TVSquad

Wow, you really loved season 6, eh?

Personally my favs were seasons 3 and 4...

Reply

Seriously? Aside from picking just the top 5 Buffy moments is worse than Sophie's Choice, you left out some major moments that truly made Buffy great.

1. Buffy kills Angel
The most defining moment for Buffy's slayer career. She had to kill her love, even after he was cured and didn't know what was happening. This moment haunted her even through season 7.

2. Faith kills the Mayor's aide
Another turning point. Faith and Buffy have to decide what side of right and wrong they're on.

3. The Death of Joyce Summers
The most tear jerking, emotional moment like ever. For all the tragedy and pain in Buffy's life, her mother dies of natural causes. How's that for karma.

4. The Master Kills Buffy
So I'm morbid about death moments, but come on, they're emotional. Buffy's death in season one was all the more poignant when we didn't know if she'd actually be coming back for season 2. Add to the scar and constant reminder of her loss.

5. Pulled out of Heaven
Buffy already died once, so her second death had less impact (still probably rounds out the top 10). But when Buffy sings in the musical episode about being ripped out of heaven, the pain is more apparent and harsh than before. The brilliant musical episode climaxes with Buffy wanting to die again because being in heaven makes life too painful to live.

Love to hear other people's top 5's.

Michael Sherrin
http://www.prodigeek.com/

Reply

I love the scenes you mention above, but if I could add a sixth, it would be when Buffy kills Angel just after his soul has been restored. That moment is filled with such tragedy and pain, and a disoriented Angel has no idea what is happening -- it breaks my heart every time, and really embodies the spirit of their relationship and love.

Reply

There must be a recency effect in these choices. You've completely ignored the years which are primarily considered the show's pinnacle.

Reply

Wow. Buffy moments...there are too many to mention! Id have to agree with most of you that the big one that stands out to me is when Buffy kills Angel right when his soul comes back. When they kiss, and she tells him to close his eyes, then rams that sword into him.... I was bawling right along with her!

Reply

Yeah, I guess I did get stuck in the later episodes with my list! Thanks for bringing out some of those awesome earlier scenes, Michael and Erin. It truly is like Sophie's Choice.

Reply

I just discovered BtVS last June (after my 52nd birthday), when I received the complete series set as a gift. I ignored the show when it was on, but when I started watching it I was consumed. I watched the entire series in 10 days. I then went back and watched the entire series 5 more times by the end of the year.

It kills me now that so many people won't watch the show because they think they know what it's about, and dismiss it out of hand. Just as I did.

I've never before or since gotten so emotionally connected to the characters in a story. The depth of the show is amazing - the more you watch it, the more you see and understand. Just reading the lists of favorite scenes brings back the emotional context associated. It's an incredibly powerful program.

Reply

I think picking the top 5 moments is a very difficult notion, but I basically agree with most of your choices. The one that sticks out for me, though, is in the episode I Only Have Eyes For You, where Buffy and Angelus are inhabited by the ghosts of the star-crossed teacher and student lovers. I LOVED this scene, and then I loved it that Angelus was trying to wipe the stink of kissing Buffy off of him.

Reply

So I too am a huge fan of season 6 and I find it interesting that people dismiss it so easily because it went "dark side". I think it shows a full and complete story arc to go to that dark place and then come back from it. Here are a few of my favorite moments from the show - of course if I was asked the same question tomorrow the list would be totally different as there are too many great moments to count...
1. When Angel and Buffy consummate their love and perfect happiness causes Angelus to emerge and when Angelus killed that alley hooker and then blew the smoke out of his mouth - I was totally grossed out and fascinated all at the same time.
2. In the episode Fool For Love when Spike reveals his human self to Buffy and how he became Spike from his speech change to his leather jacket and the end of the episode he leaned in to kiss Buffy and she denied him and then told him that he was beneath her...totally gut wrenching.
3. Two great moments in the episode Lies My parent's Told me were when spike finally realized that his mother did love him and that he was not The First's bitch any longer and he did not take Robin Wood's life when he would have before was a great sequence. And then at the end of that same episode when Buffy told Giles that she learned everything from him that she needed to know...another punch in the stomach moment.
4. I loved the scene where Willow asks Oz if he wants to make out while they are sitting in the van and waiting for Xander and Cordelia...when Oz tells her that he thought she just might be trying to make Xander jealous and that when he kisses her - he wants all of her (of course - I am paraphrasing) was such a sweet and tender scene...i truly fell in love with Oz and Seth Green right in that moment. Seth Green you rock!
5. I also thought the last scene of the last episode was awesome...when the camera focused in on Buffy and she started a little half smile at the notion of not needing to fight evil any time soon was such a satisfying moment to the end of the series.

