Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Top 5 Buffy Moments
The last list is all about Buffy. Often, the supporting characters on Buffy the Vampire Slayer get the most attention, and it’s understandable; the show put so much work into making sure everyone was three-dimensional, human, relatable, and had an arc. But it’s a crime to overlook how important Buffy is to the show’s success; she’s the center, the character whose journey we follow, and she had to be someone we loved or, despite how great the others were, the show would have collapsed. Fortunately, Buffy was a terrific hero, a fundamentally good person who was deeply flawed and made human mistakes but strove to do good because, beyond it being her calling and responsibility, she genuinely wanted to help people. She was someone you could easily root for, who you hated to see hurt, and who was as fun to watch fight evil as any superhero. And Sarah Michelle Gellar was perfect in the role, playing every aspect of Buffy with humanity, even when she was unbelievably cool. She took the Slayer and made her a real girl.
So, here are my top five Buffy moments. These range from displays of her vulnerability to being a badass to heroic altruism to an epic speech. (Buffy was the master of epic speeches.) This is where I felt for her, cheered for her, and was in awe of her the most. As always, these are in chronological order, and spoilers abound.
If you haven’t, you can read the first four articles in this series here: 1, 2, 3, 4.
Buffy Rejects her Destiny (Season 1, Episode 12, “Prophecy Girl”)
“Giles, I’m sixteen years old. I don’t want to die.”
As the spring fling dance nears, apocalyptic events start happening in Sunnydale: water turns to blood, cats give birth to snakes, and an earthquake rocks the town. Something big is coming, and it centers on the Master, leader of the largest order of vampires and season 1’s main villain. While researching, Giles uncovers a prophecy stating that Buffy will face the Master, and the Master will kill her. He tirelessly tries to find a way around it, but he fails. But Buffy overhears him discussing it with Angel, and in the most devastating scene of the first season, she quits. She tells them she will not go, that she’s had enough of sacrificing for a calling she never wanted, and she will not lay down her life because a book says she must. Throwing down the cross necklace Angel gave her, she says, fear in her shaking voice, “Giles, I’m sixteen years old; I don’t want to die.”
I haven’t put anything from season 1 on these lists till now because it’s simply not the strongest season. It’s definitely not bad, as some will tell you, and it establishes much of the lore and the central characters, but it’s mostly setup for better things to come. However, it has some excellent character work that’s necessary to enjoy where they all go in the future, and “Prophecy Girl” is about the Scoobies growing up. Willow learns the true threat vampires present; Xander learns that loving someone is not all about your own feelings; Cordelia learns that there are more important things than her mean girls clique; even Giles, who is a grownup, learns that there are things he can’t do for his Slayer. Buffy is the big one; she has been stalwart and true so far, desiring a normal life but accepting that she has a duty as the Slayer. But learning she’s going to die in twenty-four hours is a step too far, and she reminds us that she’s just a kid, a teenage girl who hasn’t even begun to live her life. When the moment of truth comes, she doesn’t grit her teeth and go to war; she quits and runs away because she’s normal. Seeing the fear in Willow after stumbling on a vampire massacre and walking in on Giles as he resolves to face the Master in her place is when Buffy grows up; she learns that if she doesn’t accept the danger, others will die. That is when Buffy truly accepts being the Slayer, and she bravely walks off to meet her doom. (As you can guess, it doesn’t quite work out the way anyone expects.) Both of these are big moments, but her initial fear and rejection of her responsibility is what makes her human.
Buffy Liberates the Demons’ Slaves (Season 3, Episode 1, “Anne”)
“Anyone who’s not having fun here, follow me.”
