10 Buffy The Vampire Slayer Episodes Everyone Remembers For ONE Awesome Scene

Buffy sends Angel to hell in Becoming, Part Two; vampire Xander and Willow get thirsty for Cordelia in The Wish; Spike rolls into town over the Sunnydale sign in School Hard; Giles and Joyce make out on a police car in Band Candy; Caleb gouges Xander's eye in Dirty Girls; Anya performs a rock number about bunnies in Once More, With Feeling...

Whatever your flavour, Buffy has scenes that really stick, tearing us in a million different directions at once and never quite putting us back together again.

Joss Whedon, Jane Espenson, Marti Noxon, David Fury and co. know their genres, and how to bend them to their will, having sculpted out a series that can go from tense melodrama in one scene to heartbreaking tragedy in the next, always with a quick pause for a one-liner or fan-favourite comedic quotation along the way.

And, of course, the show is nothing without the cast that brought it to life, trading blows, quips and epic storylines while their characters navigate the speed humps and bumps in the night of life (and, umm, un-life?).

With 7 seasons, 144 episodes and somewhere in the region of 6340 minutes to choose from, there's a Hellmouth of a lot of scenes, but here are 10 of the absolute best and most memorable moments that defined the episodes they were in.

Amid the most tense and emotionally charged episode of the entire show - season five's sixteenth episode, The Body - there is one beacon of light.

With the whole gang going into meltdown, Tara acts as a level-headed and stabilising force. Willow is panicking, barely able to hold herself together, but Tara comes through with a few kind, sensible words and a kiss - something so small and yet so big in such a desperate time, both on- and off-screen.

Joss Whedon deftly utilised the kiss to juxtapose the deep misery that permeates the rest of the episode - which kicks off with a long, music-less reaction scene of Buffy finding her mum's lifeless body on their sofa - giving the necessary glimmer of love and hope to see everyone through.

And the brilliance of this scene is not just in what it does for the episode itself, but in helping 2001's viewers see homosexual affection not as something to mistrust or fetishise, but something that can provide the same sense of belonging and comfort as heterosexual or platonic love.