10 TV Episodes NOBODY Was Ready For

Universally beloved fantasy drama show Buffy the Vampire Slayer put its titular character and her friends through some pretty gruesome stuff.

Vampires. Demons. The horrors of high school. But few things hit our protagonist harder than the unexpected death of her mother Joyce.

In an episode called The Body from Season 5, Buffy returns home one day to find Joyce lying on the sofa, unmoving, eyes wide open. After breaking down into hysterics, Buffy is informed by medical staff that her mother had suffered a fatal aneurysm.

Joyce was gone.

She had been such an important part of not just Buffy's life, but the entire show. She'd appeared in more episodes than anyone outside of the main cast, and what was her reward? A sudden, unsatisfying death via natural causes.

Though it had been hinted at, nobody expected the show to present Joyce's death this way. The fallout left her daughter in complete disarray, unable to even contemplate the idea of moving on without her.

It's a hauntingly good episode, proof that, in a world full of hellish monsters, losing a loved one is the scariest thing of all.