Ranking the Buffyverse
i've completely lost my mind
Hey! This post is absurdly long! Like, horribly, disgustingly long! There is little-to-no excuse for it! You do not have to read this at all! Of course, this is my newsletter, so I’ll post what I want to, but please by no means should you feel obligated to read this ridiculously-long, needlessly-in-depth piece! If anything, this is more like a therapy session about these shows and it’s completely and totally for myself and nobody else! But hey— if you do want to read this, go for it! I’m still really proud of it!
Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a television show that ran from 1997 to 2003. It centered around the titular Buffy Summers, a teenage girl who was called by destiny to slay vampires and demons, and her erstwhile group of supportive friends as they made the journey into adulthood. Angel, a spin-off that began in 1999, focused on Buffy’s ex-boyfriend and vampire with a soul, Angel, as he moved to LA and became a private investigator for people suffering from paranormal dilemmas. Along the way, both shows shattered expectations, broke nearly every single rule in the hour-long TV drama playbook, and explored themes of choice, identity, redemption, and trauma in profound and complex ways that anyone who wrote Buffy off because of its silly-by-design title would have missed out on.
I would genuinely rather get run over by a truck than write an intro to this piece, but formalities are formalities, and there are some things I do want to address (and it’s my newsletter, so ha). First of all, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is my favorite TV show of all time, with little meaningful competition, and Angel is right up there (although, in my opinion, it’s difficult to separate Buffy and Angel and I tend to think of them as one big show in my mind). It has some of my favorite writing I’ve ever seen in a television show— not because the writing is flawless, which it really, really isn’t, but because there are vanishingly few shows that make me feel as though the characters are as real as the characters feel on Buffy. The most frustrating decisions they make are frustrating because the characters feel so authentic and lived-in, so you understand exactly why they do what they do, and that’s the case for even the most loathsome of them. (Obviously, the performances of an excellent cast also play a huge role here.)
I’m not alone in thinking this; the sheer amount of college courses dedicated to analyzing Buffy on every textual, meta-textual, and meta-meta-textual level possible speak to that. For as thorny and poorly-aged as many of the show’s aspects have revealed themselves to be in the years since it first aired, there’s still a raw, beating heart and clear sophistication and complexity to it that makes it hard to separate what makes the show good from what holds it back from perfection. It is a flawed masterpiece, but those flaws are what makes it a masterpiece.
So for as important as Buffy is to me— and for as brilliant as I think its blend of existentialist philosophy, Jungian psychology, intricate metaphor, tight plotting, and wonderful character work is— I completely understand why someone would take umbrage with my championing of it. It has problems. Much of the feminism it was lauded for when it debuted has degraded, not just because our discussion of feminism has evolved over time, but because the moments where it tackles sexism most overtly have become ugly, unsubtle sledgehammers. It practically invented the “Bury Your Gays” trope in the same breath as it pioneered queer representation on television. It is undoubtedly far less racially diverse than it should be.
There’s no excuse for any of these, nor the show’s myriad other issues. I actually think that one of my favorite things about Buffy’s robust and often academic fanbase (which is still very active, speaking to the show’s enduring relevance) is that all of these things are critiqued ruthlessly. Buffy is a show that inspires us to be our best selves possible, and that innate quality is what inspires its fans to hold it to such a high standard and interrogate its flaws far beyond the base level of acceptability that we often ascribe to late-90s/early-00s entertainment. It’s still better than almost anything on TV before or since, and that’s why we give no quarter to the moments where Buffy (and Angel) stumbles.
But we can’t say the same for Joss Whedon, a man who has become something of an avatar for everything wrong with contemporary pop culture. He’s one of the people who brought geekdom out of the shadows of counterculture into the limelight— in searching for a succinct phrase to describe this phenomenon, you could say he is the bridge from Kevin Smith to Kevin Feige (if any sentence could make you nauseous, it’s probably that one). He’s also the person who has done the most to ruin it. Twitter is quick to condemn “Whedon dialogue,” that self-serving, clumsily self-aware and unbearably quippy style of speaking that has contributed to making so much of modern blockbusters (particularly the ones that come out of the MCU sludge factory) exhaustingly same-y and heartless.
That isn’t even to mention his atrocious professional conduct, which Buffy and Angel star Charisma Carpenter recently hammered home in the wake of Ray Fisher’s open criticism of his terrible behavior on the set of Justice League. Whedon’s name has become shorthand for “male feminist”— a man who claims to be progressive and anti-sexist, but uses those credentials to further his own career while simultaneously using that veneer to mask or even excuse his entitled, noxious behavior.
There’s no question in my mind that Whedon was once talented. But contrast his career arc with his friend and contemporary James Gunn. Gunn started out writing gloriously sick horror-comedies like Tromeo & Juliet, wrote the criminally-underrated 2002 live-action adaptation of Scooby-Doo (which, reportedly, an R-rated and more explicitly subversive cut exists of), began his transition into the mainstream with the wonderful, underrated B-movie Slither, and recently did the impossible by (sort of) undoing the unmitigated disaster of Suicide Squad with his genre-roulette, kaiju-horror-hidden-inside-character-driven-comedy-hidden-inside-superhero-movie take on The Suicide Squad. Gunn went from outsider to mainstream by adapting and evolving his sensibilities without sacrificing them. (Although, I’m sure, there’s plenty you could critique Gunn for as well.)
Whedon started out with that same wild-eyed approach to genre-mixing. After working on scripts for movies like Speed, Toy Story, and the ill-fated Alien: Resurrection, he achieved fame by reworking the disaster of the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer film into a show that masterfully integrated elements of horror, action, extremely intricate comic dialogue, and teen-soap romance with endearingly real and vital characters, and kept that train rolling with the slightly darker and more outwardly mature Angel. I was admittedly never a fan of Firefly (perhaps because the connection between Western and space opera had already been made explicit, and done better by shows like Cowboy Bebop), but Cabin In the Woods— Whedon’s collaboration with frequent late-era Buffy and Angel writer Drew Goddard, which didn’t come out until 2012 despite being completely finished in 2009— remains one of the smartest and most ambitious meta-horror films ever made.
But after signing onto the MCU and helming The Avengers (a movie that hasn’t aged all that gracefully, and whose sloppy character work extended into the much-more-poorly-aged sequel, Age of Ultron), he seemed to completely lose what made his material special in the first place, becoming something of a hollow Joss Whedon self-caricature. His script for Wonder Woman is famously laughable and outwardly sexist. He got fired from JUSTICE LEAGUE. Do you know how bad you have to fuck up for DC to give you the axe? They even allowed Zack Snyder some authorial grace.