Reply

By the way, this post was picked up on Joss Whedon's site - April 25 listing:

http://whedonesque.com/comments/20030

They call it "disappointing" (I guess referring to my "top 5 moments"?), but still made my heart race a little.

And ok! Ok! I'll add a sixth moment - Buffy killing Angel right after he regains his soul!

Reply

Good post. I'm going to pick some of the moments from the series that might not make most of these kinds of lists, just because there a few Buffy moments that most people will agree on (Buffy kills Angel, Buffy hooks up with Spike, Joyce's death, etc.) and that show was so full of great bits.

1. In "Prophecy Girl" when Willow talks about the vampire attack on the kids in the a/v room. She says something like "It wasn't our world anymore - they made it theirs. And they had fun doing it". It was the first time in the show I think I really connected emotionally with the characters and felt the dramatic impact of the story. Willow's explanation made it clear just how high the stakes were. It's commonly accepted that the monsters of Buffy were metaphors, but where is metaphor involved in a roomful of dead children?

2. Buffy 'kills' Ted in season two's "Ted" episode. I don't think this episode is a great favourite with fans, but when she knocks the abusive and domineering man down the stairs and believes that she's killed him, it violates the border between the monstrous and the domestic worlds of the show. The playful elements of the series evaporate for a moment, and you realize one of the foundations of Buffy's angst: that her power separates her from the rest of the world, and consequently she must play-act her way through reality. The situation is righted when Ted is revealed as a robot, but I was floored the first time I saw the episode. The idea is returned to (in a different form) in season six's "Normal Again," which is unbeatable for sheer creepiness.

3. Cordelia getting killed by Xander and Willow in the parallel universe of "The Wish". The episode starts off being about Cordelia, so it comes as a complete shock when she dies in the first twenty minutes or so. Plus the scene itself, with Xander and Willow crushing Cordelia between them as they suck on her neck, was BtVS perversity at its finest.

4. Buffy's face-off with the Primal Slayer in "Restless" at the end of season four. That bit contains some of my favourite lines from the entire series, including "I'm going to be a fireman when the floods roll back," which I've never been able to get out of my head. Right, and the cheese guy shows up. I also love the idea of an enemy that prowls around through the characters' dreams. In a show like Buffy, where nightmares walk the streets, what does it mean when the monsters show up in the place where the rest of us encounter them?

5. The vampire in the morgue in season five's "The Body". There is a sense in which this is the definitive Buffy scene: two horrors, one realistic and the other fantastic, suddenly appear in the same space. As Dawn stands over her mother's corpse, another body in the room sits up and takes stock of the situation. Vampires in the show were pretty much empty vessels that the writers filled with whatever metaphor-of-the-week they needed, but that vampire was the real deal, the ultimate meaning of the monster after all the other meanings are emptied out: plain old death and horror.

Reply

Don't listen to these people. The later seasons are AMAZING and it seems that the difference tends to lie in if you saw the show on DVD or TV. The TV crowd love seasons 1-3, DVD people love 5-7 (no one loves 4 ;)). I saw it on DVD and the later seasons rang out for me. I love this list and agree they are powerful moments. Another on I might add would be when Buffy, Xander, Anya and Spike all confront one another in Entropy. Such rich character dynamics there. It's fantastic TV.

Reply

Let me mention a couple of more

- When Buffy shouts in "Hush"
- A couple dozen Scenes from "Once more with Feeling". Seriously, nothing from that show? I haven't gotten there yet (again) but I know that episode was extremely good
- Willow and Xander in chemistry class, Willow and Xander in the Library, Willow and Xander in the Hallway when Xander says he just wants to touch her oh and the beginning of it all - Xander in the tux, Willow in her dress
- Xander telling the gang he did it with Faith and Willow crying in the bathroom
- Spike being unable to bite Willow in the dorm room and the talk about it - how it might be her, how they could try it again in half an hour, that this can happen to anybody, that he didn't really want to bite her and then how she crushed his head with a lamp
- when Willow made everything she said come true - When Buffy left the dorm and immediately found Spike
- A couple of scenes of when Buffy was invisible and did the nasty with Spike under the rugs and how Spike reacted
- Second the death of Joice Summers
- The beginning of Season 5 - I mean come on, Buffy has a sister, new opening credits - and no effing mention of the girl anywhere prior to that... totally awesome. Ok it's not a "moment" but rather a plot part but really... that was da bomb.

