Return to the Hellmouth

In other words, my top ten episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Or of Buffy, Slayer of Vampyres. (Yes, that episode will be making the list.)

I saw Buffy the Vampire Slayer (BtVS) when it initially came out, but only the first couple of seasons. After that, either it moved off terrestrial TV, or life intervened, so my first run-through of the whole series was this year. And it is a long series – seven seasons, 144 episodes!

This all started because I got a special offer on the Disney Channel, and lo and behold, there was BtVS. I had vague but fond memories of it from decades back, so I tried it again and really liked it. Then there were some heavily discounted tickets to a show at the Fringe (yes, I am both tight and jammy) where the character of Spike took you through all 7 seasons in just over an hour, and it was brilliant – I heartily recommend it.

So after realising how much of it I had never seen, I gave in and bought the box set, working my way through it slowly at first, then very quickly when I got covid and watching TV was the only thing I could manage, other than sleeping.

Since then, I’ve been watching an inordinate number of BtVS compilations, reactions and best-ofs on YouTube, re-watching my potential favourites, reading reviews and even a couple of books, just so that I can give you a well researched blog post. (Actually, it was just because I enjoyed it, but you knew that.) And I have, eventually, come up with my top ten.

Before we go any further, in case there are any hardened Buffy fans following my blog (and if there aren’t, the reference in the first paragraph is going to fall flat, isn’t it?), I should say that one of the episodes universally regarded as the three best does not make it onto my list. The Body is excellent, I’m not disputing that, but it’s no fun to watch. These are my favourites, not necessarily the best according to IMDB rankings or some other (semi-)objective measure. And Restless isn’t here either, because I hated it.

There are going to be some spoilers here, because you can’t really talk about why you like an episode without including spoilers for that episode, and possibly earlier ones. Where there are really big spoilers, though, I’ll put them in white text and you can highlight the gap if you want to see them. Apologies if this doesn’t work on whatever device you’re reading this on.

Honourable mentions (the ones that didn’t quite make it)

There were six or seven episodes that immediately jumped onto my top ten, but the remainder of the list had quite a few contenders, hence the rewatching. Here are a few that almost made the cut:

Spiral (season 5, episode 20) The ending gets a bit claustrophobic and exposition-heavy, but the first half is brilliant, with a Stagecoach-style fight between the Scoobies (i.e. Buffy and her supporters) in a huge campervan, and a bunch of the Knights of Byzantium (“the knights who say ‘Key'”) on horses. Epic! Plus you finally find out what much-sought-after key actually opens, and it does not disappoint.

School Hard (season 2, episode 3) The introduction of Spike and Drusilla! Finally, “a little less ritual and a little more fun” after the tedium of the Master. The title is a reference to Die Hard, with everyone being trapped in the school and Spike and his minions playing the role of Hans Gruber and the German terrorists. The whole parents’ evening plot is a bit dull, but it soon livens up when the vampires arrive. And the ending with “the Annoying One” is fantastic. “Let’s see what’s on TV.”

Innocence (season 2, episode 14) I’m not a fan of Angel, although this episode, in which he loses his soul and reverts back to being evil, was a genuine shocker at the time. That’s not why it makes it onto this list, though. It’s for the scene where Buffy takes out the supposedly unkillable demon in the middle of a shopping centre with a rocket launcher. A rocket launcher!

Afterlife (season 6, episode 3) The start of season 6 is a bit of a downer. In fact, the whole of season 6 is dark and depressing, although none the worse for it. It may even be my favourite season. Anyway, after the misery of season opener Bargaining (parts 1 & 2), there’s a beautiful scene where Spike meets Buffy after she has been raised from the dead, and silently gazes at her in love and wonder, and it’s gorgeous. And then, when she asks how long she’s been away, you find out he’s been counting the days! It’s such a sweet scene that it’s really annoying when the rest of the gang bursts in and spoils the atmosphere. And this episode also has the “every night, I save you” apology speech from Spike. Yes, I just like this because Spike is unusually sweet in it.