This clear decline in quality, in combination with his control-freak tendencies and dreadful personal conduct (which had been, basically, an open secret in the industry, up to and including his ex-wife Kai Cole’s open letter about his frequent infidelity), have put a huge stall on his career, however temporary. He left his newest show, The Nevers, before it aired, and I don’t know if he has anything in development currently. I honestly don’t really care, but I do hope he’s getting a lot of therapy.
Separating the art from the artist is impossible, and even if Whedon had disappeared into the ether after the completion of Cabin In the Woods, we’d still have to deal with the legacy of his treatment of members of the cast of his shows, not to mention the fact that his deep-seated issues seeped, sometimes quite blatantly, into his writing for Buffy and Angel. But the other reason I can’t just dismiss his contributions to those shows is because he’s also a huge part of what made them so great. Episodes that he wrote and directed are universally considered to be among the best in the shows’ histories. He had final say over everything that was onscreen. Other essential writers— fan favorites like David Fury, Douglas Petrie, Marti Noxon, and Jane Espenson— have gone on record to say he obsessively tinkered with and rewrote basically every script and that “If you like a good line, chances are likely that Joss wrote it.” He understood the characters better than any other writer, and the deep emotional truths that so many of Buffy’s best moments thrived on came straight from him.
So that is the baggage that comes with being a fan of Buffy and Angel. It’s irresponsible to talk about how much we deeply, obsessively love these shows without talking about Whedon’s myriad faults as a human; the irony is that one of Buffy’s most enduring messages is that humans are inherently deeply flawed, and it’s the actions we take once we realize those faults that define us. Just to be clear-- by no means do I want to take the shitty things Joss Whedon has done and make it about me, and how much it sucks when someone who made a work of art that impacted you deeply turns out to be a shitheel. There’s a million other places you can read about that, and everyone has their own way of making peace with the limitless fallibility of their favorite artists. I just wanted to do my due diligence and make sure that I address something that would, understandably, hold a lot of people back from delving into these shows.
But that still doesn’t change the fact that I love Buffy and Angel so much. They are shows with so much importance and resonance in my life that it’s impossible to imagine I’d be anywhere near the same person without it. The story and central metaphor of Buffy is about the universal trial of growing up. Angel’s central story and metaphor— about being an addict in recovery— is slightly more insular and slightly less universal, but its overarching themes of self-improvement and finding the potential within ourselves for redemption are just as essential. So for as much as I was dreading this part, I think it was absolutely vital so that we have a clear understanding going forward (and so I wouldn’t have to qualify my statements every time I talked about a Whedon-penned/directed episode).
In this piece, I will be ranking the twelve seasons of the Buffyverse— the seven seasons of Buffy and the five seasons of Angel. I will not be including the comics because I didn’t really enjoy them, I stopped reading them sometime during Season Eight, and they’re far from necessary to engage with if you’re looking to get into both or either show. As I said earlier, Buffy and Angel are flawed masterpieces, and they are masterpieces because they are flawed— the best season of either is still marred by imperfections, but at the same time, the worst episodes of both still have moments worth watching.
I could literally talk for hours and hours and hours about these shows, and I anticipate that this will not be the last time I will discuss them (I’m actually thinking about making a longform video essay for Buffy’s 25th anniversary this coming March). If you’re not a fan already, hopefully what I say here will convince you to at least give the show a try, and if you are a fan, hopefully you can appreciate the things I have to say here. If you’re a regular reader of this newsletter and are bummed that it’s not about music, my sincerest apologies, but I needed to get this off my chest because I’d planned to write this last year but got caught up in other stuff.
So here’s the part where I make a choice.
Angel, season 4
Angel was a show that thrived, at its best, when it was shaking up the status quo, never satisfied with letting its incredible ensemble cast settle into a groove for too long. The fourth season of Angel is basically one long rut, and even when it tried to make huge changes, they rang hollow. In fairness, it must have been really difficult both behind the scenes and on camera to deal with the colossal fallout and huge ramifications of the third season finale.
David Greenwalt, who co-created both the show and Angel as a character, and served as showrunner for the first three seasons, left to pursue other ventures. While Angel season 4 was airing, Whedon was both trying to guide the seventh season of Buffy to a satisfying conclusion and had also just created Firefly (it’s also worth noting that Firefly’s showrunner was Tim Minear, one of Angel’s most-accomplished writers). So since Angel was basically a low priority, without a firm voice steering the ship (despite new showrunner Jeffrey Bell’s best efforts), it was to be expected that this season would feel a bit aimless.
But some of the writing decisions made in this season were just disastrous. The show had no idea how to deal with the characters of Connor and Cordelia, and the latter basically suffered season-length character assassination because of Whedon’s contempt for Charisma Carpenter’s pregnancy. It’s an ugly, exhausting season of television that never really gets off the ground, and the cumulative effect of the season is one of soul-crushing numbness.
HIGHLIGHTS: “Spin the Bottle” was Whedon’s attempt to bring the magic of Buffy’s “Tabula Rasa” to the cast of Angel, and while it’s not as successful as that episode, it has its endearing moments. “Orpheus” succeeds on the back of a phenomenal David Boreanaz performance, a ringer in the form of Willow, and the conclusion of Faith’s arc. And the Tim-Minear-helmed season finale, “Home,” goes a long way towards laying the groundwork for what would become the smartest and most ambitious season of the show.
LOWLIGHTS: Basically everything else. While 45 minutes spent with the cast of Angel is never really a bad time, this is the hardest season of the show to power through, especially when you know that there are some truly transcendent episodes of television right around the corner. That said, the conclusion of “Apocalypse, Nowish” is probably the single most unpleasant moment in either show.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 1
First seasons are hard. The first season of a show as conceptually dense and ambitious as Buffy was bound to be even harder. Without the benefit of knowing and loving the characters, I’ve known many people who have outright quit the show after giving it about four episodes. It’s important to remember that Buffy was based on a flop of a film that got exceptionally lukewarm reviews, it was greenlit as a season replacement, and the first season has like, a quarter of the budget given to later seasons, but even with those caveats, there are some rough bits of the first season of Buffy, and it’s no surprise that many fans advocate for new viewers to skip it altogether and come back later. (It’s also the only season of either show that people would ever consider recommending to skip entirely.)
