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"Grr! Argh!"--Tagline for Mutant Enemy, Inc.

I realized that I might get quite far into this week's sure to be rambling, twisting narrative before I even broached the topic at hand and that would ultimately be to the detriment of my noble intentions. To buy myself some time and alleviate any anxiety on the reader's part, let me start off focused and centered. As stated in a previous column, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is my favorite television show of all time. If for no other reason than this, I would look for a reason to squeeze it in here somehow. By luck, coincidence, or perhaps the perfect workings of the universe, Buffy the Vampire Slayer whole-heartedly qualifies as a Chapter Two. It is a direct sequel to the 1992 movie, picking up not much farther along in time from where its forebear left off. Titular heroine Buffy Summers heads to a new town hoping to ditch her recently inherited mantle of vanquishing things that go chomp in the night. What she finds is that she has leapt out of the frying pan and into the Hellmouth (as it were) and that there is no escaping her destiny.

But though it may be correctly categorized as a sequel, it is not my intention to walk through season-by-season or key episode by key episode and regurgitate its greatness. You, the reader, most likely have set opinions on the Buffyverse by this point. If you love it, there's no need for this to turn into self-congratulatory noodling. If you feel that it is simply a ridiculous show with a ridiculous title, have thought so for ten years and aren't in the slightest bit interested in having that opinion swayed, believe me, I sympathize. Based on my reactions to the film - which ranged from deeply disappointed to mildly annoyed - I avoided the show and the new television network it was on (The WB) like the plague. It wasn't until I happened to catch part of an episode that John Ritter guest starred on that I began to soften this stance. It still took another year before I started watching weekly.

Anyway, I promised that I wasn't going to simply tote out high praise and palaver. What I intend to hone in on and discuss is more focused and detailed than a single season or even a single episode. The episode in question, "The Body," is, however, one of the great 45 minutes of serialized entertainment in the history of the televisual medium and a great starting point for those of you already self-identifying as "Buffy never gonna watch-ers" (bad pun intentional). No, there is an image, or more rather, an edit in this episode that, coupled with another image from the last shot of the same episode, may be one of the most replayed loops in my occasionally ADD head. Joss Whedon came up with something basic yet profound to say about death and memory and loss and grieving and a single shot has given me more to reflect on and feel attuned to than most anything else I have seen this decade, in any format. But first . . .

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