Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Top 5 Fights
Because it’s about vampires, demons, and the like, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is typically considered a horror show, but it’s also essentially a superhero story. That means action, and Buffy had some good fights in its run. These are the best of those, where Buffy has a showdown with an enemy that matches her strength – or exceeds it. These are in chronological order, and there are spoilers.
Buffy vs. Angelus (Season 2, Episode 22, “Becoming: Part 2”)
“You’re going to hell.”
“Save me a seat.”
After she takes out his sole remaining henchman, and he gets a long-overdue smackdown from a crowbar-wielding Spike, Buffy and Angelus face off for season 2’s final battle. Angelus has pulled the sword buried in the demon Acathla’s heart, meaning the world is about to be sucked into hell. The only way to stop it is to impale Angelus with another sword blessed by the knight who first slew Acathla, sending him to hell in place of the rest of us. Cue a sword fight between two fairly equally matched opponents. But context is important; in the first half of “Becoming,” Buffy fought Angelus and held back, knowing Willow was attempting to restore his soul and bring back Angel; but she discovered that Angelus had anticipated that and used the fight to keep her busy while Drusilla and their henchmen attacked the library. Her love for Angel and desire to bring him back got other people hurt and killed, and now the whole world is at stake. Unbeknownst to Buffy, Willow has recovered and is attempting to perform the spell again, determined to get it right this time. And Xander, who loves Buffy and has always been jealous of Angel, neglects to tell Buffy in the hopes that she’ll kill Angelus and he’ll have no competition for her. (Some people believe he does this for the good of the world, but I don’t buy it; Xander doesn’t think like that, especially this early.)
So, both combatants are letting loose, each looking to kill the other. This leads to one of the show’s most iconic moments: Angelus gets the upper hand, disarming Buffy and slowly walking towards her, toying with her by waving his sword around as she closes her eyes, seemingly prepared to die. He says, “So, that’s everything, huh? No weapons, no friends, no hope. Take all that away, and what’s left?” He plunges the sword to her face, but Buffy claps her hands together, stopping the blade mid-strike, opens her eyes, and says, “Me.” And she’s right; she kicks Angelus’ ass, reinvigorated and determined to save the world once again. But just as she’s about to land the killing blow… Willow completes the spell, and Angel is back. Triumph then turns to tragedy as Buffy kisses a newly-restored Angel and, while the portal to hell opens behind him, tells him to close his eyes, then impales him with the sword, sending him to hell and saving the world. She doesn’t utter another word in the episode; she just weeps and leaves town in despair. The fight itself is great, but the emotional roller coaster is what makes it one of the very best on the show, with our desire to see Angelus paid back morphing into the sorrow of watching Buffy have to effectively kill the man she loves, another wound on the soul of someone who’s already sacrificed so much. Buffy simultaneously wins and loses.
Buffy vs. Faith (Season 2, Episode 21, “Graduation Day: Part 1”)
“What’s the matter? All that killing, and you’re afraid to die?”
The season 3 finale once again puts the good guys in dire straits. The Mayor, the season’s main villain, is preparing for the Ascension, the end of a 100-day period where he will become a pure demon, a version of the Old Ones who once ruled the world. (It involves eating giant bugs.) And he’s got Faith, a Slayer who has turned to evil, as his henchwoman. In order to keep Buffy distracted, Faith shoots Angel (who is back from hell) with an arrow laced with a poison that slowly kills a vampire. The Watchers Council orders Buffy to do nothing and refuses to help her heal Angel, which goes about as well as they would have known it would if they knew the first thing about her: she quits, tells the Council to eat it, and goes to work with her friends. They discover there is only one cure for Angel’s poisoning: the blood of a Slayer. The presumption is that Buffy will offer herself up, but she grins and says, “It’s perfect. Angel needs to drain a Slayer, then I’ll bring him one.” This is a big deal; throughout the episode, it’s established that Buffy is at a disadvantage against Faith because she doesn’t kill people, even super-powered ones like Faith, and she reiterates that it’s a line she won’t cross. But with Angel in trouble and Faith being the would-be assassin, things have changed. Now, Buffy goes after Faith, tired of her woe-is-me act and ready to straight-up kill this bitch and feed her to Angel.