That being said, like any season of Buffy, there is plenty of material to like here, especially once the show realizes that its lack of SFX budget means they just couldn’t rely on Monster of the Week spectacle and they had to really focus on the budding relationships between the characters to give people a reason to tune in every week. As the show realized one of its greatest strengths was the banter-filled scenes between action- and plot-heavy sequences, it rapidly started to work, more and more, every episode.
Also, while the first season of Buffy is home to none of its scariest episodes, it is nice to see the show working within such an outwardly horror-indebted aesthetic milieu. An important touchstone for the show (which would later be made explicit when the core characters began referring to their group as “The Scooby Gang”) is Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! and that show’s German-expressionist, Gothic backgrounds are all over this season, as is a delightfully campy B-movie creature feature sensibility. The early idea behind the show was, of course, “high school is hell,” and season 1 is where you can best see that metaphor at work on a week-to-week basis.
HIGHLIGHTS: “Angel” is the first time you can see the show working with some real thematic complexity, and provides important developments within the relationships of pretty much every character. And of course, the finale, “Prophecy Girl,” is the first truly great episode of the show, featuring an absolutely bravura performance from Sarah Michelle Gellar.
LOWLIGHTS: “Teacher’s Pet” is a particularly bad offender on the special effects front, but the most thoroughly unlikable episode of Buffy for me is probably “I Robot…You Jane,” which bears the burden of more horrible special effects and sloppy, stupid writing. Perhaps even worse than that, it’s a Willow-centric episode that introduces fan favorite Jenny Calendar, and it’s still terrible.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 7
The seventh season of Buffy is tired, tired, tired. Not only do the actors (particularly Sarah Michelle Gellar, who is noticeably sick during a few episodes) seem completely exhausted, the writing forgoes the structure of past seasons in favor of stretching out eight episodes worth of plot into twenty-two episodes of television. It’s no surprise that many people find the season interminable, and even less of a surprise that the decision to introduce a whole mess of new characters out of nowhere (including a new love interest for Willow in Kennedy, who had the unenviable task of following up two of the best and most-loved characters on Buffy in that regard) rubbed many the wrong way.
But Buffy’s swan song still has quite a lot to like about it. For one thing, like its immediate predecessor, it aired on UPN instead of the show’s home for its first five seasons, the WB, meaning that it could still indulge in some really dark imagery and thematic territory (such as in the genuinely horrifying “Same Time, Same Place” or the introduction of Nathan Fillion as the misogynist priest Caleb). For another, with some distance from some of the more emotionally raw and devastating moments of season 6, there’s some really elegant and delicate character development in this season for both big players like Spike and Willow as well as previously-underserved characters like Anya and Andrew.
While Buffy season 7 definitely isn’t the show at its best— and in a lot of ways, demonstrates why the show was dissipating in popularity— the fact that everyone went into it knowing it was the last season gives it some clarity of purpose that it would otherwise be lacking, which shows up especially in the deeply-underrated first third of the season. While the writers were clearly spinning their wheels a bit for much of the rest of the time, it also admirably screwed up some real oomph for a great series finale (though even that isn’t without its flaws— “That’s my girl, always doing the stupid thing” sticks out to me most egregiously).
HIGHLIGHTS: Early season 7 is home to an excellent three-episode run: “Selfless” is an absolute banger of an Anya episode that begs the question of why there weren’t more of them; “Him” is one of the funniest late-run Buffy episodes; and “Conversations with Dead People” is one of those firing-on-all-cylinders kind of episodes that proves Buffy still had plenty of greatness left within it. Honorable mentions go to “Storyteller,” which went a long way towards humanizing a character that many people were frustrated with, and the finale, “Chosen,” which did the best it could to distill Buffy’s central themes into just one hour of television.
LOWLIGHTS: One of season 7’s biggest drawbacks is probably that at around episode 8 or 9 or so, a huge portion of the season kinda just turns into indistinguishable mush. Remember the episode where Buffy looks grumpy and makes a big speech? Yeah, that’s like eight of these episodes. That being said, there are few moments in the show’s history more frustrating than Buffy getting kicked out of her own fucking house in “Empty Places.”
Angel, season 1
Angel defined itself as a different show from Buffy right off the bat with its much moodier lighting (especially in contrast to the very, very bright Buffy season 4, which Angel aired in tandem with), its more somber tone (the first person Angel tries to save on this show dies halfway through the pilot), and its more episodic structure-- if Buffy was My So-Called Life meets The X-Files, then Angel was a turn-of-the-millennium update on Kolchak: The Night Stalker.
It follows that the biggest issue with Angel’s first season is that it struggles heavily with weak Monster-of-the-Week episodes and a lack of forward momentum. In this regard, it reminds a bit of the first season of Buffy-- struggling to find its feet while also establishing a whole new world and set of character dynamics. But this was, by now, a pretty accomplished team of writers, and by the middle of the season they’d tightened up the screws and started to forgo the freak of the week for a series of mini-arcs that steadily built towards a powerful finale.
But while Angel would eventually end up becoming an even more serialized show than Buffy, there are still some pretty forgettable moments at this juncture in the show’s run. However, it’s telling that even at this early juncture in the list, we’re already examining seasons that stand head-and-shoulders above most anything else on television. The standard for these shows is high.
HIGHLIGHTS: “I Will Remember You” is one of the most tragic episodes in the history of either show; the fact that they broke out such a heartbreaker so early on is testament to the gutsiness of the writing staff. The tears keep flowing in “Hero” and the show finds time to explore classic standbys like the body horror of pregnancy in “Expecting” (which fans of the show reportedly hate, I guess, but I think it’s pretty good) as well as demonic possession and child sociopathy in “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” But the real high point is the two-parter “Five by Five”/”Sanctuary,” which closes out the Faith arc that was started over on Buffy in a beautifully heartfelt and satisfying manner.
LOWLIGHTS: So many boring Monster-of-the-Week episodes. “I Fall to Pieces,” “Sense & Sensitivity,” “She,” and “The Ring” are probably the worst offenders, but “Somnambulist” commits the unforgivable sin of including an appearance from Jeremy Renner. Even episodes that further arcs, like “The Prodigal,” are wasted on boring characters like Angel’s cop friend Kate (who is just not at all fun to watch, and has thankfully mostly disappeared from the show by season 3).
