it’s gay, lesbian, trans, or a prominent non-Caucasian character. It can cause a lot of pain, so you have to approach it very, very carefully. Even if you approach it carefully, and reflectively, and with love and understanding, there’s still going to be people that are upset. I remember in Spartacus, when we killed Oenomaus, played by Peter Mensah, a couple of people on Twitter said I was racist, because I killed the black character. I’m like, “Wait a minute, to start with, Oenomaus historically died sooner than when I killed him and, historically, was white.”
DAVID FURY
Joss never apologized for anything. He says this is the story I’m telling. Tara doesn’t die because she’s a lesbian; Tara dies because it will break our hearts—and that’s what he’s looking to do. And so nobody should apologize. The fact of the matter is, if that’s where the story needs to go, that’s where the story needs to go. Stop looking for these characters to be symbols of something. They’re just people. And never apologize for it.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
I loved that ultimately the Big Bad was from inside and not an external force. I loved the idea that it was Xander’s love and friendship for Willow that brought her back. It also spoke to all of us that grew up reading comics, the whole Dark Phoenix saga in the X-Men. I just really, really loved that whole thing and the fantastic way that he had hinted at this darkness in Willow when the vampire Willow came over in “The Wish.” It didn’t come out of the blue. You saw hints of it in other episodes that she had this capacity to be this very dark person.
SARAH LEMELMAN
The viewer gets a glimpse into Willow’s “evil” persona in the episodes “The Wish” and “Doppelgangland” when Willow is shown as a vampire from another reality. Vampire Willow is very telling, in that she is sure of herself and confident in her sexuality. She wears tight, black leather clothes, with a plunging neckline, and bright red lipstick. In “Doppelgangland,” the two Willows are contrasted to such an extreme. The lovable “real” Willow is forced by Principal Snyder to tutor a star basketball player and says to her, “I know how you enjoy teaching … I know you want to help your school out here. I just know.” As Willow is complaining to Buffy that the principle is a bully, Giles enters the room, declaring, “Willow. Get on the computer. I want you to take another pass at accessing the mayor’s files,” and with no objection, she follows Giles’s orders.
While Willow is shown as a doormat for other people to walk all over, vampire Willow is the exact opposite. When the basketball star mistakes the vampire Willow for the real Willow, he says to her, “You’re supposed to be at home doing my history report. I flunk that class, you’re in big trouble with Snyder. Till we graduate, I own your ass.” Not standing for his insolence, she grabs him by the neck and throws him across the room, causing the “stud” to run away in fear.
Not only is vampire Willow cool and collected, but she is also highly sexualized, prompting Willow to describe her as “horrible,” “evil,” “skanky,” and “kinda gay.” At this time in the show, she does not understand the implications of her double, but less than a year after their meeting, Willow begins her expedition of identification when she meets Tara.
JOSE MOLINA
Willow was pretty much unrecognizable by the end of the show. It’s interesting, because that arc really kicked into high gear when Marti took over. Marti had something to say about addiction that was important to her and she found a way of talking about addiction through Willow and also, you know, about abusive relationships with Buffy and Spike. So most of that I think is in season six and that’s more of a reflection of Marti really being given ownership over the show.
MARTI NOXON
When I first started, I was doing a lot more writing and a lot less producing. So I loved it when I got to write a script; that’s my first love. But because you do so much more, you’ve got to stop once in a while and say, “Wait a minute, I’m a writer.” I love all this other stuff, but that’s what I am first and foremost. That’s the thing—you don’t want to go too far from your primary purpose.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
There’s no way she ruined Buffy. I look at that season and there are great episodes. I love the arc of where it goes. Joss was in and out. I’ve got to be honest, even with Angel, it was run by somebody else because Joss couldn’t physically be there, but he’s always there. I remember when I was on Angel, literally going to the set of Serenity to talk to Joss about an episode and get notes. Even if he’s not there, he’s there to some extent.