“Anne” is perhaps the most underrated episode in the show’s run. It’s a fantastic opener to the third season that shows Buffy at her lowest point before reigniting the spark of heroism in her. After she had to send Angel to hell in “Becoming” (which, sidebar, would have made this list if I didn’t already talk about it in detail), Buffy left Sunnydale behind and ran off to Los Angeles. She’s now going by her middle name, Anne, and working as a waitress in a greasy spoon. But she soon gets involved with a rash of missing kids that coincides with the deaths of a bunch of unidentifiable old people. After some investigating, she discovers that a local youth outreach program is actually a trap where a group of demons take teens to a hell dimension and use them as slaves. Time moves much more slowly in that world – one hundred years there is just a day here – so the kids, once they’re old and work themselves to death, are deposited on Earth, and new victims are abducted. Buffy is taken along with a group of others, and they’re stood in line while a big demon with a massive club informs them that they will do what they’re told, that their identities are gone, and that they are “no one.” When he asks the first kid his name, he answers with his actual name, and the demon crushes his skull with the club. Every subsequent answer is the desired “no one.” Buffy shrinks back, looking utterly defeated and devoid of hope, but when the demon gets to her and asks who she is, she slowly looks up… then puts on a wide, sunny smile and says, “I’m Buffy the Vampire Slayer! And you are?” What follows is a massive action sequence where Buffy takes on the entire demon crew and beats them down, rescuing the teenagers and sealing the entry to the hell dimension after performing a satisfying kill on the demon ringleader, Ken (which probably wasn’t his real name).
First off, this is a cool as hell action scene, so much so that the pose Buffy strikes as she’s waiting for another wave of demons was used as the final shot of her in the opening titles for a couple of years. It’s mostly martial arts, but Buffy picks up some of the demons’ weapons and uses them against her enemies as well, from the big hammer to small throwing blades. But part of why it’s so satisfying is that we saw Buffy quit again; she had abandoned being the Slayer, but she also left her friends and her mother behind. In the beginning, a customer at the diner slaps her ass, and she just takes it. She’s not who she once was, content to drift through life with no resistance after not only losing Angel but choosing to kill him. As with “Prophecy Girl,” she’s given all she’s got. But she’s lying to herself; when she finds out there are people in trouble, she has to help, because, beyond being the Slayer, Buffy is a good person who cares. That’s why she went back in “Prophecy Girl,” and it’s why she can’t let these teenagers die. The big fight is the signal that Buffy is back, and she’s making sure everyone knows it. It’s cathartic on a character level and as the action climax to the episode, and Buffy has never been cooler than when she’s in the middle of a hellish factory waiting for the forces of evil to muster up the guts to come at her.
Buffy Puts the Watchers’ Council in Their Place (Season 5, Episode 12, “Checkpoint”)
“I’m fairly certain I said, ‘No interruptions.’”
At the end of season 3, Buffy quit the Watchers’ Council. It was a long time coming; they’d forced her into a test called the Cruciamentum, where they injected her with juiced-up muscle relaxants to take away her powers and locked her in a building with a vampire. (Actually, Giles administered the injections, to his great shame.) Then, they fired Giles because he tried to stop the test and save her, replacing him with Wesley, a bureaucratic stooge (who gets much more interesting on Angel). Finally, they demanded she let Angel die and refused to help her save him. So, she told them where to shove it and operated without them, with Giles acting as her Watcher again, albeit unofficially. But in season 5, Buffy is up against the most powerful villain she’s ever faced: Glory, who is much stronger than she is and is too powerful to fight. So, the Council bigwigs, including head Watcher Quentin Travers, arrive in Sunnydale and say they have information on Glory, but they’ll only give it to Buffy if she passes a series of tests. If she refuses, they’ll pull some strings and have Giles deported. Buffy plays along as they humiliate her, interview her friends, and threaten Giles. But when it comes time for her final review, Buffy lays a sword down on Quentin’s book, then makes a big speech where she informs them that she is in charge, not them, and they’ll do what she tells them, or they can take a hike and fade into irrelevancy. It doesn’t sound like much until you see it, when it becomes epic and, if you’ve seen the rest of the episode, incredibly satisfying.