I Only Have Eyes for You (season 2, episode 19) Another Angel-centric one, after saying that I don’t like him. But the gender-flipped twist in this episode is supremely clever, and would not work if “Grace” was not a vampire (or at least, someone you can’t kill by shooting them). And it’s all about forgiveness, including forgiving oneself. It’s very touching. And then, in the episode’s last moments, Spike gets out of his wheelchair, revealing that he’s just been pretending not to be fully recovered, setting up his plot against Angel in the finale.

And then there are a couple that I’m going to mention just for the clothes in them 😂 I enjoyed revisiting ’90s fashion (Buffy has a simply enormous wardrobe – I don’t know where she keeps all her stuff), and here are some outstanding examples.

This beautiful iridescent coat from Becoming Part II. Also, note the excellent chunky ’90s heels, perfect for looking good while also doing something practical like running down a corridor to stop the baddies.

And Cordelia’s gorgeous sparkly dress in Doppelgangland;

To be clear, any (or all) of these sartorial items would make excellent Christmas presents for me. Just saying.

And so, on to the actual top ten!

Fear Itself (season 4, episode 4)

Buffy the Vampire Slayer straddles a range of genres from teen soap to comedy to melodrama to horror. I’m partial to a bit of horror, including comedy horror, so I like it when Buffy is actually scary (which is not often). This is one of the episodes where you do feel a bit scared, as a house tricked up for Halloween gets some enhancement from a fear demon that has been summoned by accident, and everybody ends up trapped in the house, facing their deepest fears.

There’s some nice character exploration, as you see what they each fear most: Buffy fears that everyone will leave her, and she ends up alone; Xander fears that he has become irrelevant to the group now that the rest of them are at university, and he becomes invisible and inaudible; Willow fears that her boyfriend, Oz, will leave her, and that she cannot control the magic she does, so her wayfinding spell goes wrong and Oz, who fears the werewolf within, starts to wolf out and does indeed leave Willow, for her own safety. The scariest moment, though, is when you see a girl screaming at a window, and then the window disappears into the wall, brick by brick.

The door has disappeared, too, of course, so Giles and Anya, who were not at the party, have to take measures to get inside:

Giles: We’re going to have to create a door…
Anya: Create a door? You can do that?
Giles: [pulls a chainsaw out of his bag] I can.

And then there’s the ending, which is properly, laugh-out-loud funny when the dreaded fear demon arrives and it’s about four inches tall! In the final scene, Giles the librarian rechecks the book about the demon and realises that the Gaelic inscription under the illustration says “actual size” 🤣

Something Blue (season 4, episode 9)

One of the ‘magic goes wrong’ episodes, and a particularly funny one. Willow becomes a very powerful witch in the end, but in season four she is still pretty hit-or-miss. Incidentally, season four is one of the weakest in some ways, with a wonky plot arc and a very poor ‘big bad’ (a term that was invented by BtVS, btw), but it has some excellent individual episodes. In fact, I just counted, and four of my top ten are from season 4.

In Something Blue, Willow casts a spell to have her will done, so that she can rid herself of her pesky grief over Oz leaving her, but she can’t do that, and instead unknowingly puts spells on her friends by saying tetchy things to them. She tells Giles he doesn’t see anything, and he starts to go blind. She tells Xander he’s a demon magnet, and the demons start piling in. And, frustrated by how much time Buffy is spending with Spike (who at this point is still an enemy, but a potential source of information), she says, “she should just go marry him!”. Cue Spike down on one knee…

There’s also a lovely detail, when Willow manages to turn Amy back into a human being, when she has been a rat for the last year, but only for a split second, and nobody notices! Poor Amy will have to stay a rat a bit longer…

Most of the comedy in the episode comes from Buffy and Spike’s engagement, of course, and everyone’s reactions to it.

Buffy: Spike and I are getting married!

Xander: How? What? How?

Giles: Three excellent questions.

