Buffy The Vampire Slayer: 10 Most Underused Characters

Buffy the Vampire Slayer was home to countless compelling and iconic characters, including Spike, Angel, Willow, Giles and the titular Slayer herself. These characters and more all lived up to their full potential, tackling major character arcs and given ample time to shine, and cementing the show as one of the most inventive and well-written on TV.

The following characters, though, were not so lucky. Despite their obvious potential for development and narrative importance, each of these brilliant figures were left in cold and never given the arc they so clearly deserved.

From evil, tragic vampires who ended up being nothing more than a plot device and promising villains tossed aside without care, to intriguing bit players with mountains of worldbuilding potential and recurring nuisances who proved to be fan favourite bad guys, each of these characters were massively let down over the course of the show.

With that in mind, here are 10 great characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer that were criminally underused, and how they could have fit into the show if they had stuck around. Major spoilers follow.

Introduced in the show's second season, Drusilla was portrayed as the crazed and unpredictable paramour of Spike. With psychic abilities and a mysterious connection to Angel, later revealed to be her sire and the man who tortured her into insanity, Dru was a magnificent villain who killed Kendra, the new Slayer in town, and was taken away from Sunnydale by a fleeing Spike.

Played with gleeful twistedness by Juliet Landau, Dru had a brief stint in Angel's first season but didn't appear on Buffy again until season five, as a means of showing the audience how much Spike was now in love with the Slayer.

Unfortunately, that's Dru's role in a nutshell. Despite her tragic and dark backstory, her powers of hypnosis and her sheer entertainment value, she appeared only sparingly, and was always there to add to Spike's arc, rather than have any time to shine in her own right.

Of Angel's old clique, she's the only one who never got time on her own to show what she was made of, and to top it off she didn't get a big send-off, either, her final fate never revealed on the show.