DAVID FURY
Season six was a tricky season and it’s the one Joss envisioned that if Buffy did come back, she would not be the same. She will have been lifted out of heaven. That’s what he had come to early on so that she would be in this horrible teenage funk. That’s kind of what we did and people got very turned off of the show. They said it lost all the fun; they blamed Marti for it, which was incredibly unfair. Marti does like to go to the angst part. She brings the emotional end to the stories that make them so great as well. But when that’s all we were doing virtually, it wasn’t all hijinks with some emotion. It was just very heavy with ennui and Marti took the brunt of it. To her credit, she embraced it. She fell on her sword and said, “Yep, it’s me. I ruined Buffy.”
JAMES MARSTERS
Oh my God, no! Joss needed someone with as much courage as he had and found that person in Marti Noxon. She is fearless as a storyteller. She can take you to those dark places and then she can make it pay off. She didn’t destroy Buffy at all … at all. You know, when you affect people, when you touch them in places that they didn’t plan to get touched, it can get a bit touchy [laughs]. They can get a little bit defensive. I often think when fans react that way, it may mean that they’re actually doing it very well. Joss once said, “I’m not here to please the audience. I just give them something I think that they need and that’s not always about wrapping everything up with a bow.”
DAVID FURY
Joss hadn’t intended on coming back in season six as he eventually did. As far as I recall, he turned the show over to Marti. He really did not want to come back as a show runner per se, but eventually he wound up doing it because we all knew it was his show; it’s his vision. That doesn’t take away from what Marti brought to the show and was able to do. She manned the ship fantastically. But ultimately Joss just needed the break. And, of course, his break was to go write a musical Buffy.
Regardless of how anyone ultimately felt about the season, there’s one episode that is clearly a towering achievement for the series that continues to be feted and discussed to this day and is a contemporary television classic. That episode, of course, is the beloved musical episode, “Once More, with Feeling.” Brilliantly written (songs as well as script) and directed by Whedon, the episode features the cast breaking into tunes while telling the pivotal and tragic story of Buffy’s being ripped out of heaven when Willow’s spell resurrected her—all in the guise of a candy-colored MGM musical … with singing demons, vampires, and Slayers, along with an unhealthy fear of bunnies.
SARAH LEMELMAN
This episode brings a demon to Sunnydale who causes its citizens to break out into song about their inner troubles and anxieties. It comes at a time when the Scoobies are transitioning to adulthood and highlights this fact, as the audience is able to hear all the characters’ secrets. The episode itself was originally broadcast for sixty-eight minutes—breaking from the series’ normal sixty-minute time slot. Once again, Whedon took a stab at something he had never done before, and may not have gotten the recognition the episode deserved, but his work nevertheless left its mark, as television in the later 2000s saw a rise in musical episodes, including in the popular Grey’s Anatomy and Scrubs.
DAVID FURY
We knew he was writing the musical and I remember we were probably into the third episode when he came back with the DVD of him and his wife Kai singing on a demo of all the music from the musical and he had the script and we all sat around in a circle reading the script out loud, and then when we’d get to a song we’d put on the DVD and put the song on. We were just blown away. We could not believe that Joss had only taught himself piano a year or so earlier and that he’d written these great songs and we were just staring at each other. Joss was anxious to get into preproduction on the musical and that sort of took over.
JAMES MARSTERS
We used to have these great parties after Joss’s Shakespeare readings at his house and we got to know each other really well.
AMY ACKER
(actress, Fred, Angel)
The Shakespeare readings were a blast. Everybody had a part. Joss would always have a huge, amazingly beautiful, delicious spread of food and he would do readings. A lot of time he had his brother or someone over who also did the music. They’d thrown some little songs together that would accompany the play. Afterward, it evolved to these little dance parties. It was the most wonderful way to spend a Sunday. I’ve never heard of another show runner doing it. I guess it helps we were all a little nerdy.
JAMES MARSTERS
I brought my guitar and started playing, because if you’re at a party and play guitar, you know, you might as well bring it. After a couple times doing that, Joss started playing piano and other people started bringing their instruments and it became a party/music-making event. At one point Joss said that’s where he thought up the idea for a musical, because he realized enough people in the cast could sing.
