Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Most Important Moment Features One Word

This is the moment that Buffy the Vampire Slayer is all about. This moment has been built up to, not just through the back half of season 2, but throughout the whole show. It’s a very stark contrast to the finale of season 1 a year earlier. As great an episode as it is, that season finale, “Prophecy Girl,” features a Buffy who was understandably frightened and reluctant, and who had to be kissed back to life (literally, having drowned) by Xander. Here, Buffy is no happier about what she has to do, but she is even more resolved to do it. She is no longer unwilling or unable to kill Angel, but determined to do what is necessary to save the world, and she has the strength of will to keep going and to keep fighting even when she has lost everything.

Buffy is more alone in this moment than at any other time in the series. At first, she is the one and only Slayer, the Chosen One – but she has a Watcher to help her, and she quickly gathers her Scooby Gang around her. Sure, she briefly dies in “Prophecy Girl.” But Xander and Angel are right behind her to save her. As a result of that brief “death,” another Slayer is summoned, Kendra (Bianca Lawson). After Kendra comes Faith (Eliza Dushku), and however bad Buffy and Faith’s relationship gets, they are both always there. And in the series finale, Buffy gains unspecified numbers of fellow Slayers as Willow activates all Potential Slayers around the world. The moment these girls realize they have a new power flowing through them is powerful in itself, and the idea of ending the series by preventing Buffy from ever being so alone again is a lovely one.

But at this moment at the end of season 2, Buffy is completely alone. Kendra was killed by Drusilla (Juliet Landau) at the end of the previous episode. Faith has technically been called but Buffy has no way of knowing who or where she is, and the Scoobies are all incapacitated or otherwise occupied. Given some later developments in the show, it is part ironic and part unintentional foreshadowing that the last person to leave her is Spike, with whom she has just established a shaky alliance. But the fact that even Spike’s self-serving self-interest (and underlying attraction to Buffy, which Marsters was clearly playing from the start even before it was scripted) is not enough to keep him there says something about how dire the situation has become. Buffy has never been so alone before or since.

Writer-director-showrunner Joss Whedon’s feminist credentials may have taken a severe knocking in recent years, but that doesn’t change the power of this moment or of Sarah Michelle Gellar’s performance. Buffy would not have lasted five minutes without Gellar in the lead role. She is able to play the perfect blend of a funny, vulnerable, ditzy teen who is nevertheless fiercely intelligent with a core of absolute steel (qualities Gellar herself showed on set as well). This moment, when Buffy finds the strength of will to keep fighting insurmountable odds and realizes that in the end, no matter what else she has lost, she still has herself, is the true heart of both the character and the series.

Sure, the dramatics belong to the killing of Angel, but he gets better. And there are plenty of other great Buffy moments for the character. We could talk about the moment she takes back her name and her identity in “Anne” and proudly declares, “I’m Buffy, the vampire slayer,” the moment she shows Professor Walsh how badly she has underestimated her in “The I In Team” and tells her, “you really don’t know what a Slayer is,” or her swan dive in “The Gift.” But none of them top this one.