In Buffy the Vampire Slayer's second episode, Buffy, in the middle of a world-saving adventure, gets grounded. In the face of Buffy's insistence that it is extremely important that she leave the house, her mother succinctly responds, "Everything is life or death when you're a sixteen-year-old girl." On it's own, the line is witty joke, a humorous comment on a character's lack of knowledge in that situation. Taken in the context of the seven years to come, however, it sounds a little more like a mission statement.
Over the following seasons, Buffy would take the basic fears, struggles, and emotions of adolescence and repackage them as literal monsters, magic, and fantasy. Conformity and bullying appear in the form of hyena spirits possessing teens. When characters can't keep anger towards one another buried, zombies rise from the grave. When our main character has a new college roommate she hates, that roommate turns out to be a literal demon. The package this all comes in is light (usually), entertaining, genre television. But all those monsters communicate very familiar ideas to us. Things that were meaningful to us when we grew up. Perhaps this resonance is why a show that many dismissed at first glance (Variety's first review went as in depth as a synopsis followed by "Series has potential for early-teen viewing") went on to become a show that fans and academics have endlessly dissected and analyzed (an entire academic journal and biannual conference exist just to study creator Joss Whedon's work).
The familiarity of the ideas being explored drew in fans. And, in using genre television as a vehicle for symbolism and metaphor (and, some would argue, allegory) Whedon defied all expectations for a show that, at first glance, seemed to be a fun romp for "early-teens". But Joss Whedon is not a lazy man. He was not content to repeat the same symbolic-monster-of-the-week formula for seven years straight. So, after breaking the mold with the show itself, Joss Whedon began to break his own mold. Increasingly, over the years, Whedon and the other writers of the show began to experiment. They looked for ways to use not only the content of the episodes to express ideas, but the very structure of the story being told. In the process they created what would be some of the best episodes of the series, and perhaps some of the most inventive episodes of television ever created. Here are three particularly worth your attention:
Hush (Season Four, Episode 10)
Hush was a game changer. Before it, there had been a few episodes that changed things up a little bit. There had been one alternate universe episode, and one that made the requisite apocalyptic threat a B-plot for comic effect (The Wish and The Zeppo. Both exceptional episodes. Watch them.) But, aside from the clever narrative devices, they mostly play like normal episodes. Hush was the first episode during which a viewer couldn't fail to realize that they were watching something wholly unusual. And something this show had certainly never done before.
For the first three and a half seasons it was on, the one thing Buffy was more or less universally praised for was its witty dialogue. So, in light of that, Whedon decided to make an episode with hardly any dialogue at all. For two thirds of its run-time, Hush is completely silent. On the subject of why he would do that, Joss Whedon told IGN in a 2003 interview:
part of it came from my feeling that I had started to fall into a hackdom, if you will. I'd been directing for three years, I'd directed, like, ten Buffys, and I was sort of falling into a very predictable visual pattern, which is what TV mostly does. It's radio with faces. I thought if I had no dialogue, I would be forced to tell the story visually.
It would be easy, as a viewer, to regard an episode like this as a gimmick, a jumping-the-shark moment. And on many other shows, it might have been. It could have just been "the silent episode", and nothing more. But Whedon was trying to artistically challenge himself, and he rose to that challenge. Instead of being a gimmick, the silence is both a vital plot device, and a means of expressing ideas about human communication. Hush, then, becomes a meditation on the insufficiency of language.
For the duration of the show's first act, roughly 13 minutes of screen time, words do nothing but get in the way. our characters bungle just about every social interaction they have. Buffy can't move things forward with her love interest because she has to lie about her life, and she awkwardly interrupts near kisses with more talk. Xander and his girlfriend have a serious fight because he's unable to articulate how he feels. Willow joins a wicca group to advance her study of witchcraft, but they're all talk. There are many more examples. There are about three per scene for, again, roughly 13 minutes of screen time. But once the speech is removed, real communication starts. Every failure of communication found in that first act is addressed thereafter. Everything that couldn't be communicated by words, is cleared up through actions. Not every problem is solved. Some things, in fact, get worse. But everything can move forward once those pesky words aren't stopping it. It was a bold move, to make an episode about how talking fails us in a series known for its talking. But Whedon's gamble paid off. Hush became a perennial fan favorite, and the only episode ever to earn the series an emmy nomination for writing.
Restless (Season Four, Episode 22)
Restless is one of those divisive, love-it-or-hate-it episodes (I'm in the love camp). It's not surprising that some people didn't quite know how to react to it. It's positioning as a season finale is, at the very least, unusual. Typically season finales are the climax of whatever storylines the show is working with that year. In the case of an action heavy show like Buffy it would be when the final battle happens and that season's Big Bad is defeated (as it had been the previous three seasons). So, imagine fans' surprise when, in the spring of 2000, everything got wrapped up a week early, leaving them to wonder what could possibly be happening in the finale. The answer: the heroes get some sleep.