JOSS WHEDON
Before my dad wrote television, he wrote off-Broadway musicals. My mom had a framed telegram from Moss Hart saying he had a new show coming up and he wanted her to audition for it. And that was a beautiful, perfect little thing for her, and in a way it was like her way of telling us, “I had you three so I don’t get to do that!” At Radcliffe, everybody was acting and doing little theatricals, and she directed stuff and starred in it at school or at summer stock or at the Dennis Playhouse, which is one of my earliest memories in Cape Cod for my whole childhood.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
Joss is incredibly funny and quick-witted. I have seldom met anyone that had such a quick wit. Really, I can’t even describe how funny Joss is and all of the ideas that just pour out. I’m sure everybody has a “Joss Whedon is brilliant” story, but when I first came in, I know he was learning how to play the piano. I heard rumors, “Oh, yeah, he’s learning how to play the piano because he wants to do a musical episode.” Then the next year he disappeared to the East Coast for a week or two. After a couple of weeks, we all get a package that’s a script and a CD. He had written a musical script in that period of time along with the songs and recorded them with his wife.
JOSS WHEDON
There is a heightened state, particularly in a song in a musical, where if the musical is being done right, this is the moment where it all comes out; this is where everything is building to, and you have this perfect state where not only is somebody articulating who they are and what they need, but it rhymes. Like, it is absolutely this pristine, very structured thing. Everything I do is about that structure and about that moment of somebody going, this is the best version of me that I can explain. You’re always trying to hit that feeling, whether it’s sad, happy, or scary, whatever that feeling you get when a musical number is in that moment where you’re trying to hit those peaks all the time in conversation.
MARTI NOXON
What can you say about old Genius Head? There was a tremendous amount of work and love put into that episode. Joss is a huge musical fan. He spent the majority of the summer writing the music and figuring out exactly how it was going to work. It took a lot more time and a lot more production value than a usual episode but [was] well worth it. It was almost like a vacation for everybody. Joss obviously conceived it and was the mastermind behind all of it creatively, but all of us got into the act one way or the other. Some of us quite literally.
JAMES MARSTERS
I was comfortable singing publicly; I was already doing it in clubs around Los Angeles. Tony [Head] had already come out with an album, so we were comfortable singing, but a lot of the other cast members rightly said to Joss, “You hired me to be a one-camera comedic-dramatic actor. That’s my wheelhouse and we’re succeeding here, and now you’re asking me to do something that I’m not trained for and you’re going to ask the audience to be entertained by that? Like, please, no!” I think one actor actually went to Joss and begged to juggle live chainsaws rather than sing, because that would be probably safer for their career than singing.
DAVID FURY
Everybody was excited about the idea, especially the actors who sang. The ones who couldn’t Joss assured them they weren’t going to look bad: “We’re going to record these things and you’re going to do fine.” I think Aly [Hannigan] and Michelle were probably the most nervous. Sarah, as uneasy as she was initially, rose to the occasion beautifully. She loved dancing, she loved learning the choreography, and she thought she couldn’t sing, but I think ultimately what she was able to do was great. There was some anxiety about it. Nobody said I’m not doing it; no one had a hissy fit about it. It was just definitely out of some people’s comfort zones. Aly and Michelle were nervous but were given limited things to sing. Joss really protected them. He said, “I’m not going to make you sing huge songs. Just sing a line here, sing a line there.” They got very excited once we were doing it. It was all very exiting. There was a lot of energy and buzz around the whole experience.
MARTI NOXON
Everybody felt really energized by it, because they got to do different things and the actors were all really excited. People were going to music lessons, rehearsals, and it was like putting on a show in the barn—only this was a really big barn and there was a $2 million budget. We were all awestruck by the end results. It was a culmination of years and years of stuff that Joss had wanted to do. He’s very lucky that he gets to make it happen, and we’re very lucky we get to see the end result. Most musical episodes on television are a little more gimmicky than this and don’t necessarily move the story forward in a huge way. But this was so important in terms of the season.
JAMES MARSTERS
I thought Joss had gone crazy. I thought that he was absolutely jumping the shark. That he was taking a perfectly good show and just flushing it down the toilet. I mean, it’s one thing to watch “Once More, with Feeling” because when you watch it it’s just obviously a success and amazing and the music is fabulous. But if you just get the script and you haven’t done it yet, it’s a big risk.
