Buffy the Vampire Slayer Took an Idea From Xena: Warrior Princess and Perfected It

Buffy was then brought back to life and forced to claw her way out of her own grave by her well-meaning friends at the beginning of season 6. She had been clearly depressed ever since but no one knew why; it was when forced to sing all her deepest feelings in the musical episode that she revealed it was because she had been yanked out of Heaven (and not a Hell dimension, as her friends had thought) against her will. The musical also saw a turning-point in a dark sub-plot between Willow (Alyson Hannigan) and Tara (Amber Benson), in which Willow was magically manipulating her girlfriend, as well as Giles’ (Anthony Stewart Head) decision to go back to England, and the beginning of a romantic relationship between Buffy and still-un-ensouled vampire Spike (James Marsters). So all in all, like “The Bitter Suite,” “Once More, With Feeling” took place at a very bleak moment in the characters’ lives.

Buffy’s musical was also, like “The Bitter Suite,” a fully immersive musical in which the characters were compelled to sing their deepest emotions by external forces; in this case, because of a spell foolishly performed by Xander (Nicholas Brendan) that summoned a demon (Xander having learned nothing from the time he made every woman in Sunnydale desperate to be with him in season 2’s “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered”). Feelings that various characters had been suppressing were forced out by the musical numbers, just as in “The Bitter Suite,” though the finale, “Where Do We Go From Here?,” was more of an open question than a resolution.

“Once More, With Feeling” features a number of songs in different musical styles, chosen to fit individual characters. Tara sings a melodic love song, Spike is a rocker (Marsters was in a rock band), Giles (played by actual musical theatre star Anthony Stewart Head) sings a Broadway ballad, while Buffy herself gets both a fun Disney-style ‘I Want’ song at the beginning (“Going Through The Motions”) and leads a rousing chorus number (“Walk Through the Fire”) at the end. However, unlike “The Bitter Suite,” which had to pack everything into a regular TV episode run-time, “Once More With Feeling” had a slightly extended runtime of 50 minutes, allowing it to pack in even more songs than its predecessor – and they are, no offence to Xena’s excellent numbers, a little bit catchier too.

Like “The Bitter Suite,” “Once More, With Feeling” didn’t neglect color, liveliness, or humor either. The Land of Illusia had looked vibrant and fun; the Buffy version steps that up a notch by saturating the normal Sunnydale sets with color and putting everyone in particularly colorful costumes. Tara and Willow are dressed as if going to a Renaissance Fair for no apparent reason, EMMA Caulfield’s Anya wears a stunning red negligée for her Old Hollywood-inspired song and dance, and the colors on display in the famous “They Got The Mustard Out!” sequence are quite something.

“Once More, With Feeling” also features probably the funniest and most well-observed line in any TV musical episode. Whereas the singing in Xena’s “Bitter Suite” was a mix of cast members with strong voices doing their own singing while those less confident were dubbed by professional singers, all the Buffy cast were required to do their own singing. Sarah Michelle Gellar and Nicholas Brendan do a decent job of holding their own next to their professional-singer castmates, but Alyson Hannigan was not confident at all, so she was given very little singing to do, and her contribution to the all-cast number “Walk Through The Fire” is a brief “I think this line’s mostly filler” It is, and it’s genius.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a show was well aware of its debt to Xena: Warrior Princess, its predecessor in ass-kicking female character-led genre television. Back in season 2, when everyone turned into their Halloween costumes and Buffy became a helpless, over-protected 18th century young lady, Willow lamented, “She couldn’t have dressed up like Xena?” The musical’s obvious debt to “The Bitter Suite” was also acknowledged early on in the episode, as Xander reacts to events by exclaiming “Merciful Zeus!”