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 4
The fourth season of Buffy occupies a very weird place in the show’s development, and how charitably you view it tends to depend on whether you prefer the teen years of seasons 1-3 or if you gravitate towards the darker and more tumultuous young adult years of season 5-7. If you, like me, enjoy both aspects of the show’s identity, then season 4 is a confused middle ground that does its best with the themes it tries to develop, despite lots of behind-the-scenes difficulties and being saddled with the job of getting Buffy the show and Buffy the character from one side of the hump to the other.
It helps this season’s case that it’s home to an embarrassment of riches in terms of one-off episodes. Many, if not most, of the show’s best-regarded MOTW episodes are right here in this very season. Additionally, the cast’s chemistry is on point, and the writers had hit such a stride that it was very hard to completely fuck up an episode, so every episode at best is hilarious and at worst is still very much watchable. You might have forgotten that this is actually the season where Anya, Tara, and Spike, three of the best characters on the show, become regular fixtures of the Scooby Gang.
But on the other hand… man, the unplanned departures of certain characters really did a number on the season’s overall arc, and the result is really, really sloppy and unsatisfying. Add to that the show’s insistence that we accept (blech) Riley Finn into our hearts, and you start to understand why so many fans seem to think of this season as the beginning of the end for Buffy. (This assertion isn’t helped by the fact that, when the MOTW episodes don’t hit, well, they really don’t hit.)
HIGHLIGHTS: I wasn’t joking when I said this season’s one-off episodes tend to be golden. “Fear, Itself” is the best Halloween episode the show ever did, “Something Blue” and “Superstar” are bar-none two of the funniest, and “Hush” and “Restless” are rightly regarded as two of the most successful experiments in TV history. That’s not even to mention “This Year’s Girl”/”Who Are You?”, arguably the body-switching storyline to end all body-switching storylines. Why are people so down on this season again?
LOWLIGHTS: Oh, right… the arc. While there are very few outright bad episodes this season, the arc-heavy episodes-- specifically “The Initiative,” “The I In Team,” “Goodbye Iowa,” and “Primeval”-- really suffer from the fact that the seasonal arc is just not very well-developed, perhaps in part because the person who was supposed to be the Big Bad had to leave mid-season. This also leads to the arc elements basically spinning their wheels rather than being organically worked into the one-offs, resulting in a season of Buffy that is just far less satisfying, thematically, than we’ve come to expect. Not to mention, ugh, Riley, and the insane amount of focus placed on him. Also, the one-offs that don’t work-- which include my guilty pleasure “Beer Bad” and the truly repugnant “Where the Wild Things Are”-- really don’t work. I also don’t have anything really bad to say about “Wild at Heart” and “New Moon Rising,” but… you have to watch Willow cry, and that always really sucks.
Angel, season 3
I was actually pretty surprised at how well season 3 of Angel holds up on rewatch. This season is packed with ambition and is home to probably the most successful season-long arc in the show’s history as Angel and his supporting cast grapple with huge changes to the world they thought they knew, and although the character of Holtz is sloppily introduced, his extremely compelling motivation and increasingly complex and psychologically torturous revenge plot provide one of the most heartrending payoffs in the show’s history.
And yet. It’s towards the end of this season that you can start to see one of the problems that would end up completely destroying season 4: the plot driving the characters rather than the characters driving the plot. Let me explain-- both Buffy and Angel got a lot of mileage out of putting their characters through the wringer and watching them react as they naturally would to the catastrophic events. But everything that happened, and every character’s reactions, were rooted in who those characters are as people.
In season 3 of Angel, you start to see characters acting in ways that are completely anathema to how they would have behaved previously; in particular, Cordelia begins to suffer from a complete evaporation of her previous personality, and a huge twist at the end of the season rests on a decision made by Wesley that requires a lack of communication between him and the rest of the group that I simply just don’t buy. Additionally, although Fred would rapidly grow to become one of the most beloved characters on the show, the early goings of season 3 are transparently trying really hard to make sure we love her, and it comes off more than a little off-putting on rewatch. It all adds up to a season of Angel that is really consistent, but is starting to show some very real cracks.
HIGHLIGHTS: “That Old Gang of Mine” provides tons of great character development for Gunn in addition to a hate-crime metaphor that rings uncomfortably true in the aftermath of events like the Pulse nightclub shooting. “Fredless” does the same for Fred, and is one of the most emotionally affecting episodes in the show’s run. “Billy” is an exploration of misogyny that stands as one of the most terrifying episodes of television ever made, particularly during its The Shining-inspired climax, and “Lullaby” is a wonderful payoff to multiple plots that have been percolating since the beginning of season 2. The remainder of the season is admittedly remarkably consistent (and “Waiting In the Wings” is haunting, funny, and elegiac in that particular Angel way), but the two episodes that close the season, “Benediction” and “Tomorrow,” are some of the most exceptionally-plotted and emotionally rewarding in the show’s history.
LOWLIGHTS: “Birthday” isn’t a bad episode as such, but it is patient zero for the complete erosion of Cordelia’s character, while “Sleep Tight” does the same for Wesley. Much like season 4 of Buffy, there’s nothing quite bad about any of these episodes, but there is a subtle discomfort to them, particularly on rewatch, as you realize that they’re setting the stage for some real rot later to come.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 2
I might get some heat for this placement, since Buffy season 2 is sometimes regarded as the best season of the show. Admittedly, this is, in my opinion, the moment where the show became transcendent television. While many identify the Age of Prestige Television as having started in 1999 with The Sopranos, I think that’s rooted in a bias against genre television, as Twin Peaks and The X-Files, both of which started in the early 90s, were making enormous strides in complex and ambitious storytelling, blending cinematic techniques with the kind of serialized methods that could only come with television, and I see season 2 of Buffy as making good on its promise and continuing in that lineage.
To be sure, the season arc of this one is nigh-unimpeachable. It sets its stage early on, and rewatches reveal endless foreshadowing, both plot-wise and thematically, for the massive twists that would come late in the season. There are several crescendos throughout season 2 of Buffy, but the finale achieves a level of operatic high drama that makes you understand exactly why this is the season that turned Buffy into a global phenomenon and made it appointment viewing for anyone who was interested in television as an art form. Plus, this is the season that introduces Oz and Spike, so that makes it essential viewing right there.