Everyone kind of assumes Buffy is great at killing monsters and doing cool action-hero stuff, but what you won’t learn until you watch the show is that Buffy tells people off better than anyone. There’s a scene that I considered for this list from season 4 where Professor Walsh, the woman who ran a government program called the Initiative in Sunnydale, set her up to be killed and assumed it worked, but Buffy comes back on the camera and tells her, “If you think that’s enough to kill me, you really don’t know what a Slayer is. Trust me when I say you’re gonna find out.” But her showdown with the Watchers in “Checkpoint” is the best, and these stuffed-shirt prigs royally deserve it. One of the cool things about Buffy (and Angel) is the graying of moral lines as the story goes along. At first, we just accepted that the Watchers’ Council was a force for good, and while that’s basically true, they’re also petty, vindictive, and obsessed with controlling the Slayer and, in Giles’ case, her Watcher. Buffy confounds them because she’s too independent and sneers at their rules. They don’t much care that she’s right. For example, the Slayer is supposed to cut herself off from friends, family, and all ties to humanity, but Buffy is so successful as the Slayer because she does the opposite; she embraces her friends, and they give her a strength no other Slayer has had. (Does this sound like a farm boy from Tatooine who dreamed of being a Jedi?) When she quit, it was a massive blow to their egos, and now they see an opening to regain control of her and are taking it. But Buffy finally sees through it and gives them the news: “You guys didn’t come all the way from England to determine whether or not I was good enough to be let back in; you came to beg me to let you back in.” And it’s not just about her; Buffy defends her friends when the Council brings them up, telling them how important they are to her. She even gets Giles reinstated as her official Watcher with retroactive pay. This is a tremendous moment that shows how strong, intelligent, perceptive, loyal, and determined Buffy is.
Buffy Sacrifices Herself (Season 5, Episode 22, “The Gift”)
“Be brave. Live. For me.”
Dawn is Buffy’s sister, except not really; she’s a mystical energy source called the Key, who was turned into a human by a group of monks and given to Buffy to protect, with false memories created so that Buffy and everyone in her life would think of her as Buffy’s sister. In the season 5 finale, Glory, the god of a hell dimension, enacts her plan to use Dawn’s blood to open a gateway to her home world and return, unleashing hell on Earth. In the final moments, Buffy has defeated Glory, but she’s too late to stop the inter-dimensional gateway from opening; one of Glory’s minions has cut Dawn, whose blood is needed to open the door. The only way to stop it is by killing Dawn. Earlier in the season, Buffy went on a sort of vision quest and was visited by the spirit of the First Slayer, who told her, “Death is your gift.” All this time, Buffy assumed that it meant dealing out death, which she’s done many times as the Slayer, and now that the gateway is open, the obvious interpretation of that phrase is that she must kill Dawn, or at least allow Dawn to kill herself, which Dawn is ready to do. But as she stares into the abyss, Buffy remembers what she said to her friends: Dawn was created from her, with the monks using Buffy’s blood to make her. Suddenly, “Death is your gift” takes on a new meaning, and Buffy dives off the tower where Dawn was held, falling through waves of dark energy, and dies, which allows the portals to close. She sacrifices herself to save the world, and specifically, her sister, in one final act of love. (Well, not exactly “final;” there are two more seasons to go, so she doesn’t stay dead long.)
This is Buffy at her most heroic because it’s on a personal level. Buffy could have enacted the “Death is your gift” line by killing Dawn, no matter how much it destroyed her, to save the world, as she did with Angel in “Becoming.” But this time, there’s another way; either choice will save the world, but Buffy chooses to die to save Dawn. Buffy gives the girl who was never meant to be alive the chance to live the life she was denied. It’s her refutation of the idea that the Slayer is meant only to kill; she is not the instrument of a bunch of ponderous elders but a hero in her own right, someone who does right because she wants to help. And this is her ultimate test; she can kill Dawn and end the destruction of Earth. But she would rather save the individual, the girl she swore to protect, the sister that never existed but whom she will not deny because she knows what she feels. As with everything else she’s accomplished as the Slayer, it’s Buffy’s ties to humanity that allow her to be a hero. When they find her body, the reactions of her friends show what she meant to them all, with the most devastating being Spike, who weeps uncontrollably into his hands, removing any lingering doubt that he truly loves her. The sight of her tombstone as the final image is the perfect encapsulation of the show: sad, triumphant, and funny at once. Just like Buffy.
Buffy Rallies the Troops (Season 7, Episode 10, “Bring on the Night”)
“Anyone who wants to run, do it now, because we just became an army.”