There’s another character called Riley who has been making moves towards Buffy, and a spanner is thrown in the works when she tells him she’s getting married to someone else.

Buffy: You’ll really like him! Well… nobody really likes him. I don’t even really like him. But… I love him… I do.

Then at the end, Buffy and Spike are locked in a kiss when Willow, realising what she has done, breaks the spell. Their disgusted reactions are just as funny as their magically-induced romance. Of course, they won’t always feel that way…

Earshot (season 3, episode 18)

Another comedy (it’s easy to forget how funny BtVS is), but one that gets more serious at the end. Buffy gets some weird demon blood on her, which gives her the ability to hear people’s thoughts. At first, it’s fun, but as her power grows, she can’t block out the constant noise of the whole town thinking, and the Scoobies have to find an antidote before she goes mad. But meanwhile, they have to find out who the person is that Buffy overheard planning to kill the entire school.

There are two standout scenes. The first is in the library, when Buffy hears all of her friends’ thoughts, and they are very much in character. Xander is desperately trying not to think about sex; Willow is feeling very insecure; Oz is having deep, philosophical thoughts about the nature of reality; and Cordelia literally says whatever comes into her mind just the moment after she thinks it. As she says in another episode, “Tact is just not saying true stuff.”

The second, and the key scene of the whole episode, is when Buffy talks down Jonathan in the clock tower, where he has gone with a rifle (to kill himself, not his classmates, as it turns out). Her speech about how no one thinks about him is surprisingly touching, and has a lot of truth in it. Jonathan’s a bit of a favourite of mine, and the next episode on this list is his finest hour.

There are also fun little throwaway moments, as there often are in BtVS, like the scene where, despite Joyce’s best efforts at staying out of her daughter’s way, Buffy hears in her mother’s thoughts that while they were under a spell, she had sex with Giles, the librarian. On the bonnet of a police car. Twice. And there’s this cute little Oz moment:

Willow: The school paper is edging on depressing, lately. Have you guys noticed that?

Oz: I don’t know. I always go straight to the obits.

Only in Sunnydale would you find a regular obituary column in a school newspaper.

(Incidentally, this episode was originally meant to air only days after the Columbine High School massacre, so it was pulled and shown later. There is no school shooting in the episode, but you can understand why it would have been a bit too close to the bone when the characters are quipping about how high school shootings are “bordering on trendy at this point.”)

Superstar (season 4, episode 17)

Jonathan Levinson – actor, entrepreneur, singer, genius. It’s no wonder Anya is reading his biography and even Giles has the Jonathan swimwear calendar. (It was a present, he insists.)

This is one of those episodes where they mess around with alternate realities, but here you are just thrust into it with no explanation, and the characters have to work out what’s going on over the course of the episode. (In that way, it’s a future echo of what happens with the character of Dawn in season 5.)

What’s particularly fun is that they even change the opening titles (not that I was paying enough attention to notice the first time, but I’ve gone back and checked), so that Jonathan is in them as if he were a main character, doing heroic things. Jonathan has used magic to alter reality, of course, and now everyone thinks he’s wonderful. He helps Buffy with vampire slaying and gives her wise advice on her relationship with Riley; he helps the Initiative (a secretive military outfit) with how to defeat Adam, their out-of-control experiment; and he always has time to share a kind word with fans and sign their books.

It can’t last, as there’s always a payoff with magic, and soon people are wondering if everything is as it seems. For instance, how could Jonathan have starred in the Matrix and invented the internet without taking time off from high school? And what is the connection between Jonathan and the (fairly pathetic and unscary) monster that is now running around Sunnydale?

This is just a silly piece of fluff, and I know that people who don’t like the character of Jonathan don’t like this episode. I do, and I enjoyed seeing him get the chance to be heroic and look handsome (a different haircut, better clothes, self-confidence, and a touch of eyeliner was all it took). But it’s not a throwaway episode, because Buffy acts on his relationship advice and, crucially, it is the genius version of Jonathan that reveals how Adam can be destroyed – information that Buffy will use in the season finale. The thing with Jonathan sharing his bed with blonde twins is distasteful, and the monster is rubbish, but I love just about everything else about this episode.

