“I just feel like I’m spending all my time trying to be okay so they don’t worry. It’s exhausting.”
I know this line. I live it. Like Buffy the vampire slayer, there is a clean line between one part of me and another. A girl who once lived easy, a woman who never will again. Someone who feels guilty for saying something so absolute, because it makes people uncomfortable. But who at other times feels sick of abetting that comfort when there’s no space made for me.
You see the predicament? The endless back and forth of self. The people pleaser and the people hater. They shout at each other inside of me, all day long. Part of me craves assimilation and part of me is proud to reject it.
Buffy season six has always been a balm for me, because it translates this messy inner-conflict to screen. The above line comes from episode four, “Flooded”, when Buffy shares with Spike the tiresome way she spends her days: Hiding her depression so her friends can feel better. The exhaustion that comes with making others feel better at the expense of your pain.
The season opens after Buffy dies and is resurrected by her friends. An act of generosity, seemingly, but in truth of duplicitous intent. Buffy wasn’t snatched from a hell dimension like her friends presupposed, but was expelled from heaven—where, after the slog of slaying, the threat of never-ending apocalypse, and enormous personal loss, she was finally at peace.
Now she’s actually in hell. As she tells Spike, the only member of her cohort who understands her pain (he being a vampire and therefore dead himself):
“Wherever I was, I was happy. At peace. I knew that everyone I cared about was all right. I knew it. Time… didn’t mean anything. Nothing had form. But I was still me, you know? And I was warm... and I was loved... and I was finished. Complete. I don't understand theology or dimensions, or... any of it, really. But I think I was in heaven. And now I'm not. I was torn out of there. Pulled out by my friends. Everything here is... hard, and bright, and violent. Everything I feel, everything I touch... this is hell. Just getting through the next moment, and the one after that. Knowing what I've lost.
With every rewatch, season six strikes some different chord in me. It’s a controversial one for fans (and even Sarah Michelle Gellar). The sharp shift to despair… it isolated. But for the despairing, it was a welcome transition. I love how fearlessly the season plunges the show into adulthood, how unflinchingly it exposes each core character. There are so many lines that hit and hurt and linger, not just about Buffy, but about her best friends too: Willow, the witch, whose growing power slips into ego and addiction; Xander, the “normal” one, whose quick commitment to fiancé Anya unlocks ravaging self-doubt; Giles, Buffy’s mentor and trainer, whose answer to everything is to run away; and Spike, aforementioned vampire, whose obsessive love of Buffy is returned with great physical and emotional cost to both.
My most recent rewatch was more revealing than any other. Because my own life has transformed so seismically in the decade since I last revisited. I was bowled over by the season’s profundity, its clean writing, its fanged approach to character development—never easy, always so fucking real. Most teen shows are clumsy as they age to adulthood. Buffy is anything but. It may not feel good all the time, it may not comfort, but it’s important for audiences to see what life can be—and what it already is for those of us walking in Buffy’s (trendy) shoes.
Still I always feel this strange estrangement—
Nothing here is real, nothing here is right.
Buffy’s famous musical episode, “Once More With Feeling”, is a centerpiece for season six and a key part of what makes it so beautifully human and so abundant in its depiction of depression, suicidal ideation, self harm, abandonment, and addiction. It opens with Buffy on a typical night of slaying, walking through a graveyard with stake in hand. Sunnydale is under the spell of a demon who turns daily life into song. This musical device means the characters have no choice but to sing the feelings buried within. It’s an hour of revelations that give the season momentum, and lay bare its deepest heartaches.
Buffy’s opening musical monologue about “going through the motions” is melodically twinkly, but the lyrics are cutting. She cries out for the version of her that she lost in death and the depression she now suffers from, one she carefully hides from her friends. But she also admits something we haven’t heard in the season until this point: that she really does long to be alive again. That there is hope in her gloom, albeit so buried in ennui that she can’t chisel her way through, can’t rattle herself back to recognizable form. She fears that this is it. This is life now: Detachment, desolation.