Restless is composed almost entirely of dream sequences. Aside from a dialogue scene at the beginning and another at the end, nothing else happens. Each act consists of one dream, one for each of the four leads. A spirit attacks them late in each dream, to give it a through line. But mostly, they're just dreams. Once more, Joss Whedon presented himself a writing challenge, as a way of shaking things up. In his DVD audio commentary for the episode, he says:
This was, for me, a great big departure because everything I've done has been very, very carefully structured. Every story, every beat of every story is structured before I write a word. I can't write unless I know exactly where I'm going... in this particular instance I couldn't know where I was going. I literally had to just let it flow, and make sure the images were true to the characters, true to the flow of the energy of the narrative so that there was some momentum. Things become creepier as we go along. But basically I just had to free-associate in every act, which for me was very liberating.
.And with this atypical, free-associating structure, the episode becomes an examination of the characters and where they are in their lives. Rather than the climax to the thrilling monster plot, the finale becomes more of a final emotional statement at the end of a season focused on the characters growing apart and changing as people (more or less what happens in real life during the first year of college). Thus Willow, who has spent the year redefining herself and grappling with her shifting sexuality has a dream full of performance imagery and the suggetion that her new identity is a disguise over the old one. Xander, who didn't goes to college and lives in his parents' basement, has a dream full of attempts to join his college friends, and do meaningful things, which repeatedly fail and lead him back to that basement. And so on and so forth.
Thus, with an extended look into our protagonists' psyches, and healthy dose of humorous, surprisingly accurate dream-logic (We recognize that play as Death of a Salesman, but it sure isn't how we remember it from when we were awake), Joss Whedon gives us a nuanced, almost mesmerizing examination of how four specific human beings are growing and changing.
The Body (Season Five, Episode 16)
Even among these unusual episodes, this one is unusual. Its atypical structure doesn't come in the form of an easy to define almost-gimmick like "the silent episode" or "the dream episode" (or the later "the musical episode"). There isn't even a monster to fight. Well, actually there is, but it's more afterthought than anything else, and has no bearing on the plot. Most significantly, unlike most episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Body isn't fun. That's not to say it's bad. Some people (myself included) consider it the best episode of the series.
With The Body, the makers of the show set out to make an episode about death. Five seasons into a show where somebody dies in nearly every episode, they made an episode about death. Not the sort of death they had done before, with monsters and excitement, but real death. Death as it happens in real life, and how it affects those whom the deceased has left behind.
So, Buffy's mother dies of natural causes, and we get an unflinching look at the aftermath.
On the subject, Joss Whedon has this to say:
What I really wanted to capture was the extreme physicality, the extreme – the almost boredom of the very first few hours. I wanted to be very specific about what it felt like the moment you discover something, ah, you've lost someone. And so what appears to many people as a formal exercise – no music, scenes that take up almost the entire act if not the entire act without end – is all done for a very specific purpose. Which is to put you in the moment. That moment of dumbfounded shock. That airlessness of losing somebody.
And it all achieves that end. Every act functions more like a short play than a section in a TV story. Each act is in real time, focusing on a different character or group of characters. So, you're there in the moment as the characters deal with a tragedy. The lack of music keeps it from becoming too easy. A score would make it feel like, well, a TV show. It would make it all okay. Without it, you are left with just the dead air these people are breathing. A series of strange, expressionistic, cinematic flourishes give us painfully familiar insights into what the characters are feeling. (When the paramedics arrive, we never get a clear, focused shot of their faces. As an agitated Xander paces, he wanders in and out of frame, while the camera holds on a crowd of people outside, still living their ordinary lives.)
For anybody who has ever lost a loved one, the proceedings here will feel painfully familiar, and incredibly accurate. It is difficult to watch, and it should be. Loss is devastating. And this is a very truthful portrayal of it, from a very unlikely source: a TV show that usually consists of witty people fighting kooky monsters. It is one of the best episodes of Buffy and one of the greatest portrayals of its subject matter popular culture has produced.
There are well over a hundred other great episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And even a few other experimental ones (See also: Once More With Feeling and Conversations With Dead People). But even the regular ones, for the most part, consistently provided some little nugget of truth, some idea that feels familiar and lets us look at our own adolescence in a new way. Perhaps that's why Buffy has lasted while some of its contemporary genre television has faded away. It was never content to talk to you in a way you'd heard before. In Restless, as Buffy dreams, her friend, Tara, tells her "You think you know what's to come." Critics in '97 thought they did. Later on, fans of the show thought they did too. But, as Tara would go on to say, "You haven't even begun."