But I tend to think of this season as kind of an inverse of Buffy’s fourth season in that, while the season arc is incredible on all levels, the standalone episodes reveal that the show had not yet learned how to properly incorporate its serialized elements like it would to great effect in later seasons. Some of these MOTW episodes are every bit as clumsy and ineffective as the worst of the first season, and even worse than that, the late-season standalones function basically as impediments between the stunning highs of the arc-heavy episodes. For as amazing as this season can be at its best, it is still, at the end of the day, an uneven season of television.
HIGHLIGHTS: Granted, there are some really great standalones here. Season opener “When She Was Bad” ably cleans up the beautiful mess of the previous finale, and we get the beginning of the traditional Halloween episodes, plus the introduction of Ethan Rayne, with the terrific “Halloween.” The absolutely devastating “Lie to Me,” the underrated and unnerving “Ted,” and the equal-parts-hilarious-and-horrifying Xander-centric episode “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered” are all winners. But the seasonal arc episodes are where it’s fucking at here. “School Hard” introduces Spike and Drusilla with aplomb, the “What’s My Line?” two-parter is wonderfully cinematic, “Surpise” and “Innocence” are a one-two punch of emotional anguish that cemented Buffy’s place in the pantheon of incredible television, and “Passion” and the two-part season finale “Becoming” ratchet that brutality up to eleven. Buffy finds its voice this season, and it’s incredible to see.
LOWLIGHTS: The bad episodes this season are among the most boring the show ever produced. “Some Assembly Required,” “Inca Mummy Girl,” “Reptile Boy,” and “The Dark Age” are episodes that I straight up occasionally entirely forget the existence of. “Phases” admirably introduces some new character traits in a sloppy and uneven way. “Bad Eggs” is amusing, but regularly shows up on worst-episodes lists for a reason. And there’s a late-season arc interruption of near-pointless standalones that’s nearly unforgivable, including “Killed by Death,” which actually was originally written for the first season, and “Go Fish,” which at least gives us Xander in a Speedo. Also, despite the fandom’s love for “I Only Have Eyes for You,” I find that episode almost unbearably tedious. Sorry.
Angel, season 2
The best thing about both Buffyverse shows is the dynamic between the ensemble cast. While Buffy is about, well, Buffy, and every major character metaphorically represents a part of Buffy’s psyche, Angel isn’t burdened by having to find “the Buffy of it all” in every episode, and that freedom granted it the ability to build some truly phenomenal arcs for characters that they just didn’t have room to develop fully on Buffy, like Wesley and Darla. But, admittedly, the heart of the show is still Angel, and this season explores both the ensemble cast’s relationship with him as well as his own incredibly complex and dark psychology with a deft touch, leavened with delightful doses of comedy.
Characters who had been introduced in the previous season, like Gunn, Lilah, and Lindsey, are given chances to really grow into their own here, and season 2 of Angel also gifts us with perhaps the single best and most adorable character in the entire Buffyverse, sympathetic demon Lorne. (Oh, and also Fred.) The friendships between Angel and Cordelia, and between Wesley and Gunn, are given ample time to develop into endearing and compelling dynamics that give us a reason to tune in every week, while plot-wise, the season arc just bounces from strength to strength to strength.
So, why isn’t this season ranked higher? Well… it does not end well. It ends pretty badly, in fact. And that bad ending is suspended over four entire episodes. But I’ll get to that in a second.
HIGHLIGHTS: The ghostly 1950s flashback episode “Are You Now or Have You Ever Been” explores themes of mob psychology, paranoia, and deep, deep regret for mistakes you can never take back in a truly haunting and memorable way. “Guise Will Be Guise” is a refreshingly funny episode that features Wesley pretending to be Angel for an entire episode, and it is an absolute delight. Fans tend to dislike “The Shroud of Rahmon,” but I find it to be a fun time. They similarly dislike “The Thin Dead Line” but I actually find its exploration of police brutality to be, if anything, more relevant as time has gone on. The stunningly dark “Reunion”/“Redefinition” two-parter shows Angel discovering his limits to accept help and sets off an excellent arc that pays off in a wonderfully heartwarming and funny fashion in “Epiphany.” Harmony is always delightful, and her guest turn in “Disharmony” is a high point for her character across both shows. And “Dead End” is worth watching for the incredible joke at the end of the episode alone.
LOWLIGHTS: Look. I love Lorne. He’s my favorite character on Angel and he’s one of the only things that makes season 4 tolerable. I also love Fred, and I find her development throughout the next several seasons to be one of the most emotional arcs in television history. I even like the Groosalugg once he shows up in season 3 and gets a haircut. But the four-episode suite that closes Angel’s second season-- “Belonging,” “Over the Rainbow,” “Through the Looking Glass,” and “There’s No Place Like Plrtz Glrb,” otherwise known as “the Pylea arc”-- is one of the most insufferably boring in either show’s history. I do not care about medieval fantasy Renaissance Faire bullshit. A demon dimension should either be unremittingly dark or wonderfully whimsical, and in trying to be both, this arc fails spectacularly. It doesn’t help that it basically stops the entire series arc in its tracks. Nothing, not even Numfar doing the Dance of Joy, can save these episodes from putting me to sleep. If you’re watching Buffy and Angel in tandem, as I would recommend for first-timers, this arc also suffers because the four-episode suite that concludes the fifth season of Buffy is so fucking dark and phenomenal. And because every other season finale in Angel’s history is basically flawless, it’s especially disappointing that this comes at the end of such a strong season.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 6
At this point, my top 3 choices are dead giveaways, and all are pretty common favorites among Buffyverse fans. But this is the most polarizing season of either show, and I predict that my placement of it this high-- above the second seasons of Angel and Buffy, especially, which are widely adored-- may ruffle a few feathers. But I don’t care. I’m an enormous apologist for this season, even for what many consider to be its worst episodes, and I also think you have to give it a lot of credit for having to come up with a way to move forward after the cataclysmic conclusion of Buffy’s fifth season and the subsequent end of its run on the WB. Fledgling network UPN snatched Buffy up from the jaws of cancellation, and the much more lax censorship standard gave season 6 of Buffy the room to explore the absolute darkest territory of the show’s entire run.