There is another unspoken element too. In season five, Buffy’s mother Joyce died of a ruptured aneurysm after brain tumor surgery. It is, by the show’s standards, a “normal” death: nothing supernatural or otherworldly about it. And Buffy, so used to otherworldly ordeals, struggles to comprehend or combat it. She pushes it aside. She soldiers on. There is so much else to face that Joyce’s absence takes a while to fester.
And that’s the thing with grief. It is often on delay. It’s something I know intimately too. My mother died of the exact same thing Joyce does. Like Joyce, she seemed sure to recover after brain tumor surgery. But then she didn’t. And though her death was less sudden, it ended the same—it always does. I was eleven, but the terrible finality of her loss didn’t register until much later—my mid-20s, really. And by the time it did, the damage was done. The grief mingled with all the other things wrong with me: the generational mental illness, the emotional neglect, the tendency to self-harm, self-annihilate. Together, those ugly things made a person. Me. I felt for a long time, and sometimes still do, that they were all that I am. Sharp edges and open veins and something diabolical, fundamentally and irrevocably broken.
Buffy post-resurrection is to familiar to me and my various acts of self harm—and their near-death repercussions. You may escape the fog, but you never really do. There is always a part of you still there, in the veil of fabric between life and death where you temporarily lived. And though it’s fucked up to admit, sometimes you miss it there. There is something easy about craving death. Craving life is far more absurd.
Season six is unkind to Buffy in many ways. Almost relentless. She is tormented by “the trio”, the season’s de-facto villains: three obnoxious fandom-obsessed incels who weaponize their nerdiness to exact revenge on those who’ve wronged them. (Another way this season was ahead of its time.) She gets involved in a toxic relationship with Spike, one that ends in a brutal sexual assault. She has visions of herself in a mental institution and wonders if her life is even real. She almost kills her friends and family during a psychosis. She is shot and nearly killed again.
But I’d argue that the worst thing that happens to her is the loneliness that comes with her trauma. Something any chronically grieving and depressed person knows all too well. The overwhelming and annihilating awareness that most people will never understand you. Will slather you with faux-sentiment and impersonal positivity that only exiles you more. They’ll tell you things like “I’m so sorry you’re going through this” or “I’m thinking of you”, which is such AI, Mad Libbed, hokey bullshit it’d be better if they shut up entirely. All you crave is simple and sincere acknowledgment—a check-in on the holidays to see how you’re doing, a book or movie recommendation that they sense might bring you solace, a look in the eyes that says “I see you, you matter. Your pain is understandable and you deserve to feel it.”
But you never get that. You are deprived of such things. Your friends expect kindness and gratitude from you. And so the forced assimilation becomes prolonged resentment. And that’s where you live—in that space between craving life, craving death, and wishing torment on the people who only mean well.
I saw a world enchanted,
Spirits and charms in the air.
Willow. Delicate, lovable computer dork. Earnest, sensitive friend. In early seasons, she channels her inherent, genuine goodness into magic. An act of selflessness that became self—a draw to the mystique that made her as powerful, or perhaps more powerful, than her best friend the slayer. In time, the shy, soft Willow was austere, controlled, magnetic.
But as with many who seek channels of control, Willow’s love for magic shifted into reliance—and eventually abuse. It became a crux: a quick fix for everything, right down to changing her clothes. When something went wrong, there was a spell to mend it. As Willow’s dependence on magic grew, so did the concern of her girlfriend and fellow witch Tara, who was not just wary of Willow’s magic, but a victim of it.
In “Once More With Feeling”, Tara learns that Willow is using a magical flower to play with her memory. Though angry, she extends grace and gives Willow another chance. A chance Willow quickly fails, once again toying with memories to protect her good standing and reliance on her drug.