Intervention (season 5, episode 18)

Ah, a Spike episode! And as he is my favourite character, naturally this is one of my favourite episodes. Having been firmly given the brush off by Buffy, and advised by Giles to move on from his obsession, Spike commissions a robot copy of Buffy from evil nerd Warren. I don’t think that’s quite what Giles meant, Spike. This should be far more distasteful than the twins in Superstar, but somehow it’s just funny and sweet. Spike is so attached to his Buffybot, and gets quite upset when it asks him if it should repeat the “programme” of being unable to resist his charms.

Intervention is an episode that goes in unexpected directions. First of all, the Buffybot sneaks out to hunt (other) vampires, having been programmed to be as similar to Buffy as possible (although much more cheerful and perky), so Buffy’s friends see it and, since the real Buffy is out of town, assume that she has returned early and this is her. The Buffybot, meanwhile, interacts with them using information programmed into it, which you can see on the screen in shots from its point of view, a la The Terminator. Spike follows it and pretends everything is normal to Buffy’s friends, but that’s undermined when Xander and Anya see him actually shagging the bot in the graveyard. So now they’re all concerned about the poor choices Buffy seems to be making as a result of her grief over her mother dying, leading to an amusing confrontation.

Buffy: I am not having sex with Spike!

Xander: No one is judging you. It’s understandable. Spike is strong and mysterious and sort of compact but well-muscled.

Buffy: I am not having sex with Spike, but I’m starting to think that you might be.

But far more seriously, Glory (the season 5 big bad) is on the lookout for someone who may be ‘the Key’, someone Buffy is loving and protective towards… so of course, her minions also see Spike with the Buffybot and, assuming Spike is the key, carry him away to torture information out of him. So a light and fluffy episode suddenly gets quite dark and serious, not only for poor Spike (who is being horribly tortured) but also for the gang, who are afraid that Spike will reveal who the Key actually is.

Spike gets away from Glory, and the gang rescue him and dump him back in his crypt. But Buffy has to be sure that Spike didn’t talk, and that he won’t in the future, so she goes to his crypt, pretending to be the Buffybot – because why would Spike lie to it? Spike’s feelings towards Buffy have been developing over the course of many episodes  (over a couple of seasons, you could argue), but Buffy has always dismissed them, believing that a soulless vampire is incapable of love, empathy or compassion. This is the first time she acknowledges the validity of his feelings, when she hears Spike explain to the ‘bot’ that he was ready to die to prevent Buffy from suffering pain.

Buffy: What you did for me and Dawn, that was real… I won’t forget it.

She gently kisses him – and despite being beaten to a pulp, Spike can immediately tell that it’s the real Buffy, not the bot. He’s always the one who can tell. (Yes, I am a total Spuffer, i.e. shipper of Spike and Buffy, and I don’t care!)

Lover’s Walk (season 3, episode 8)

Yes, it’s another Spike one, but it’s a great illustration of the value of the character. He’s a chaotic blast of fresh air, and when he appears for his only episode in season 3, you realise just how much the show misses his presence.

In a nice touch, Spike’s car knocks down the ‘Welcome to Sunnydale’ sign again, just as it did in School Hard, but this time instead of emerging from the car full of swagger, he falls out of it in a drunken heap. Drusilla has left him, and Spike is a total mess. (In a very funny moment, he’s still in a drunken sleep when the sun comes up, setting his hand on fire and sending him running back to his blacked-out car.) His mission is to get someone to perform a love spell on Drusilla so that she will love him again.

There are too many wonderful and/or funny moments in this episode to run through, but some of the best are:

Spike turns up at Buffy’s house, where her mother, Joyce, is home alone. Screen cuts to black 😬 The next time we see them, Joyce has made Spike a mug of cocoa and he is pouring his heart out to her about Drusilla – “Our love was eternal. Literally! You got any of those little marshmallows?” 😂 (Spike’s friendship with Joyce is one of the weirdest and cutest relationships in the whole series.)