A couple more, I'll get back to you once I'm done watching :-)

And shame on you for finishing first ;-)

Reply

This is fascinating. I discovered Buffy during FX reruns in my 45th year (I'm now 54), way past what many consider the series' prime, and I think it's interesting that while I might I have a different top five than Jane did, I would include all her scenes in, say, my top 15.

First, let me say I hate vampire movies, stories, books, whatever. The genre doesn't interest me. I hate horror. And I'm far beyond teen angst. But I adore great characters and great writing and I adore Joss Whedon. Not that I knew that before Buffy.

Season 1 did little for me, other than that it had a lot of interesting character development and clever writing, which what is literally caught my ear (FX ran the reruns early in the morning when I was dressing for work and after checking the news quickly, I left the TV on for noise).

I thought Season 2 had some great moments, particularly Angel turning evil and the great mall encounter and, of course, Buffy having to kill Angel. That's when the show got me, because I recently had gone through a divorce with someone I still loved. So the show connected with me emotionally for the first time.

But I really fell in love with Season 3 onward. I found so many gems in that season, as well as Seasons 4 and 5. I kind of liked Riley, to be honest. I liked moving to the college years. And season 6, while dark, was much more adult as was Season 7.

So, I'm wondering after hearing Jane's comments and hearing from the guy who discovered Buffy at 52 if what resonates with you most about the series has to do with where you were in your life when you discovered it.

And, to be honest, if how you experience the series is affected by whether you did it as weekly TV over 7 years or if you did it through the DVDS in a much more concentrated manner (even the reruns I saw on FX were much more concentrated than the actual series -- you got 2 eps a day, five days a week).


The other thing I like about Buffy, Angel and Firefly is how they can spark a conversation with total strangers of all ages, races, socio-economic status in any place around the country (and probably the world).

A couple of years ago, my mom died and I was back in the Midwest at my sister's farm preparing for the funeral. The preacher of this lovely historic country church where Mom had chosen to be buried came over to the house to discuss the service with my siblings and I. He was new to the church, around 30 or so, I'd say. I was wearing my Serenity T-shirt, the one in black that spells out Serenity across the lovely Chinese motif.

The guy stopped, took one look at me and said: "Serenity? Firefly? Joss?"

We immediately went off on a 30-minute conversation about all of those. My sister-in-law, a doctor who probably has watched 20 hours of non-news TV in her entire life, looked at me and said, puzzled, "So Serenity is a movie? I thought you were making a life value statement."

That was the strangest situation where that shirt started a conversation for me. But no matter where I go, I get comments from folks of all ages about it....That's the beauty of Joss Whedon's writing.

Reply

The interesting thing about this is hearing from someone who just watched Buffy. Thanks for the chance to talk about it some more, Jane. And whenever you make a list, you're not going to make everyone happy. I agree, it is a very different experience watching it on TV vs. DVD and at different ages. I watched it from day one on TV when I was 19 (I still remember seeing the billboards before it aired, and thinking, I am going to watch this show.) But I've also watched it back to back in a couple of marathons, including one just a few weeks ago and now I'm 31. My opinions changed a bit. I loved Season 6 so much more when I watched it recently and although I still really don't like Dawn, I didn't hate her quite as much as I did when it was on TV. Probably because when it was on TV, you were living with it for years, not just a few months or even weeks. So the new characters don't feel so much like intruders when you're watching it in a row on DVD. There are so many amazing moments from Buffy. Mention of The Wish brought up one that hit me -- when the Master snapped Buffy's neck in the alternate universe in slo mo. It just felt so empty and showed how different things could have been for Buffy if she hadn't met up with Giles and Willow and Xander. There was also the scene in season 7 when Angel comes back briefly and Spike sees Buffy kiss him the day after she'd stayed in bed with him, getting comforted when she got kicked out as being the group leader.

Reply

Hey Jane,

I'm the one that originally linked to this over on whedonesque.com. It seems I owe you an apology for using the word "disappointing" when talking about your list. I meant no offense and to tell you the truth I'm not even really all THAT disappointed. I can't really recall what I was thinking as I posted that comment so I'm not sure why I chose that word. But it seems I crossed some line with it because I'm catching no end of hell over there for it. I've edited the post (though I couldn't resist being snarky about it), so with any luck people will start to focus more on your actual list and less on my "condescending editorializing".

At any rate, hope you weren't offended. And let me know when you watch Joss' follow-up series "Angel" 'cause I'll be all over that with any number of favorites lists.

Reply

My favorite moment in the whole series is from "Fool for Love" (5x07), when Spike is so full of rage he's going to kill Buffy -- but ends up consoling her instead. Really shows off the polydimensional nature of the characters, and there's some amazing acting in that scene.

Can we do one of these for Angel as well?

Reply