Buffy’s journey to depression isn’t out of nowhere. Her draw to darkness was there from the offset, a consequence of her role as chosen one. But Willow… her change cuts deep. And it didn’t start with her betrayal of Tara, but rather her decision to resurrect Buffy. Because Willow didn’t merely wish to bring back her friend. She eager to prove that she could. In a conversation with Giles, she speaks of the dangerous retrieval spell with arrogance and thrill, disregarding the severity of the act in favor of the high that came with it. Giles chastises her, calls her an amateur, which should have snapped Willow back to reality—but instead only pisses her off.
Willow’s addiction storyline is one the most divisive in Buffy history. Look at any ongoing fan conversation and there is significant debate about its necessity and inevitable fallout. Not only does Willow slip into dark magic after Tara leaves her, but she almost kills Dawn. And though she gets temporarily clean, she’s brought right back when Tara is unexpectedly shot and killed by Warren, the leader of the trio. The devastation of Tara’s loss plunges Willow in the darkest depths of magical addiction. She overdoses on power, murders Warren, and almost ignites another apocalypse before Giles and Xander intervene.
Tara’s death is hard to defend in the context of television history. I won’t deny the grave impact of the “bury your gays” trope, nor do I think that she needed to die at all. The absence of her purity and kindness, what she brought not only to Willow but also to Dawn and Buffy, leaves a hole in the rest of the series. But the lead up, and Willow’s swift downfall, is in my opinion profound in impact and intent. And says something not just truthful about addiction, but hopeful too.
I suffered from alcohol abuse for about a decade, something that started, as with Willow, fairly innocently. It’s amazing how what feels like elixir can slowly turn to arsenic. Too much of any good thing and you’re under a spell. Synthetic confidence is a mirage. It’s unsustainable. And it will bring you down with impunity, always an escalation of events: merciless, punishing, deadly.
I will always be appreciative for the way the show handles Willow’s addiction, for many reasons but especially this one: the love from her friends never wanes. That’s been my experience too. The people who love you, who really love you, never stop. You will never know grace like you do in addiction. You lose some people, and that’s the cost. You lose parts of yourself too, which are often irretrievable.
But the love… it becomes your new intoxication. The real elixir. And Willow’s friends, despite their grief, never stop loving her. I think fondly of this exchange between Buffy and Willow, after the latter almost kills Dawn in a car crash. Buffy seethes with anger—until she sees the pain her best friend is in.
Willow: If you could be, you know, plain old Willow or super Willow, who would you be? I guess you don't actually have an option on the whole super thing.
Buffy: Will, there's nothing wrong with you. You don't need magic to be special.
Willow: Don't I? I mean, Buffy, who was I? Just... some girl. Tara didn't even know that girl.
Buffy: You are more than some girl. And Tara wants you to stop. She loves you.
Willow: We don't know that.
Buffy: I know that. I promise you.
Or Xander, who finds Willow in the finale on the brink of mass destruction—her own, and the world’s—and comforts her. “I know you’re in pain… I can’t imagine the pain you’re in,” he says, referencing Tara’s loss. "And I know you’re about to do something apocalyptically evil and stupid. And hey, I still wanna hang. Because you’re Willow.”
You are always yourself, even with parts discarded. Willow learns this. I’m still learning this. Addiction alters you atomically, but in sobriety it also makes a new you. A better you. A you who understands the darkest shadows of self—and who knows they are vanquishable.
I lied, I said it's easy.
I've tried, but there's these fears I can't quell.
Speaking of Xander, he’s the character I find most allusive—I am not sure I understand him, but in that complication is something deeply recognizable. Not relatable to me personally, but real. And though I’d like to refrain from too much stereotyping or gender essentialism, it may be hard, because unfortunately Xander is most men I’ve known.
And that’s the conundrum. Because I find men (at least of the cis-hetero variety) to be utterly perplexing. I know and have seen their sensitivity—the soft parts that exist but go un-nurtured. I know that they listen and at times even absorb. But I don’t understand the gulf between observation and communication. What gets lost in there. And I don’t think they understand the capacity for harm contained in that negligence.