Spike alternately threatens Willow with horrible violence and whines to her about his break-up from Drusilla:

I gave her everything. Beautiful jewels. Beautiful dresses – with beautiful girls in them. But nothing made her happy.

The hilarious moment when Angel (who is magically excluded from the house because of stuff that happened in season 2) tries to warn Joyce about Spike (who is in the house). But as far as Joyce is concerned, Spike is the vampire who is on her daughter’s side, whereas Angel is the creepy stalker vampire. And while Angel is trying to persuade her, Spike is pretending to attack Joyce, just out of her eye line, simply to wind Angel up. You have to see it to appreciate it, but the picture at the top gives you an idea.

And of course the famous “love’s bitch” scene, which is telling for Spike’s characterisation, but also brings Buffy and Angel to an important realisation about their relationship:

Spike: The last time I looked in on you two, you were fightin’ to the death. Now you’re back making googly eyes at each other like nothing happened. Makes me want to heave.

Buffy: I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Spike: Oh, yeah. You’re just friends.

Angel: That’s right.

Spike: You’re not friends. You’ll never be friends. You’ll be in love ’til it kills you both. You’ll fight, and you’ll shag, and you’ll hate each other until it makes you quiver, but you’ll never be friends. Love isn’t brains, children, it’s blood – blood screaming inside you to work its will. I may be love’s bitch, but at least I’m man enough to admit it.

So the episode ends with everybody moping and miserable after Spike’s chaos has revealed secrets they were keeping (including from themselves). Lots of sad music and staring into the middle distance, and then…

Spike speeds out of town in his blacked-out car, confidence restored, singing along happily to the Sex Pistols/Garry Oldman version of ‘My Way’. Pure joy.

Storyteller (season 7, episode 16)

This is the only episode taken from season 7. After I watched season 7, I thought it was terrible, but on revisiting it for this post, it actually has some good episodes at the start, before the potential slayers appear and it goes pear-shaped. This episode is actually from later in the season, in the midst of all the annoying stuff, and it is such a relief! It even pokes fun at some of the things that are so terrible about season 7, like when Andrew can’t remember a potential slayer’s name (who can?), or when he leaves the room while Buffy is making yet another rousing speech, checks back a few minutes later and yes, she’s still making the rousing speech. At least it’s not just the viewer who is bored by them.

Andrew is one of the three evil nerds from season 6 (and the only surviving one). He has joined the side of good, originally as their hostage (“I like to think of myself more as a ‘guestage’.”) and then becoming more integrated to the group. But although he was never the instigator, he has done some terrible things and never really confronted them, partly because he is an inveterate fabulist. His tendency to romanticism and self-deception is pure gold when he starts to film a documentary record about Buffy, the Slayer of Vampyres, and her allies. When you watch the ‘footage’ from his camera, you see things through his eyes. A perfectly mundane breakfast scene suddenly looks like this:

And Spike, whom we have just seen fully clothed in ‘real life’, is suddenly shirtless and almost-but-not-quite kissing Buffy while Andrew intones “Buffy and Spike have some kind of history. You can feel the heat between them, although, technically, as a vampire, he’s room temperature.”

Andrew also romanticises his past, which is more problematic. It’s hilarious to watch his re-write of his  (i.e. Anya’s) battle with Dark Willow (Willow’s dialogue unchanged, his retconned), or how he was the sharp-suited leader of the Trio, rather than a scruffy fanboy of Warren, the actual leader. But the real thing preventing him from moving on in his redemption arc (there are a lot of redemption arcs in BtVS) is that he won’t admit, even to himself, the true circumstances under which he killed his best friend, Jonathan.

The way he eventually admits what he did is beautifully achieved through a piece of deception on Buffy’s part, when she places Andrew in the same position as his own victim, and lets him think he’s going to suffer the same fate. It’s the moment of empathy that he needs to acknowledge his guilt. It’s a much quieter, sadder Andrew who signs off his video diary at the end of the episode, but one whose conscience is now a bit cleaner.