I think the reason I have such fond memories about “Once More, with Feeling” is that, after a few days of complaining and fear, the cast realized that we were not going to talk Joss out of it and we stopped being so fearful, and we stopped whining, and we got to work. And suddenly people were hiring vocal coaches and dance instructors with their own money. Rehearsing in between scenes—this is the episode before we started filming “Once More, with Feeling.” And we got to work. In the face of certain doom … guaranteed failure … we decided that we would go down swinging and try our best.
We knew we would fail, but we decided to try our best anyway. I was never more proud of us as a company. And then of course Joss edited the first scene that we shot and showed it to us … wheeled out a TV onto the soundstage … and we crowded around it, and it was brilliant! It was the Xander-Anya dance scene, and it was fabulous. We suddenly realized this thing could actually work. And then from that moment on, we were just flying high. Until the final scene when Hinton Battle came to town. Hinton played Sweet, the villain of the piece. Hinton is a Tony Award–winning Broadway musical stage actor. That man has chops. The Buffy cast was just standing in the Bronze staring up at Hinton doing his thing up onstage and realizing, “Oh, that’s how you do it … we’re screwed. Like, we can’t do that.” But luckily through the magic of editing, it all came together.
DAVID FURY
The story is so sound, which is the great part. It’s one thing to do a musical episode, and a lot of shows have done it, but they do it as a lark. They do it as a goofy thing, but the songs in the Buffy musical and the story are so rich in meaning and emotion. The fact that this is the way Joss wanted to exposit where Buffy had been after she died and the reasons she’s being the way she is. Getting under the skin of all these characters in the form of the musical … made it so much of a magnificent accomplishment. It was not just, OK, our characters can sing; they sing some songs, and we go back to some silly plot. It was very emotional. It’s one of those episodes that makes you cry. It makes me cry when I think about it. It was so beautiful and so well done.
DAVID GREENWALT
(executive producer/cocreator, Angel)
Here’s the thing that’ll really just make you want to quit being a writer. Joss, when I met him, had a keyboard in the office and he did like a few chords. He piddled around on the piano a little bit. He certainly was no musician. The summer before the musical, he went to Cape Cod, where he and [his] then wife Kai had a home, and Tim and I and some of the writers went back there and Joss spent about six or eight weeks working on these songs. He’s playing us these songs that are just incredible and then everybody had to sing and dance—even the ones that were shy about singing and dancing. He came up with this great episode, this amazing music. I frankly think it’s better than most stuff that’s been on Broadway.
JAMES MARSTERS
It was brilliant. It was absolutely wonderful. Everybody was just flying and smiles all over. There is something about music that just taps into emotions more directly than words. I often feel like words have to be processed by the intellect and then accepted or not accepted by the heart. But music bypasses the intellect completely and goes right into the heart. We’d be acting the scene and the time would come for the song. Joss would hit playback, and the big speakers would roar up and this beautiful music would come out and you’d lip-synch, but you’d feel like you were singing, and we were able to go to emotional places that you couldn’t just doing dialogue. When a musical is designed, there is a point where the characters can’t talk about it anymore. In order to express what they really want to express, they have to sing about it, so it jumps up a level. Then Joss, of course, puts that on its head, and he had people singing things they really should shut up about.
DAVID GREENWALT
I used to go when he was directing it with my then wife and we’d just watch it. It would be Friday night till midnight or two, and it was so beautiful to watch the making of that episode. And then his assistant forgot to enter it in the Emmy nominations, which is a pity because it certainly would’ve won something.
DAVID FURY
One thing I knew after I heard it was I wanted very much to film the making of it. I want to be behind the scenes, because I thought this is significant and really special, which Joss allowed me to do. By doing that, I wasn’t around as much as I probably should have been since Marti needed help, but I got caught up in the musical and wound up going to all the recordings and filming everyone as they were doing all their voice tracks and doing the shooting. It’s on the Buffy DVD behind the scenes. It was just me and my little camcorder interviewing everybody, asking them to talk about what the experience was like. It was really neat and great to do. But it put me in a weird place when I came back into the room after all this; I felt I’d been away forever. I feel badly I didn’t help Marti as much as I should have. But she never complained to me or asked me to stop doing it. She held down the fort and got things done just perfectly without me.