Xander, in an act of sweeping love, proposes to Anya in the finale of season five. He tells her it’s because he’s confident they’ll survive their current apocalypse. And she believes him. Anya, former vengeance demon, always loved Xander uncomplicatedly. His body, his charm, the love for his friends. But he was never quite ready for that. For her. As if there were some cognizant disfunction in his brain that would not permit unfettered love. His eye fixated instead on the horizon—on what hadn’t come to pass but what might.
But he communicates none of this. His affection for Anya is there, but always fractured. He is often more concerned with Buffy’s romantic life than his own. His eye wanders. His loyalties never quite affix to the person to whom he proposes. As season six unfurls, so does his assumption that his love for Anya might grow clearer—despite putting in zero effort. And damn, if that isn’t so many men. Coasting, coasting, coasting, then bam: a waterfall of hurt.
You’d think they’d learn. But instead, betrayal often begets belittlement. Such is the case with Xander. After a demon gives him a vision of the future—an unhappy future, where he and Anya loathe one another—he decides to leave her at the wedding altar. And even though we learn the demon was merely manipulating him, it doesn’t matter. It made that nagging fear too real. And instead of working through it, and despite Anya’s pleas, he walks.
This abandonment sways Anya back to vengeance demonhood, and eventually, into the arms of an equally heartbroken Spike. When Xander finds out she hooked up with a vampire, he makes no attempt to see her side. Instead, he doubles down, slut shames her, calls her immature. He takes no responsibility for the relationship he destroyed.
And as much as I hate him for it… I love the show’s commitment to accountability. That it holds Xander firmly over the fire and makes him squirm. After the confrontation with Anya, she calls Xander a “scared, insecure little boy”, mocking his reliance on humor as defense mechanism. It’s something many Xander critics have long lamented, and seeing it articulated in the show’s text is a powerful confrontation. Xander is not immune from the same undressing his friends get. His demons may not be literal, but are still laid bare.
I do think Xander leaving Anya was ultimately for the best. Not because he did some noble thing, but because she deserved the freedom. Women carry so much, endure so much—and are awarded with lifetime of supply of male fragility management. I know I’m tired of it. Of putting so much effort into relationships while my male counterparts barely try.
I wish that Anya’s story ended happily—spoiler alert: it doesn’t—but I am proud that the show took her pain seriously. That it saw the shit Anya put up with and validated her emotional fallout. Buffy never makes its women hysterical or nonsensical. Xander is the loser here, and he knows it, learns it, and never quite recovers from it. He gets what he deserves.
A whisper in a dead man's ear doesn't make it real.
And then there’s Spike. Cruel, complicated—beautifully, meticulously layered. Always interesting, always vulnerable. And unlike Xander, sensitive to and appreciative of women in a way that defies his undead nature. He is maybe the show’s only good man.
Which is a loaded thing to say in a season where he tries to rape our heroine. It feels almost wrong to defend him, because modern optics make me feel like an apologist for doing so. But I don’t think it’s that easy. And while I do believe making him an attempted rapist is one of the least thought-out plot points of the season, there are aspects of it that I “like” (for, uh, lack of a better word). Even though it takes some icky sidestepping to get there.
But let’s try. Because by this point, we’ve watched Spike grow from a villain-of-the-week into one of the show’s most fascinating and lovable characters. He’s a vampire, yes, but a vampire whose human goodness bleeds through evil exterior. In season four, a government initiative implants a chip in his head that prevents him from harming humans. What could have been a lazy plot device to make Spike part of the gang is actually a wonderful narrative tool, something explored with impressive depth in the seasons that follow. Yes, the chip ostensibly neuters Spike—but in muzzling his vampire instincts, he’s allowed to grow in ways I’ve never quite seen on TV before. His arc follows no preordained formula. It is something strange and unique to this character, this show. And it’s so revealing—not just of Spike, but of the human condition and its supernatural capacity to reform.
