Best of Buffy

Okay we are almost done discussing one of the greatest shows of all time, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. We are on the final season, Buffy season 7. This last season is very tonally different from the rest of the series just because of how high the stakes are all season. We also get some new players as part of our regular group. The regular scooby gang had to call in some back up when dealing with this season's Big bad.

Big Bad: The First; The first refers to the first evil. We have had one other encounter with the first over the course of the series and it was back in season 3 and really the only people to have interacted with it were Buffy and Angel. But The First comes back on a much larger scale. The First has the ability to appear as literally anyone and this is something that obviously causes problems for Buffy and the rest of the group.

The other major thing to happen this season is the gathering of the potentials. Every potential slayer that could be awakened after Faith is brought to Sunnydale to help fight this evil. Now obviously for the most part these are scared little teenage girls so they have to be trained and we do get a lot of screen time for this which is great. This leads to a truly incredible moment in the finale where Buffy of course delivers an amazing speech and ALL the potential slayers around the world are awakened and it's just a really incredible, powerful and emotional moment that I will always cry at because it's just so wonderful.

And then there is the worst moment of the whole series when Buffy gets kicked out of her own house like she hasn’t saved the lives of these ungrateful fucks over and over and over again. As if they haven’t been living in her house for free. As if she didn’t literally sacrifice her life for them. I will forever get irate just thinking about it. But it also brings us an amazing moment between Buffy and Spike. He delivers just the most incredible and romantic monologue.

Best episodes:

Episode 3: Same Time Same Place: Willow comes home but no one is able to see her due to a monster. This episode just does a really great job of depicting Willow’s guilt and her friends' skepticism of having her back. There are a lot of complicated emotions regarding Willow and this episode really does a great job of processing them.

Episode 5: Selfless: Anya kills a bunch of frat boys as she has returned to being a vengeance demon and Buffy has to do her job as the slayer. Now obviously this upsets Xander but Buffy finally says all the things that I regularly yell at the screen. She is the law. She killed Angel when he proved himself to be dangerous and killing Anya is simply her job.

I didn’t include the entire episode of Touched because I actually hate the context surrounding it but the monologue Spike delivers to Buffy was truly incredible and beautiful. Overall Buffy season 7 is a very solid finale season; it does a great job of wrapping up storylines and character arcs while also raising the stakes and paying them off. We weren’t prepping for something all season that resulted in everyone surviving, we had some upsetting deaths and that is actually what made the whole season and finale battle really well done. There was loss, as there would be in any war or major battle.