Hush (season 4, episode 10)

One of the three episodes that everyone agrees are the best, and another scary one! The basic concept is chilling, the villains are beyond creepy, and there’s a jump scare at one point that really did make me jump. Brrr!

The story behind this episode is that because critics were always praising BtVS’s sharp dialogue, as if that was the only good thing about it, showrunner Joss Whedon decided to write an episode with almost no dialogue – and it was nominated for an Emmy.

The reason no one can speak is that the Gentlemen have stolen the voices of everyone in town in preparation for removing the hearts from living, conscious victims, who scream in terror and pain but are unable to make a sound. I told you it was scary.

Buffy and friends have to stop the Gentlemen before they have collected all seven hearts. There are some ingenious ways of getting around the problem of not being able to talk, from price-gouged mini whiteboards sold by an enterprising street trader, to voice synthesising software down at the high-tech Initiative, but the best one is Giles’ overhead-projector slideshow of exposition about who the Gentlemen are and how to defeat them. From the backing music Giles selects (Danse Macabre by Saint-Saëns), to his putting the first slide up the wrong way round (everyone over a certain age remembers that) to his ridiculously gory cartoons, it is perfect. To my mind, some of the broad humour from the other characters in the scene is a bit rubbish (I know this is a minority opinion), but Giles is perfection.

So now I probably have to justify why this isn’t higher up the list – and it’s not just because the next one is another Spike episode. I’ve said that season 4 had some of the best episodes, but it was still season 4, with all of the Initiative nonsense, and a love interest with all the wit, allure and sensitivity of a sack of corn. So while it was nice that Buffy and Riley achieved some real progress in this episode, not least learning about each other’s secret identities, I just didn’t care that much. And it’s nice that Xander manages to prove his love to Anya by totally misinterpreting an innocent tableau of Anya and Spike, but Anya’s still a bit of a one-dimensional character at this point, so I didn’t care too much about that, either. The relationship event that did actually touch me was when Giles’ long-distance girlfriend Olivia realises that he hasn’t just been spinning tall tales about his battles with the netherworld. She says it’s scary. He asks, “Too scary?”, obviously half-joking, and she replies, quite seriously, “Maybe.” And that’s the last time we ever see her. Poor Giles. I hope he’s lucky at cards, at least.

Fool for Love (season 5, episode 7)

Not just a Spike episode, the Spike episode. This is the one where we get his backstory and find out how he became the vamp he is today.

Buffy, having been seriously injured in a run-of-the-mill encounter with a vampire, seeks out the only living(ish) being who has ever witnessed a slayer being slain – Spike, who has personally killed two vampire slayers. By this point Spike has had a behaviour-modifying chip in his brain for a year, preventing him from killing people, so it’s easy to forget how dangerous he used to be. But more interesting than that is what Spike was like before he was dangerous, when he was a bit of a drip called William Pratt who wrote terrible poetry and got picked on at parties in the 1880s.

At first it’s hard to understand how cool, confident, sexy Spike could ever have been William the wimp, but on reflection it makes perfect sense. On the one hand, now that he’s super strong and immortal, he’s reacting against everything that made him the butt of jokes back when he was alive. But on the other hand, he’s still got the heart of a sensitive poet who feels very deeply. That explains a lot about his affectionate relationship with Drusilla, whom we see here turning him into a vampire, but also his feelings for Buffy, and the way Spike is just different from most vampires – capable of perspicuity, empathy and adaptation.

The low point of the episode is the aforementioned party, where people taunt William in ridiculously unconvincing English accents and with inauthentic dialogue, but that’s easy to forgive when compared to the high points, the best of which is fight with the second slayer, Nikki, in 1977 on a New York subway train. It is a masterpiece of match-on-action editing, with modern-day Spike demonstrating to Buffy his fight with Nikki, while the action on screen shifts seamlessly from the past to the present, until it is Spike from the 70s directly addressing Buffy. There’s a little example below, but do yourself a favour and watch the whole exhilarating scene.