We learn in season five that prior to his turning, Spike was a gentle soul: a poet and hopeless romantic who felt inferior to the women he fell for. As a vampire, that romanticism still exists, but is sharpened—both by the nature of vampirism, but intentionally by Spike too. He tries his best to be bad, and often succeeds, but there is a softness to him that is intrinsic, that even demonhood can’t fully suppress. We see it even with Drusilla, whom Spike tends to with affectionate devotion. Their version of toxic and violent love is “acceptable”—they’re blood-sucking demons, after all. But when he falls for Buffy, he’s forced to sort through evil impulse and the earnest lover he once was. A dichotomy ripe for dysfunction.
When Buffy returns from the grave, Spike is the only person she feels safe confiding in. Part of that is their shared experience with death. But another part is that she knows he loves her—and she gets off on it. Spike is not the first vampire she’s had feelings for, but her love for Angel was less complicated because he had a soul, and so she knew there was good in him. But Spike is soulless and therefore the very type of creature Buffy was called upon to destroy. She hates him, but she also hates herself, so she seeks him out. Lets him in.
The result is, unfortunately, very sexy.
But it’s also really fucked up. Buffy starts sleeping with Spike, who appreciates the reciprocation—while also feeling the gnawing pain of loving someone who only tolerates you. And yet, because Buffy is exploring her dark side, she goads Spike’s evil instincts too. They say cruel things to each other. They trade kinks. They fuck in public. When the trio makes her invisible for a day, she manipulates Spike into sex. They tell each other they’re over countless times, but keep coming back for more. Consent is abstract. It’s mutually destructive, but they can’t get enough.
And what depressed person hasn’t been there? Doesn’t know this kind of relationship? Secretive and barely real to anyone but the participants, and even them only half the time. Knowing it’s doomed but stoking the fire all the same. Knowing it hurts but allowing that hurt because you think it’s what you deserve. And it’s even more red-hot when one party is actually insnared. Because they can make you feel important. And when you’re hungry to feel something, anything, importance can function like love.
Through Spike, Buffy can also act out parts of herself she never could before. With Angel, things were sweeping and romantic, but “traditional” as far as vampire love stories go. With Spike, however, nothing is off limits. And when you share that kind of dangerous bond with someone, you are locked in morbid gameplay. You are a secret keeper. And when you’re not wholly on the same page, that becomes a threat.
I’ve been Buffy, running after someone I shouldn’t just to feel. Provoking myself, pushing my own boundaries as a resuscitation attempt. But I’ve also been Spike, in love with someone who wouldn’t love me back. Putting up with more than I should because a taste is better than nothing. Enduring toxic, going-nowhere situationships instead of admitting that we cannot mold people’s feelings into what we want them to be—even our own—if the pieces don’t fit.
Of course, the Buffy and Spike thing grows more complicated by the assault, when Spike’s evil instincts win out in his attempt to make Buffy love him. It’s a morbid scene, one that’s increasingly hard to watch, but one that is often the conclusion of toxic relationships—not the assault aspect, per se, but some type of crushing fallout. I don’t like what this scene does to Spike’s character, even though it technically makes sense, given his soulless existence. Vampires are evil, and the scene exists to remind us of that—and also to call out the lack of established consent between the two, one that a human knows the limits of but that a vampire cannot. How can you practice and enact morality when your existence is to corrupt it?
I wish the writers had devised a different way to get him to his next steps, because where he winds up at the end of season six… it really means something to me. It shows us that even the worst evil can subside with intent and atonement in the name of love—of self and others.
Spike locates a demon who restores his soul so he can never hurt Buffy, or anyone, again. An act of utter sacrifice—one we’ve never seen a vampire actively seek. (Angel’s soul was restored as punishment, not will.) Spike tries harder than anyone to fight for whatever goodness might still exist in him. I hate what it took to get him there, but I can’t deny the impact of the season’s closing moments. Of the demon placing his hand on Spike’s chest and imbuing him with tremendous, overpowering light. The light of life. Enduring inconceivable pain for the only thing he can conceive of anymore: Buffy. The woman he loves, even if she won’t love him back. Because sometimes—or maybe even always—love is nonsensical. But clinging to it, even just for ourselves, can be the sliver of hope we need. To reignite, or perhaps discover for the first time, our true purpose.
