3. Buffy, Interrupted
Show: Buffy The Vampire Slayer Episode: Normal Again (S6 E17) In this episode, the baddies of the sixth season The Trio (of evil-ish nerds) inject Buffy with a hallucinogenic venom that causes her to switch back and forth between the world she knows and saves, a lot and her possibly more nightmarish reality in a mental hospital. In alt-world, the Buffster is actually a patient who has created this entire world on Sunnydale in her mind. This has some serious implications for the beloved cult characters in the show: The Scoobies don't exist, Dawn was never created (possibly the only silver lining) and Buffy was never going to be the one to stand against the forces of darkness, because these forces of darkness exist only in her mind. The end of the episode shows Buffy choosing to save her friends from the weekly demon and take the antidote found to cure her of her hallucinations. In the alternate reality, however, the camera pulls away from a doctor's assertion that they've lost her as Buffy sits unresponsive in the corner. The episode itself one of the best of the series, showing some major acting chops from Sarah Michelle Gellar, while making a classic Whedonesque sardonic commentary about the "and then she woke up!" television trope. The beauty of the episode is in the end and what follows. The possibility of this alt world is never spoken of in the series again, but audiences and Buffy herself are forever left wondering about Buffy, Sunnydale, and its sexy-brooding/peroxide-headed vamps.
Kayla Calder
Contributor
Having been born and raised in the one-stoplight town of Collingwood, ON, I craved city life and sardonic people so much it hurt. So, I moved to Toronto to embrace my ability to be (as quoted by a professor from my undergraduate years) "wittily and wickedly self-deprecating" in my writing, with an onus of course on literature, film, and television; my three out of four vices (no, I don't plan to indulge you with the last).
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Kayla