The alley fight scene ends with Buffy rejecting Spike’s romantic advances using the exact same words the woman from the Victorian party did, and it wounds him so deeply he starts to tear up. James Marsters, who plays Spike, does such a wonderful job of making you feel sorry for Spike when you really shouldn’t, that I said “Don’t cry!” out loud the first time I watched this scene. (And someone else has made a gif of giving Spike a wee hug at that point, so I am not the only one getting the feels.)

Obviously, modern-day Spike is not one to sit around weeping, so instead he decides that he will try to kill Buffy (again). But when he gets to her house, she has just received some bad news about her mother and is sitting crying on her back step. So Spike, who has come there to kill her, instead asks her what is wrong, and how he can help, and then just sits next to her, patting her shoulder in tentative and awkward consolation. It’s so unexpected, so sweet, and so revealing of his true, sensitive nature under the bloodthirsty fiend-ness. The perfect ending to an almost perfect episode.

Once More with Feeling (season 6, episode 7)

What can I even say about this episode? Going into it, I knew it was the musical episode, and I knew it was considered by many to be the best BtVS episode ever, and it still blew me away. It is just staggeringly good. It’s so good, I got my sister to watch it, even though she has no interest in BtVS at all, and she seemed to enjoy it. She laughed in all the right places, which reminded me of how funny this episode is too, as well as being dramatic, emotional, stylish and unforgettable.

The plot is that everyone in town has suddenly started singing and dancing, which sounds like fun, but they are also spilling their deepest secrets that they wanted to keep hidden, and in some cases they are dancing themselves to death by spontaneous combustion. Buffy and the gang have to work out who is behind it and stop them, while they keep inconveniently bursting into song.

The songs are great (my favourite is the rock number Rest in Peace, but there are lots of good songs that get stuck in your head); many (though not all) of the actors have great voices (Anthony Stewart Head’s poptastic tenor, James Marsters’ growly baritone, Amber Benson’s ethereal soprano); it looks fantastic (shot in widescreen and with more cinematic lighting); and the ‘dancing demon’, played by an award-winning Broadway star, is mesmerising. These are the reasons Once More with Feeling was released on DVD as a standalone, why it was shown in cinemas as a singalong, and why you can show it to relatives who aren’t fans and they’ll still enjoy it.

But for the fan, it’s all about the characters. They are saying the things they want to keep hidden, remember. So Xander and Anya sing about their doubts over the forthcoming wedding

Xander: Like she thinks I’m ordinary.

Anya: Like it’s all just temporary.

Tara sings a lovely ditty, Under Your Spell, about how she’s in love with Willow, which takes on a much darker meaning when she realises Willow has actually used magic to alter Tara’s memory. Giles sings about how he feels he should leave Buffy to stand on her own two feet (even though she’s trying to cope with crippling depression). And Spike, who is the one person Buffy has been able to talk to this season, a reliable shoulder to cry on who asks nothing of her in return, has to reveal, against his will, how much it pains him to spend time with Buffy when he is so much in love with her, and she seems to feel nothing for him. But worst of all, Buffy tells her whole friendship group the one thing she swore she would never tell them: that when they brought her back to life, they ripped her out of heaven.

All of these revelations will have consequences that will play out over the entire length of the season, and beyond – and they would never have come out, if it weren’t for the demon’s singing spell, which makes the whole musical extravaganza make sense in context. (Spells making people act out of character is a BtVS staple, of course.) It’s just a masterpiece, genuinely. I rated it 10/10 on IMDB, and I am a hard marker. (It has an overall IMDB score of 9.7.) And, for the Spuffy fan, it is an added bonus that “the curtains close / on a kiss, God knows”:

But enough gushing. If you made it to the end of this very long post (well done!) why don’t you let me know what your own favourite episodes are in the comments?

Tags: BtVS, buffy, cult TV, musicals, spuffy