Does anybody even notice?
Does anybody even care?
Season six is also, in many ways, about the thing I fear most: abandonment. What it does to people, how it breaks them. It is a theme most articulated through Dawn, Buffy’s little sister, who feels loss—and its associated abandonment—everywhere. Her mother, her sister, Tara, Giles. People keep going, and even the ones who stay are faraway. Willow lost in magic, Xander in his woes. .
And so Dawn acts up, developing a shoplifting habit that at first glance is kind of juvenile and unimportant. Everyone else is going through real shit, and she’s just stealing necklaces and toothbrushes. But on this watch, I saw this arc for how sad it really is. How in doing something stupid like stealing trinkets, she’s pleading for their attention and affection. And you’d think after all she went through in season five—when her own identify frayed—that they’d do more to protect her. But her protection is instead a flimsy concept—keeping someone physically in the house to watch over her—instead of a real attempt to make a child feel loved, held, safe.
The fourteenth episode of the season, “Older and Far Away”, focuses intently on Dawn’s abandonment anxieties. She accidentally makes a wish to vengeance demon Halfrek that the people she love stay put, which becomes literal. It’s Buffy’s birthday, so everyone is in the Summers household for a party. Sensing opportunity, Halfrek binds the attendees to the house so they cannot leave, sealing them away together. It’s a great narrative device in that it necessitates confrontation. Dawn’s kleptomania is revealed, as is her immense, almost cloying desire for protection—the real kind.
Though it doesn’t take hold until the finale, this episode plants the seeds for the thing that finally brings Buffy back by season’s end—that helps her find something truly worth fighting for.
Her sister.
Not to get too sappy or even more personal than I usually do, but this part landed so hard for me on this watch. Because it’s my story too. My little sister is the reason I’ve clawed my way back to life many times. The thing that keeps me going most days. When life feels overwhelming and insurmountable, I tell myself: if you give up, she’s the one who pays. Like me, she’s lost a mother, a father, much of our family, and her own people too. I have a tendency to express my pain as if I’m a singular victim of it, but in truth I am not. She is too. The exact same strain. The exact same scars.
Finding community with her has healed me better than any medicine or therapy. The threat of leaving her behind, of becoming the thing I fear most—an abandoner—is all the antidote I need. And the one Buffy needed too. In the closing moments of season six, with Sarah McLachlan’s “Prayer of Saint Francis” narrating, Buffy fights for her life again. But not before she tells Dawn: “I don't want to protect you from the world. I want to show it to you.”
Soft light bathes a graveyard as together they emerge from another near-apocalypse. Nearby, Willow and Xander are embracing on a hillside, magic draining from her body. Far off, Spike is fighting tooth and nail for his redemption. It is a sequence of great emotion but most of all great healing. Everyone—finally—trying. Really trying. Using love to power through their various undoings. Coming together, not running away.
Where do we go from here?
I struggle to see why a season so punishingly human is reviled by so many, but I guess it makes sense. It’s easier to pretend these things don’t exist, to stave off confrontation and accountability. We don’t always want our entertainment to force our own bloodied conscience to the foreground. And maybe it’s even simpler than that. Maybe there is apprehension in disturbing the peace. I think again of Buffy’s friends prior to the finale, before all the hitting of shit on the fan. When they paved over her resurrection trauma and ensuing depression and told her to be thankful for life. Those cloyingly empty sentiments are more comfortable for many. They mimic compassion without understanding it.
And these days, I have more patience for that. I think: they haven’t yet been acquainted with the dark things that I have, that my sister has, and that many others like us have. But they will be someday. And it’ll hurt. And maybe they’ll rediscover Buffy season six too, and it’ll mean something new.
Amazing. Season six has always been one of my favorites, and you captured some of the reasons why so beautifully!