I Need to Talk About Buffy

Missing: Found Family

With friends like these, well, you’ll still die a tragic death

I’ve been working on two posts this week, but they’ve both been put on the back-burner because I need to complain for a hot minute. Quick warning: this piece is going to spoil a whole bunch of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

If you’ve never seen Buffy, it’s a coming-of-age story about a slayer and her friends fighting vampires and other assorted demonic baddies. Full disclosure, I’m an absolute sucker for a monster/villain of the week type show. Doctor Who, Supernatural (embarrassingly), and X Files are some of my favourite TV shows of all time. And up until season five, I was going to include Buffy as the best of them.

At its strongest, this show is a story about the value of friendship and found family. For four seasons, Buffy continuously drives home two ideas:

1. Family is made. Your family are the people around you that you can rely on and turn to in times of trouble. Quite literally it’s the friends you make along the way.

2. Buffy is nothing without her friends. The thing that separates her from slayers of the past is that she is not alone. Buffy isn’t doomed to die young like previous slayers because she has a support system.

Season five throws these ideas out the window and into the Hellmouth. I could live with a bad season of television. I’ve done it before. Just pretend like it’s a four season series. When I rewatch Community, I stop at season three and treat it as a series finale. The difference here is that everyone agrees with me about Community. But last night, I finished season five of Buffy and I hopped online to look for how the fans dealt with the disappointment. Reader, you can imagine my devastation when I discovered that season five is considered one of the best, if not the best, season of the show.

On some level, I can understand the love. The writing is solid and the acting is fantastic. But, to me at least, writing and acting quality come second to the exploration of a show’s themes and core ideas — something season five joyfully abandons.

The main arc of the season consists of Buffy and her sister, Dawn. In simplest terms, Dawn is a sort of MacGuffin. Monks created her out of a ball of energy at the beginning of the fifth season to protect that energy. They added her to Buffy’s family as a little sister, creating memories in all the characters to make them think she’s been around forever. The characters protect Dawn from the season’s Big Bad, Glory, who wants to use the energy to end the world or whatever.

In previous seasons, whenever Buffy gets too defeated or overwhelmed, she can fall back on her friends for help. Together, they support each other and take some of the weight of the world off of Buffy’s shoulders.

In season five, Buffy gets beat down episode after episode with no relief. At their best, her friends can’t help her, and at worst they’re nowhere to be found. The writers took her found family and replaced them with given family.

By the season’s end, Buffy’s mother is dead and Dawn has been taken by Glory to be used in some apocalyptic ritual. This leaves Buffy with only her friends to rely on. Throughout the show’s run, Giles acted as a pseudo father figure to the entire group, but especially to Buffy. As her watcher, his responsibility was to protect the world above all else, but he came to realize that his love for these kids outweighed his responsibilities as a watcher. In fact, he’s fired from the job when he intercedes in a test designed to challenge Buffy in order to save her life.

But by the end of this season, Giles discovers that the only way to stop the apocalypse ritual is to kill Dawn. He coldly tells Buffy that she may have to kill her sister for the greater good. Buffy, of course, balks at this, and by the episode’s end when they go to rescue Dawn, Buffy tells her friends, the people who have been her family, that she’ll kill any of them that get near Dawn to stop the ritual.

By the finale, the ritual has begun and Buffy realizes that she can stop the apocalypse by killing herself instead of Dawn. She saves the world by jumping to her death. The episode ends with her friends reeling from this and we close on a shot of her grave.

This whole storyline is antithetical to the show. After four seasons of building up these central themes, they all come to nothing. Buffy’s friends can’t help her, and the man who has been her father betrays her by suggesting the unthinkable and destroying his character arc in the process. In the end, Buffy is just like any other slayer. Her friends make no difference. She dies young and violently. And the idea that found family can be just as important as given family? That comes to nothing. Buffy flat out states she will kill them rather than let her sister — a family member literally forced upon her — die.

This is not what Buffy is about. Her friends would never suggest killing Dawn, and she’d never suggest killing her friends. In any previous season, they’d all let the world end first. The weakness of previous slayers was that they were isolated — they had no loved ones. All they did was kill and die. And in the end, that’s all Buffy did.

There are two more seasons to watch. I read the synopsis of all the episodes to see if it gets any better, but it only seems to get worse. Main characters die, no one gets to be happy. It’s a grim-dark heel turn that the Angel spinoff was supposed to get out of Joss Whedon’s system.

I don’t care how well acted or written these episodes are. I watched Buffy because I fell in love with this found family. But in the end, it all came to nothing. The show’s thesis changed. Family can’t be chosen, friends don’t matter. Everyone dies and the only ones that are there for you are blood relations. Suitable, I guess, for a show about vampires.