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Buffy the Vampire Slayer could certainly be argued as a fairy tale, easily, but in my eyes, it has always been a little too realistic for that. Allow me to clarify. Whedon's show brilliantly works on multiple levels of metaphor, camp, irony, "guilty pleasure", teen drama, and action spectacle. At its heart, as it speaks to me, it's about how high school is hell (no big surprise) but then "real life" turns out to be nothing more than high school writ large. How do I find what it is I really want to do if it feels like my future has already been set in stone? How do I go about forming adult relationships when I still feel like a kid inside? How do I balance romance, a career, and friends, with the unspeakable horrors that go on around me on a daily basis? Buffy could be ridiculous and painful from one shot to the next or all at once, as painful as some of my other favorite, more "realistic" shows like Once and Again, My So-Called Life or Freaks and Geeks. And as someone who retrospectively prefers his time in high school to his time in college, I prefer Whedon's take on the difficult transition into adulthood, without rendering his characters as slackers or any less motivated because of their doubts.

I remember coming home from my evening class at NYU and watching that night's episodes of Buffy and Angel on the evening "The Body" first aired. I don't recall that I actually allowed myself the luxury of sitting on the couch. I believe I sat right in front of the television, the glow of the Triborough Bridge lights tearing into the darkness outside my living room window. The format of the plot is elegantly restrained: using only a single camera, no music cues or score, and a feeling of "real time", Whedon examines the aftermath of Buffy's discovery that her mom has died. Not from a creature of the night, but from a brain aneurysm, months after she had had a medical scare and been in the hospital. The exception to this plot progression is the sequence that takes place directly after what was the return from the first commercial break.

Having been left hanging on the image of a frightened Buffy squeaking out "Mommy?," we are returned not to the scene at hand, but a Thanksgiving dinner at the Summers household, in what must be the most recent Turkey Day, as Tara, Dawn and Anya are all gathered around the table alongside Buffy, Xander, Willow, Giles and Joyce. The scene is most notable for its utter ordinariness: banter, flirting, references to past episodes. And yet, there's something not quite right, something just off about it, a feeling caused in part by wondering, what's up with this scene? Is it a flashback, the final thought that flashed through Joyce's head, a device on Whedon's part to allow Kristine Sutherland to be alive for just a few more minutes?

In Whedon's commentary for the episode, which I just listened to very nervously for the first time five minutes ago, he allows that it is partly the latter but mostly that he needed a three-minute scene to play under the credits, as he did not want the credits to take away from anything involving Joyce's death. What has struck me, haunted me and burrowed its way into my brain is the jagged, beautiful edit from the past to the present. As Buffy prepares to cut a pumpkin pie in the kitchen, the glass plate slips and on the sound of the (off-camera) shattering, Whedon cuts to a close-up of the death mask of Joyce: eyes open, vacant, lifeless.

What this jump from then to now so eloquently declares to me is this: Once someone we love is no longer living, then every memory we have of them - happy, sad, defining, trivial - eventually has to confront the vanishing point of the reality of their absence. Like the shattering of the plate, the knowledge of the loss of a loved one cuts into our memories and leaves them ruptured, a fact that we must ultimately learn to live with. I should stress that I don't find this a particularly morbid thought. Whedon's show has always examined death from all angles and without sentimentality or maudlin mawkishness. In the very last shot of "The Body" we see Dawn's hand tentatively reaching out towards her mother's body as it lies on the table at the morgue. I find it very telling that the shot ends before we see her fingers making contact. Death may be all around the Scooby Gang every day, as it is around all of us, but the loss of a loved one can always cut deeply.

Next time: I finally weigh in on one of the all-time acclaimed Chapter Twos, a sequel that won more Oscars than its predecessor did.

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