The fight is a no-holds-barred brawl between two equally powerful women who absolutely hate each other. Every punch and kick has the weight of a season’s worth of conflict behind it. Faith feels that Buffy has taken what was supposed to be hers, that she’s not special because Buffy exists as the Slayer as well, that her friends and Watchers see Buffy as the true Slayer. And Buffy has tried to help Faith over and over, but is now about to lose Angel after just getting him back, and she’s had enough. The fight tears Faith’s penthouse apartment to pieces and spills onto the rooftop terrace, where Buffy handcuffs herself to Faith to stop her from getting away, then pulls out Faith’s knife, one given to her by the Mayor, which Buffy took after she left it behind in an earlier standoff. When Faith mentions it’s her knife, Buffy says, “You’re about to get it back,” and we all cheer. And, finally, Buffy stabs Faith in the gut with her own weapon. Knowing (well, assuming) it’s over for her, Faith hits Buffy one last time and jumps off the roof, landing in a passing truck and ensuring that Buffy can’t use her to save Angel. Meanwhile, Buffy is horrified that she actually did it; she thought she was ready to take a life that deserved to be taken, but actually killing Faith (or so she thinks) is different. And here, we see what separates Buffy from Faith; Faith’s taking of a human life halfway through the season pushed her to evil, while Buffy’s only reaffirms her decency and heroism. Again, Buffy technically wins, but she loses almost as much in the process. (Not Angel, though; this time, she makes the sacrifice to save him.)
Buffy vs. Spike (Season 4, Episode 3, “The Harsh Light of Day”)
“Oh, do it again. It tickles, you know, in a good way.”
Buffy and Spike have fought many times over the course of the show, but this one is the best and most epic. They’re still arch-enemies at this point, and they want to kill each other, so the stakes are high. This episode is Spike’s return to Sunnydale after fleeing with Drusilla at the end of season 2 and a brief reappearance in season 3 (the excellent “Lover’s Walk”). He’s here searching for the Gem of Amarra, an artifact that makes a vampire invulnerable. After a lot of digging, drilling, and putting up with new girlfriend Harmony’s incessant yapping and lack of intelligence (Harmony is another long story, but she’s great, too), he unearths a treasure trove and, eventually, finds the Gem as the jewel in a ring. Putting it on, he seeks out Buffy, the one Slayer he’s been unable to kill, to finish her off once and for all. Buffy, meanwhile, is emotionally vulnerable after being used as a one-night stand by some dip named Parker. The moment Parker casts her aside, Spike steps in to deck her, and the fight begins.
As the title implies, the fight takes place on the local college campus in broad daylight, to which Spike is now immune, thanks to the Gem. They trade some blows, and Buffy quickly puts a stake in his heart, but once again, it does nothing, and Spike slaps the stake away from her. But before he hits Buffy again, he makes the big mistake of arrogantly showing off his ring, the location of the Gem. The fight scatters freaked-out college students as Buffy and Spike throw each other all over a sitting area, but Spike’s invincibility and Buffy’s recent humiliation give him the advantage, and she begins to tire as he throws her through a glass table. Spike, an expert at exploiting the weaknesses of his opponents, picks up on Buffy’s self-doubt over Parker and demeans her over it, but he also makes his second mistake when he invokes Angel. Suddenly, the fire is back, and Buffy unleashes on Spike, pummeling him until she locks his arm and gets ahold of the ring. He warns her against taking it off, saying they’ll both burn when the sunlight ignites him, but she does anyway, and Spike runs back into the sewers before the sun sets him on fire. This one doesn’t say a whole lot about the characters outside of demonstrating something Buffy told Kendra (the second Slayer before Faith): her emotions are her assets, and she uses them as weapons. In this case, she’s losing till Spike mentions Angel, and she uses her anger and hurt to spur her into defeating him. Mostly, though, it’s just a really cool fight between my two favorite characters. Buffy wins, and she gives the Gem of Amarra to Oz so he can bring it to Angel in the first crossover between the two series.
Buffy vs. Adam (Season 4, Episode 21, “Primeval”)
“I do appreciate violence.”