Generally speaking, it is that overt darkness that I think fans respond poorly to. This season can be a difficult watch, mainly because it shows characters we love making some truly terrible decisions. But unlike season 4 (and parts of season 3) of Angel, I think that nearly all the poor decisions made by the characters during Buffy’s incredibly ambitious sixth season make perfect sense in context of their characters. Unlike every other season of the show, which focuses on a supernatural Big Bad, the writers (including Marti Noxon, who stepped up to the plate as showrunner alongside Whedon and advocated for many of the more brutal plotlines) went into this season with the idea that the Big Bad was “life.” This season shows the Scooby Gang at the most painful juncture of the shift from childhood to maturity, when you’re under siege from your own mental health, you’re learning how to get a job and support yourself, and you’re struggling with the bad decisions of your friends while your friends are struggling with your own bad decisions, all with a lack of adult guidance.
This season does have its low points-- in particular, there’s a metaphorical turn that is communicated in a pretty sloppy and heavy-handed way-- but I stand by even some of the least popular decisions. People don’t like that the villains of the season are The Trio, because they’re just three nerdy human boys, but I think it’s completely realistic that villains who would basically amount to a Monster-of-the-Week inconvenience in previous seasons are so difficult for Buffy to combat after the turmoil of season 5, and I think it’s even more realistic (and, maybe even brilliantly so, ahead-of-its-time) that unexamined low-grade nerd misogyny would lead to some truly catastrophic consequences. In recent years, it’s become a more common take to admit that Buffy’s sixth season is among its best and most enduring, and as a longtime fan, I’ve been very pleased to see it.
HIGHLIGHTS: Much of what makes season 6 so great is seeing the development of the characters’ unraveling psyches as the season goes on (which is all telegraphed in the ambitiously bleak opening four-episode suite), but the way those roots are subtly laid in the overtly comedic “Life Serial,” as well as the subtle development of those themes, particularly in regards to Buffy’s depression, in its tonal companion piece “Gone,” stand up particularly well on rewatch. Speaking of comedic centerpieces, “Tabula Rasa” is arguably the single funniest episode of the entire show, which makes it even more distressing when, during the final minutes, it becomes a Michelle-Branch-scored gut-wrencher. “Dead Things” is just as depressing, and is one of the most explicit condemnations and analyses of Nice Guy behavior ever aired. “Normal Again” is literally a psychological horror mini-film, and is the single scariest episode of television ever made, especially with the weight of the rest of the series behind it. “Seeing Red” is a very controversial episode, for good reason-- and as others have pointed out, its very arguable whether or not the show was particularly prepared or well-equipped to deal with the consequences of trying to tell such a visceral and sadly relatable story-- but the episode’s grit and raw power is singular and its ambition is admirable. If the “yellow crayon” speech in season finale “Grave” doesn’t at least make your eyes a bit shiny, you might not be capable of human empathy. And it should go without saying that the musical episode, “Once More, with Feeling,” is the best episode of the entire series, and maybe even the greatest episode of television ever made. It’s just that fucking good. And that’s coming from someone who instinctively loathes theatre kid bullshit-- this episode doesn’t feel like that in the least. It’s just marvelously-constructed, amazingly well-executed television.
LOWLIGHTS: Like I said, I’ll stand by even the weaker episodes of season 6. People may not like seeing Buffy deal with a shitty low-income job in “Doublemeat Palace,” but I maintain that episode is at least watchable. People may not like seeing the dissolution of one of the show’s most endearing relationships in “Hell’s Bells,” but the motivations of the characters are painfully realistic. But there are several moments that are just plain exhausting. The return of Riley in “As You Were” suffers due to, well, the presence of Riley. No amount of hot (and I mean really hot) sex can save you from the mid-season “addicted to magic” doldrums of “Smashed” and “Wrecked,” which comes off even more ridiculously overbearing given how delicately sketched and well-foreshadowed that arc had been in past seasons and episodes. “Entropy” approaches greatness, but even the most realistic of character interactions can feel incredibly ugly. But the biggest sin this season commits is undeniably “All the Way,” which is unfortunately saddled with the distinction of being the show’s only Halloween episode that is boring and inessential.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 3
This is it. These top three seasons aren’t just the peak of the Buffyverse-- they’re among the best seasons of television ever aired. And it all starts here, with the third season of Buffy. You might be thinking that I’m more biased towards the later seasons of Buffy, and I’ll cop to it: admittedly, I think the show’s overtures towards darker themes and incredibly ambitious and complex formal experimentation provide a lot of vitality; I think that the writers and actors understand the characters so well that the show overall becomes much more consistent; and I think that the later seasons’ more serialized nature pretty much uniformly serves the show well on a sheer episode-to-episode level of rewatchability.
But all that starts here, with what is arguably the single most consistent season of either show. The writers seemed to have been slowly learning their lessons throughout the harsh curve of the first two seasons (remember, Buffy started airing in March of 1997 and the third season debuted just over a year later-- by the standards of today’s much slower TV turnaround times, that’s an insane gauntlet to put the cast, crew, and writers through), and the way they’re applied here is marvelous. The seasonal arc is wonderful and the standalone episodes have finally learned how to incorporate (on a smaller level) running plot elements as well as (on a grander level) thematic elements in order to create a season that holds together so tightly I can’t imagine axing any of its twenty-two episodes.
The character dynamics are operating at an all-time high. Something I rarely see talked much about is how well Buffy and Angel did arguments: big groups of people who all care deeply about each other accidentally hurting each other because everyone thinks they’re in the right. This season is home to some of the most realistic arguments in television history, and the reason they work so well and hurt so much is because the rest of the season shows how much these characters love each other and work well together.
There’s also the nostalgia aspect. Buffy is a nostalgic show for a lot of people, and that nostalgia tends to fade with the later seasons as character dynamics and settings shift around more and more. The hub of later seasons moves between Giles’s apartment, Xander’s basement, the Magic Box, Buffy’s house-- but the hub of the first three seasons is the library at Sunnydale High, and by season three, it feels like home. This season burrows into your psyche-- a lot of people think of Faith as a main character on the show, but this is the only season where she is a frequent recurring player. (Her relationships with the Scoobies as well as the Big Bad are just marvelous, and Eliza Dushku is a joy. Obviously she is stupid-hot but by the time she learns how to act midway through the season, she’s capable of carrying some truly stellar scenes, which pays off in even greater dividends any time she pops up in later seasons or on Angel.)
The third season of Buffy is, in a lot of ways, the definitive Buffy season. I know that when I think of the show, this is the season that plays in my head. It’s the season that makes the show’s central theme of growing up most explicit, as the incredible finale centers around the gang graduating high school. For better or for worse, Buffy would never be the same after leaving high school. For all the unevenness of the first two seasons, this season demonstrates exactly what a loss that would be.