“Bring on the Night” puts Buffy at one of her lowest points. She’s suddenly got a new responsibility: protecting the Potentials, the girls through whom the Slayer line runs. The First Evil, a devilish entity without physical form, is hunting them down to eliminate the Slayer for good and tip the balance of power on Earth in favor of evil. But it’s bringing in the big guns, including the Turok-Han, an extinct evolutionary ancestor of the vampire. It’s also kidnapped Spike, hoping to turn him to evil again and using him as a sleeper agent thanks to some mental conditioning. Buffy sets out to save him and encounters the Turok-Han… and it wipes the floor with her. Buffy is beaten decidedly, with Giles having to help her home. The Scoobie and the Potentials are worriedly arguing in the dining room till Buffy walks in, bruised, bloody, and seemingly broken. She begins to agree that their fight is hopeless. “I’m standing on the mouth of hell, and it is gonna swallow me whole.” Then, her demeanor shifts, you can almost hear her teeth grind, and she says, “And it’ll choke on me.” She then assures them that they are going to win, that they’ll overcome whatever odds are arrayed against them because they always have, and that the First Evil doesn’t know what it’s up against. She is the general of the army of light now, and she will lead them to victory because she has to.
A very dark and depressing episode ends on a note of triumph, even though nothing good has happened yet, because Buffy makes you believe it will. Sarah Michelle Gellar is outstanding in this scene, and Buffy’s initial fear is absolutely real, as is her change to determination. The part everyone remembers is the gung-ho second half of the speech because it’s awesome, but the first part is essential. Buffy is afraid, and she’s in pain. She’s outmatched, she’s lost Spike, and she’s got a bunch of scared and confused teenage girls depending on her, not to mention her friends and her sister. So, she’s got to suppress her fear and be the Slayer, the warrior for good, the last thing standing between humanity and darkness. And this is the portent of what’s to come because Buffy lives up to that promise. (See the Top 5 Fights list.) But her ability to calm the fears of those around her, to get them to follow her lead and be the best they can be, is part of what makes her a hero and an effective leader. She’s spent the past six years earning her friends’ trust, and now she’s assuring them that she’ll lead them to victory, and watching it, you’re ready to sign up with Buffy too.
Honorable Mention: Buffy Goes Back for the Potentials (Season 7, Episode 21, “End of Days”)
“There’s always more.”
Things have not gone well in season 7. In a controversial scene that’s difficult to watch, Buffy’s friends turn against her and ask her to leave, putting their trust in Faith (who is reformed now, which… I don’t care for) and taking over her home. This is born of fear, as she wants to attack the First’s seeming base of operations, a vineyard where she’s convinced the bad guys are hiding something. So Buffy leaves, dejected, until Spike finds her (after telling everyone off, which is a delight) and explains to her why and how he loves her in an incredible scene that resonates more with me the older I get. Reinvigorated, Buffy goes to the vineyard alone, and what a surprise: she was right! The First’s minions were looking for a weapon called the scythe, which was designed specifically for the Slayer. Meanwhile, Faith’s big plan leads her and the Potentials into a trap; a bomb explodes, and three Turok-Han emerge to slaughter the survivors. But when the First taunts her over it, Buffy goes back for them and rescues the people who took everything from her, using the scythe to make short work of the Turok-Han and bringing everyone home.
Season 7 has a lot of problems. The Potentials are annoying as hell, for starters, and they’re an important part of the story, so they’re around a lot. And having Buffy’s friends turn on her the way they do is hard to stomach. I understand they’re being manipulated by the First, but good God, it’s wildly out of character. But it does lead to some great stuff, like seeing Spike be the only one who refuses to turn on her and then giving her the strength to be a hero again, reciprocating what she did for him earlier in the season. But this moment says so much about Buffy because if any of us were in her shoes, we probably wouldn’t try to save these ungrateful wretches. When the Turok-Han set upon the Potentials and an unconscious Faith, I wanted a massacre because I was so disgusted with them. But despite everything they did to her, Buffy still goes back for them, saving them from certain death. She is a hero, the truest hero on the show (especially now), and she proves that when she has every reason not to. No matter how bad things get, you can still count on Buffy.
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And that’s a wrap! Thank you very much for reading; I hope you enjoyed these as much as I did writing them. Tomorrow, I’ll have a review of Slayers: A Buffyverse Story.