Technically, “Primeval” is not the finale of season 4; that’s “Restless,” a dream episode that sets up much of what’s to come on the show. But this is what would traditionally have been the finale, the big battle with the season’s main villain. A lot of background is necessary for this one, so here goes: Season 4 introduced the Initiative, a military program to capture, study, experiment on, and weaponize demons. (This is where Spike got the behavior modification chip implanted in his head.) The ultimate result of this is Adam, a Frankenstein’s Monster forged from the strongest parts of a bunch of different demons, plus some robotics and a tiny bit of a human, which makes him almost unkillable and incredibly strong. He was to be the first of a new race of beings that would act as soldiers for the government, hence the name. But Adam gained sentience, escaped, and became a sort of philosopher and guru for disaffected vampires and demons (Spike hilariously compares him to Tony Robbins at one point), slowly growing his legion of acolytes until he enacts his final plan. He has the demons allow themselves to be captured by the Initiative, then overrides their base’s security measures and releases them, hoping the Initiative soldiers and demons will slaughter each other and he can use the parts to create an army of hybrids like himself. The lynchpin to his plan is Buffy, whom he wants in the battle to ensure as many demons die as humans, for without the Slayer, the demons will just massacre the soldiers. But he’s smart enough to know that Buffy’s greatest strength is her friends, and he enlists Spike to get Buffy into the facility but without the Scoobies. Spike fails, of course, and the result is a big showdown that proves Adam’s estimation of the team right.
Buffy finds Adam deep in the Initiative’s underground compound, staying behind during the riot, and they fight. As with their previous encounters, Buffy is outmatched, and it’s clear she’s not going to beat Adam. He uses what has been his primary weapon, a retractable spike in his arm taken from a demon Buffy killed early in the season; this time, Buffy breaks it off, only to find Adam has “been upgrading;” his arm turns into a mini-gun (and, eventually, a rocket launcher – the logistics of this are something you just kinda have to go with) that he fires at her, forcing her to dive behind a terminal. It’s not going well for Buffy, and this is where her friends come in. Willow, Xander, and Giles are holed up in a barricaded room and performing the Enjoining Spell, a powerful bit of magic that invokes the power of the First Slayer and joins all their powers – real or metaphorical – with Buffy, creating a sort of Super Buffy. They all give one part of themselves to the spell; Willow is the spirit because of her growing magical abilities; Xander is the heart because of his bravery despite his powerlessness; Giles is the mind because of his vast knowledge of the demon world; and Buffy is the hand because of her physical strength. Buffy is also the vessel for the spell, and she suddenly has new powers, greater strength, and speaks in dead languages. She mystically overrides Adam’s cybernetic enhancements, overpowers him physically, and finally rips the power core from his chest – the thing keeping him alive. Adam drops dead as Enjoined Buffy destroys the core. This is the culmination of the season’s themes; Buffy and her friends have felt increasingly isolated from each other, and this spell and its defeat of Adam symbolizes them coming back together, realizing that they are all each other’s strengths on every level. And the Initiative is man’s desire to control the natural world, which Buffy warns them is a mistake. (“You’re messing with primeval forces you can’t control.”) Adam is the horrific culmination of their meddling, and Buffy’s invocation of a primeval spell is the triumph of nature over modernism. The fight itself is also cool, with Adam’s increasingly destructive weapons and Buffy’s new powers finally countering them; it reminds me of the final fight in The Matrix, with the formerly all-powerful villain suddenly becoming powerless. Buffy wins – or, more accurately, she gets by with a little help from her friends. (I referenced the Beatles; I feel dirty.)
Buffy vs. The Turok-Han (Season 7, Episode 11, “Showtime”)
“I’m the thing that monsters have nightmares about.”
The Turok-Han is a primitive cousin to vampires that’s been resurrected by the final season’s main villain, an ancient entity called the First Evil. It looks like Nosferatu on steroids, an eternally savage and demonic vampire that is almost impossible to stake through the heart because its breastbone is impenetrable. In the previous episode, “Bring on the Night,” Buffy faced the Turok-Han… and it decimated her, beating her to a pulp and forcing her to flee for her life. Spike has been captured, Buffy’s friends are in disarray, and the potentials – a group of girls through whom the Slayer line runs and which the First Evil is trying to destroy – are scared to death. Buffy has to rally her troops, and that means she has to prove to them that they can win. So, Xander and Willow bring the potentials to a construction site where the Turok-Han awaits, ready to slaughter them all for its master. Then, the floodlights flash on, and Buffy tells it that it doesn’t want them; it wants her, and she reveals that this is a demonstration for the potentials of what the Slayer can do. “Welcome to Thunderdome.”