HIGHLIGHTS: Where do I begin? The whole fucking season is just banger after banger. “Anne” is the moment where Buffy finally embraces that the Slayer is who she is, and her experience in LA after the fallout of the season 2 finale is punctuated nicely by the Scoobies trying to make it work without her in Sunnydale. “Dead Man’s Party” features one of those incredible argument scenes, and some great line readings from Giles and Oz. “Faith, Hope, and Trick” introduces Faith and establishes the arc of the season in the cleanest fashion possible. “Homecoming” is peak Cordelia, and illustrates why Angel’s later mishandling of the character is such a loss. “Band Candy” is the hilarious writing debut of Jane Espenson, who is arguably the writer who understands the characters best after Whedon. “Revelations” features another excellent argument and moves the plot and character arcs along at an excellent clip. “Lovers Walk” gloriously brings back Spike, who inadvertently engineers a heartbreaking fallout between characters that resonates for the rest of the season. “The Wish” is the gold standard of Alternate Universe episodes, and sets the stage for the brilliant “Doppelgangland” as well as introduces Anya, one of my absolute favorite characters. “Amends” is a gorgeous and deeply existential dry run for Angel. “Gingerbread” and “Helpless” are two of the scariest episodes in the show’s history, and the latter deepens the relationship between Buffy and Giles beautifully. “The Zeppo” is the show’s single best stab at self-satirization. “Bad Girls,” “Consequences,” “Enemies,” and “Choices” are thematically-resonant arc episodes that nearly reach the highs of season 2. “Earshot,” which was originally scheduled to air in the immediate aftermath of Columbine, is an incredibly funny, surprisingly insightful, and mildly scary examination of the pain of existing in high school. “The Prom” ends with the most heartening moment in the show’s history. And of course, “Graduation Day” sets a tidy standard for finales that few others in the show’s history could reach.
LOWLIGHTS: If anything, the show might just be too consistent this year, if that makes sense? Every episode moves from strength to strength to strength, but the lack of breathing room between all these really good episodes sometimes prevents them from reaching the height of gravitas that the best episodes of seasons 2 could achieve (for as good as the arc episodes in the back half of this season are, they just aren’t quite as perfect as their corresponding episodes in season 2). But if the worst things I can say about the weakest episode, “Beauty and the Beasts,” are that the SFX and acting are weaker than usual, and its themes of misogyny and abuse are just too overt to work within the sensitive and nuanced world of Buffy, we’re batting a pretty great average here.
Angel, season 5
This is the final aired season of the Buffyverse, and you’d be forgiven for assuming the creators would phone it in for this one. I mean, season 4 of Angel was a disaster, Buffy had reached a natural (if not overdue) conclusion, and Firefly had just been canceled, so I can’t imagine morale was very high. But the lack of any other things soaking up the writers’ attention led to an extremely focused and ambitious set of episodes-- perhaps the most conceptually ambitious in either show’s history. There were some major repercussions to the conclusions of Angel’s fourth season and Buffy’s seventh, and Angel’s final season admirably stepped up to the plate, ably dealing with all of those consequences and sending off the Buffyverse’s television run in spectacular fashion. (The comics, as far as I can gather, did a much worse job.)
The way the character arcs play out during this season is nothing short of awe-inspiring. The Shakespearean tragedy that is Wesley Wyndam-Price concludes in a manner that is both subversively shocking and wholly appropriate. The story of Fred and Illyria must be seen to be believed. Harmony returns and is predictably wonderful. This show also made the controversial decision to import Spike, but I have to say, that decision paid off in spades-- his very presence provides the show with a direly-needed jolt of energy, his dynamic with Angel is incredible, and this season is especially worth watching if you didn’t like how he was handled in the final season of Buffy. Cordelia takes center stage in a melancholic episode that almost makes up for how terribly her character was handled in season 4. Angel himself is put through a wringer and rises to the challenge, demonstrating why the decision to give him his own show was such a good one. Plus, Lindsey!
If there is anything holding this season back from being my favorite season of either show (besides a couple of admittedly subpar episodes, which we’ll get to shortly), it’s that this season of Angel is maybe too ambitious. I love the places it’s willing to go, and the writers commit admirably. The season’s central theme-- the push and pull between the cosmic futility of trying to reform a broken system and the grim sense of obligation that comes with knowing you can never stop fighting for what’s right-- is explored exceptionally well, and complements the decisions made during Buffy’s series finale. But it’s such a radical departure, not just from the show that Angel had become, but from what Buffy was, that it almost seems anathema to put it above my number one choice, for reasons that will hopefully become clear below.
HIGHLIGHTS: “Hell Bound” boasts some of the scariest imagery in Angel’s history, and since this show already had a tendency to lean more into horror than Buffy, that’s saying something. “Destiny” is a thrilling exploration of the Spike/Angel dynamic that concludes with, appropriately, one of the darkest punchlines in the show’s history. “Harm’s Way” is an extremely charming day in the life that elicits both laughs and huge amounts of sympathy. I’m a total sucker for the trippiness of “Soul Purpose,” one of the best explorations of dream-logic ever made (coming right behind “Restless,” honestly). “You’re Welcome” is a heartstring-tugging examination of the relationship between Angel and Cordelia. “Smile Time” is, to put it lightly, an absolute joy, and provides an excellent bit of levity right before the hammer comes down in “A Hole In the World,” which is on par with a certain episode of Buffy (see below) in terms of being the saddest episode of television ever aired, and every episode in the season from that point on is basically a winner. “The Girl In Question” is a buddy-comedy par excellence, managing the Herculean task of making an episode about Buffy without her ever actually appearing and still managing to be satisfying. And of course, “Not Fade Away” is in the running for the greatest series finale of all time-- tragic and bleak and inspiring and thrilling all in equal measure.
LOWLIGHTS: “The Cautionary Tale of Numero Cinco” is one of the most poorly-regarded episodes in the show’s history, partially for the fact that its overtly goofy tone doesn’t jive with the rest of the season (even in contrast with the similarly silly but much more delightful “Smile Time”), and partially because it’s just too episodic to really fit in with the season’s overall arc. That same sense of inessential nonsense pervades “Why We Fight” as well, which suffers exponentially more for coming in between two of the best episodes of the entire show. But aside from that, this season is really such a triumph.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 5
“The hardest thing in this world is to live in it.”
