The Body is, understandably, often held up as one of the very best episodes of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Completely devoid of anything supernatural, it sees the group dealing with the fallout of Buffy's mum dying of natural causes. It's less spine-chilling, and more plain depressing. Nobody wants to think about the mortality of their parents. The follow-up, meanwhile, is properly petrifying. Conversations With Dead People, from the show's seventh season, sees the characters having spooky encounters across a single night. Andrew keeps talking to Warren's ghost, Buffy meets an old high school pal-turned-vamp, and Spike turns out to still be a mean old blood-sucker. What's really nerve-racking, though, are the interludes with Dawn and Willow: the latter is visited by the ghost of a girl Buffy failed to save, who claims Tara wants Willow to kill herself; the latter is visited by a malevolent force attacking her house, with the rotting ghost of Joyce popping up just to hit the terror home.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
