7. Buffy - Buffy has a Sister?
This was a real "what the...?" moment for me. The moment came at the end of the season 5 opener, "Buffy vs Dracula" when Buffy tells her mother she is going out somewhere. She then walks into a room in her house and a strange new character, a teenage girl turns around. Buffy says, kind of shocked but with a sense of recollection "What are you doing here?" before her mother shouts from the other room, that if she's going out, she should take her sister. For those who haven't seen the series, Buffy doesn't have a sister, at least up until this episode anyway. Many people I imagine turned off after this revelation, imagining it was just a silly reason to include a new character, and I bet they thought there would be absolutely no explanation for this sudden sister. Either that, or people thought it was an exciting cliff hanger that would be completely resolved and fixed in the next episode. I remember watching this when I was about 10 (having seen a few, but not all of the Buffy episodes previously) and initially thinking that this sister must have lived with her father, or been a sister from Buffy's fathers new marriage. Nothing could have prepared me, or any one else for that matter for what Dawn (Buffy's sister) really was. Long story short, she was a mystical ball of energy capable of opening every hell dimension and bringing chaos to the earth, but had been made human (with human memories and no knowledge of ever being a ball of energy) and fully believed she was Buffy's sister- because she kind of actually was. Complicated sure, but brilliant. This is the one plot twist in all of Buffy which gives me a great argument when I try to convince someone this really was the greatest TV show of all time. No other show could have pulled this off. For those who pay attention, there are also many cryptic clues to Dawns arrival way before she appears. In the season 3 finale (2 seasons previously) and an episode in Season 4, Faith appears in Buffy's dream and says strange things about "little miss muffet" and a "little sis coming". In the season 4 finale, Tara (in another dream) tells Buffy to be back before Dawn... though obviously at the time we didn't think she meant Dawn as a name.