For as thrilling and ambitious as season 5 of Angel is, the fifth season of Buffy has a couple legs up. For one, it knows exactly what it wants to do from episode 1 to the end of the season finale (which was, at the time, assumed to be the series finale-- and in fairness to season 7 and especially my beloved season 6, it would have been an excellent one). For another, even more than the third season of Buffy, it functions as a thesis statement for the show.
Both shows, in some way, are about accepting responsibility. If we agree with Angel’s central metaphor being that of a recovering addict, then the journey of Angel the character and Angel as a show is about holding yourself accountable for the hurt you caused in your addiction, making amends where you can, making peace with yourself where you can’t, and learning from that pain to move past your guilt and become a better person. Angel season 5, for as incredible as it is, just doesn’t quite fit into that framework. Like all seasons of the Buffyverse, it’s still about responsibility, choice, and identity, but it feels more like a coda for Buffy’s series finale and its themes of destroying a system that doesn’t work and trying to rebuild from scratch.
But Buffy was always a show about growing up. Becoming an adult means accepting responsibility, and in each season, we saw Buffy accepting increasingly more responsibility: the responsibility of being a Slayer in season 1; the responsibility of making sacrifices that others can’t in season 2; the responsibility of confronting the darkest parts of yourself and realizing that you can never be a child again in season 3; the responsibility of learning how to stand on your own two feet and how to ask for help when you need it in season 4. Season 5 of Buffy is where all that responsibility coalesces and Buffy embraces her adulthood, leading to the struggles that come with being a young adult in seasons 6 and 7.
On a personal note, I had the most unique viewing experience with the fifth season of Buffy. One of my earliest memories is of watching the season premiere, where Buffy fights Dracula, live with my mom. At the time, the thing that stuck with me most was Xander eating bugs. When I got older and developed more of an interest in the show, we ended up being able to get every season on DVD except for season 5, so I had to skip it in a lot of rewatches and wasn’t able to properly watch it in its entirety until it ended up on Netflix years later. My first time watching it all the way through, rather than piecemeal in reruns or on the shady streaming sites of mid-00s Internet, was a revelation. This was a season that was almost, if not just as, consistent as the third season of Buffy, but was even more thematically resonant for me as a confused kid who was trying to figure out how to enter adulthood.
The fifth season of Buffy is, on every aesthetic, metaphorical, and structural level, near-peerless. The way that certain plot elements (events concerning Dawn and Buffy’s mom, particularly) were seamlessly woven into the fabric of the writing and performances from minute 1 and had been sneakily foreshadowed even back in seasons 3 and 4 is awe-inspiring. The emotional depth and complexity of episodes both dramatic and comedic is stunning. The psychology of individual characters is explored in ways that don’t hold back from being fucked-up and disturbing, but are always empathetic and human. Every arc episode is tightly-plotted and essential. Every Monster-of-the-Week episode is deeply connected to the running themes of the season and includes just enough serialized intrigue to feel unskippable. The show layers these themes, and these myriad moving gears of plot elements, and all these series-long harbingers into a singularly purposeful season of television that builds and builds, inexorably, inevitably, towards an explosive conclusion that’s as fitting and appropriate as it is heart-rending and upsetting. It’s the single most satisfying season finale I’ve ever seen, and that final shot encapsulates everything we love about Buffy, and about Buffy: She saved the world. A lot.
HIGHLIGHTS: It almost feels reductive to go through this season on a piece-by-piece basis and take away some of its cumulative power, but I’m the one who decided on this format, so here goes. “Buffy vs. Dracula” is delightfully dumb high camp that expands upon many of the ideas from the previous season’s finale and ends with a pretty stellar “what the fuck?” moment. “Real Me” expertly lays the groundwork for the season arc and incorporates a huge new element into the show almost-seamlessly. “The Replacement” is one of the most relatable episodes of television ever made. The twist at the end of “Out of My Mind” is well-earned and irrevocably affects the entire rest of the show. “No Place Like Home” announces the arrival of perhaps my favorite Big Bad in the show’s history. “Family” finally fully integrates Tara into the Scooby Gang and concludes with a wonderful tear-jerker of a moment, helped along by, of all people, Spike. Speaking of Spike, “Fool for Love” is one of the biggest fan favorites of the series for great reason, and the episode’s conclusion is a masterful moment of quiet that speaks volumes. “Listening to Fear” is a harshly underrated episode that capitalizes upon the marginalization of the mentally ill in a way that still feels relevant (and, unlike most, I find the creature design in this episode to be genuinely freaky). “Triangle” avoids dispensability by being genuinely hilarious and exploring the under-utilized dynamic between Willow and Anya. “Checkpoint” is full of great character-based comedy and concludes with the most badass monologue Sarah Michelle Gellar ever delivered. “Blood Ties” moves the arc forward expertly and highlights what is perhaps the show’s most-effective implementation of dramatic irony. “Crush” explores the psychology of perhaps the most fucked-up character on the show in an absolutely riveting way. “I Was Made to Love You” foreshadows one of the main themes of season 6 while remaining entertaining throughout and concluding with what many consider to be the biggest and most out-of-nowhere gut-punch in the history of the series. “The Body” is a fucking masterpiece, an artfully-rendered, absent-of-music meditation on loss that marks the show reaching its fullest potential, and the only episode that rivals the musical for the show’s best. “Forever” is a genuinely creepy and uncomfortable attempt to grapple with the aftermath of a catastrophic event that still finds time for some endearing character moments. “Intervention” is hilarious, dark, and surprisingly moving in that way that only Buffy can be. “Tough Love” and “Spiral” set the stage for the endgame by ratcheting up the tension to almost-unbearable levels. “The Weight of the World” magnifies that tension by taking a stylistic detour into Buffy’s mind, finally putting all the moving pieces into place and priming us for the brilliant catharsis that is the show’s 100th episode, “The Gift,” which is, well… a gift.
LOWLIGHTS: The snake demon in “Shadow” looks kinda stupid, and I hate Riley so the fact that “Into the Woods” wants us to believe his departure is some sort of horrible tragedy is where my suspension of disbelief snaps. But really, those are minor quibbles in the grand scheme of things. The fifth season of Buffy is remarkable-- in its scope and scale, in its close examination of and clear love for its characters, and in its overall excellent construction. Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 5 is the best season of Buffy, and perhaps the best season of television ever made. Fight me.
Where do we go from here?
-GRR, ARGH, Ellie
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