JOSS WHEDON
It was an actual musical where people not only break into song, but they break into songs that I write that are about the story. It’s not one of those, “We do a scene, then we do a Motown hit that vaguely fits the scene.” It’s actually song-driven storytelling that was very connected to the season, because it deals with emotion. I actually think of it as a sequel to “Hush,” because singing is like being quiet. You say the things you wouldn’t otherwise say. So a lot of the emotions were building over the first few episodes of the season, and then they burst out, literally, in song.
MARTI NOXON
We wanted to do something good and spooky. It was about following the repercussions of what they’d done. There had to be continuing repercussions from what had happened. Obviously, that one has the great scene at the end with the revelation that she had been in a nice place. It was a continuation of the same idea, that you don’t get to come back from the dead without some heavy tariffs.
DAVID GREENWALT
I don’t know any other executive producer who would be working that hard in year six. Joss would find something that would challenge him, that would actually frighten him a little. “Can I do an episode with no music? Can I do an episode with no dialogue? Can I do an honest-to-God musical and write all the songs?” Him challenging himself like that fired us all up on all of the shows. There was no phoning it in allowed around there; no resting on your laurels. Then our excitement kind of fed him and it was a nice little circle. If people were reading Shakespeare at his house on Sundays, he got me writing songs again, which I hadn’t done in twenty years. It was all like a little renaissance. A very exciting place to be.
RAYMOND STELLA
(director of photography, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
It was just the show with a little more of a flair. If I was outside, I would make it a little brighter, make it feel a little more dreamy. Adam Shankman was the choreographer, because there’s a lot of singing and dancing. Shankman was the director on the Mystery Girl thing that I did in San Diego. Gay as a three-dollar bill. Not that there is anything wrong with that.
KEVIN LEVY
The musical episode was a big deal for us. We did have a party for the musical episode. I remember we screened it on the Paramount lot in that big theater that they have, and we invited a lot of the cast. That was the first time any of us had seen the final cut of it. It was great. It’s just amazing to see that years later people still do all those sing-alongs.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
His musical talent is vast. You can see his love of music and musical theater just shining through in that and Dr. Horrible. I long for another Joss Whedon musical, because I think he’s so damn good at it.
DAVID GREENWALT
We all went and watched it. It was just amazing. Joss went from knowing five chords when we met to writing that episode in five or six years. That’s a talent that’s not visited on everybody. You combine that with the hard work ethic and you can’t go wrong.
JAMES MARSTERS
By the time we got to “Tabula Rasa,” which was the one after the musical, we were like, “Oh, this sucks. There’s no music! It’s boring.” And in fact, “Tabula Rasa” was one of the most delightful, where we all lost our identities and it was complete farce.
MARTI NOXON
It was Joss’s notion that they all lose their memory. I thought that was just brilliant, because that way we can have a fun, lighthearted episode and then in the end, you know, reality comes crashing back. And it’s not good. So, that was really the goal there; to do something where we knew there were going to be repercussions, but we also knew wasn’t going to be so serious and sad. And we found a way with Big Genius Head’s help. I was really into that one. You know, we got to really poke fun at ourselves. It was farcical and turned out really well.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
I love humor. One of the biggest things I loved [about] working on Buffy was just what Joss had set up. That you could have a deeply serious scene and somebody can say something funny, like in real life. It was never one or the other. The show does have so much great, great funny dialogue. I was surrounded by incredibly funny writers. David Fury, Jane Espenson’s hysterical, Doug Petrie—just everybody was so much fun. In that sixth season, Drew Greenberg joined us, who was also just absolutely delightful.
MARTI NOXON
I would have done things differently if I had to do things again. But at the same time, overall I felt like it still was compelling. It may have made you mad or nervous or frustrated, but it was always interesting. We also had some really lovely episodes in there. I was just invested in the whole Spike-Buffy thing and the whole Willow thing. Those story lines really worked for me. I don’t know how we could have done another “Here comes the Big Bad.” We’d done it so many times and very successfully, but I just feel like you had to shake it up and that was probably what was going on. Joss was just interested in trying some new stuff and we were all for it. Season seven might not have been as successful if we hadn’t had season six. We needed to do some downbeats in order to get back to doing the show with the same enthusiasm.