The fight is long and brutal, and once again, the Turok-Han outmatches Buffy. But she’s running on sheer determination; she knows she has to win this fight, that she has to show the scared girls in her care that evil can be overcome no matter how powerful it is. She also knows she can’t have any help; they have to see the Slayer kill this monster. She’s doing better than she did in “Bring on the Night,” but not by much, barely standing still as the Turok-Han pounds on her and tosses her around like a rag doll. Every weapon she picks up is taken or batted away, and she’s thrown through boards and masonry, with things getting direr by the second and this demonstration looking like a fatal error. But just when it seems like she’s done for, Buffy gets the upper hand, pulling an ineffective crossbow out of the Turok-Han’s chest and jamming it in the beast’s eye. She finally turns the tide, knocking the Turok-Han off a scaffolding, beating it to the ground, and finally wrapping a string of barbed wire around its neck and pulling till she decapitates it. It’s an exciting fight partly because we’ve seen Buffy lose decidedly to the Turok-Han just one episode ago, and for most of the rematch, she’s on her heels when she’s not lying on the ground in pain. But her will is the focus, her drive to win and to protect, and it allows her to triumph over an unbeatable foe. (An army of Turok-Han shows up in the series finale, and they’re much weaker; my headcanon is that the First merged with this one as it eventually does with another of its agents, Caleb, but that’s me excusing a plot inconsistency; this is why I can’t be objective about the show.) Buffy wins, but boy, does she bleed.
Honorable Mention: Buffy, Angel, and Spike vs. An Army of Vampires (Season 3, Episode 8, “Lovers Walk”)
“God, it’s been so long since I had a decent spot of violence; really puts things in perspective.”
As mentioned, “Lovers Walk” is Spike’s sole appearance in season 3 after blowing town with Drusilla at the end of season 2’s finale, “Becoming.” And he’s a broken vampire; Dru’s dumped him, and he’s back in Sunnydale first to reminisce, then to curse Angel in revenge, and finally to force Willow to perform a love spell so Drusilla will want him again. He spends most of the episode drunk off his ass, but when Buffy and Angel find out he’s back (after a funny scene between him and Buffy’s mom, who always seemed to like Spike more than Angel), he tells Buffy that he’s kidnapped Willow and Xander and will only release them if they help him collect the ingredients Willow needs for the spell. But the Mayor, the season’s main antagonist, gets wind of Spike’s return and, after considering the implications of a possible mixed metaphor (I can’t expound enough what a fantastic villain the Mayor was), decides that having an X factor like Spike around is too dangerous when his final plan is coming to fruition. So, he sends an army of his vampire henchmen after Spike with orders to kill. They tell Buffy and Angel they can go, but Spike reminds them that if he dies, Xander and Willow are dead, too. What follows is a huge street fight with Buffy, Angel, and Spike facing the Mayor’s horde of vampiric minions.
The fight starts in the streets before spilling into the Magic Box, the local occult store (which Giles will buy two seasons later, after which it becomes Buffy’s base of operations). Buffy, Angel, and Spike are powerful, but they’re facing overwhelming odds, and any one of them probably would have been overrun. Together, they’re able to fight the seemingly endless wave of vampires. They are compromised, however, as Angel isn’t quite at full strength since returning from hell, and Spike is drunk (although he thinks he’s starting to sober up) and heartbroken over losing Drusilla. While the others get some good moments (Buffy has a great kill where she skewers a couple of vampires with a mop handle; I remember when we first watched this, my dad turned to me with a big smile and said, “She made a vampire-kebab!”), it’s really about Spike. When Lenny, the leader of the vampires who once worked for Spike, tells him that he’s gone soft, Spike is reinvigorated, exploding into violence and beating Lenny senseless before killing him. Buffy and Angel find a supply of holy water in the Magic Box and pelt the remaining vampires until they run away, but while they’re just happy to be alive, Spike is his old self again, resolving to get Drusilla back without tricks or spells but with brutal violence, the way she’d want. It’s a great ending to a great episode, and when it’s all over, Spike is the only one who’s happy. (Not that it lasts, but good for him for trying.) Buffy, Angel, and especially Spike win.
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If you think I’ve missed any great Buffy fights or just want to talk about these, feel free to comment below. There’ll be another Buffy list every day this week, culminating with a review of the Audible radio play Slayers: A Buffyverse Story. You can find links to the first two here and here.
