Buffy The Vampire Slayer - S06x17|♡Uncut Reaction &Review♡

I appreciate your reactions, Sofie. I am way late... but I really dislike this episode. It would be better without the ending scene, I think. It is such a slap in the face. This incredible female hero, the warrior of the people, is just some crazy girl who thinks she's special. Um, no. Just no. I watched Buffy when it aired and later shared it with my daughter. I love this show. We don't have enough female heroes as it is. Buffy is not some crazy girl she is the Slayer. I agree with others that her being in the institution before was part of her hallucination. It doesn't fit with earlier seasons.

Rachel Munns

I love this episode so much. My favorite part is that in the hospital reality it's tied in with her being in "heaven" (the reality where she was safe and loved) by the doctor's statement that she was there last summer. I like that's is open ended. I tend to believe that the non slayer reality is the "real" one and it still doesn't subtract from her slayer reality and story to me. If she thinks that's the real reality then all her choices there and all her joys and pains are just as real as anywhere else.

Jonathan Hall

Even if the mental hospital reality is the "real one" it's not a waste of time. If Buffy is living in a false reality that's still the one she is living in so everything that happens to her there and everything she does is still her life. Most TV shows are fiction and never actually happened. I would argue watching great TV shows aren't a waste of time even if they aren't "real."

Jonathan Hall

Feel like people either really hate this one or love it. I love it personally

Eclair W

I'm catching up on watching your full reactions, so I'm a bit behind, but honestly, I think I'd like to skip this one, because I can't handle watching the episode again. I really hated this episode, on a visceral level, when it first aired, and never rewatched it. It did its job too well, and left me wondering if the last six seasons were a complete waste of time ("It was all a dream.")

This is one of my fave episodes and your reaction was the best I've seen!

James

I never thought Vampires represented rapers?? Where does that came from? .. also why would Buffy - the victim of a rape- fall in love with a raper (Angel) and have feelings for/Sleep with the other in her delusion where she isbsupposed to be coping with her trauma?!!

Enas Bassiony

I've got a theory (that it's... ahem, let's not digress) about this one, but it's extremely dark. Let's consider here that the real Buffy is the institutionalized one. What provoked the crisis? Something I only recently noticed is Joyce telling her daughter she's "a survivor". A survivor of what? Well, we all know what vampires are a metaphor of. Buffy, the NA reality one, was a rape victim. She created this whole universe in order to cope with the assault. Now, the two reasons why this is even crueller : first, in-universe, two episodes later, it's "Seeing Red". Even in her delusion, she still ends up being the victim. Second, in real life, it's very possible that there's somebody who went through a real attack and created her own universe in which they're a Buffy-like character. Re: the retcon issue, I wouldn't overthink it. The first four seasons didn't exactly happen the way we watched them. And then again, if the NA reality is "true", it's all in the mind of a person who's gone tragically insane...

Gau Thier

This is mainly a bunch of bored writers trying to be clever, imho. I think fandom works waaaaayyyyyy too hard trying to explain it. I don’t bother.

Rio de Tanana

I really like the concept of this episode, and I thought it had a great deal of potential, but it ultimately felt like it was rewriting a very significant part of Buffy's past with her saying she'd been committed before Sunnydale... We know Buffy slipped up in front of Joyce at least once- once in The Witch when she was spell drunk, referring to herself as a vampire slayer, which Joyce shrugged off with little concern as Buffy being weird and silly. If Buffy had been institutionalized because of that prior to her saying this, her mother definitely would have had more of a reaction than that... But besides that, it also wouldn't make sense based on how Joyce reacted when Buffy told her she was the slayer in the season 2 finale. She was utterly completely floored and shocked. If Buffy had been committed for doing the same thing before, why wasn't it brought up by her (Joyce) when Buffy told her? And wouldn't that have played a huge role in Buffy's fear in telling her (again in this scenario) and been mentioned by her at some point.. The fear of being committed again... So yeah, unfortunately it's a retcon to me

Alexis Cardarella

The scene where Buffy tells Willow that she was institionalized is clearly a Monk-Memory, or a hallucinatory memory to make Buffy more likely to believe the hallucinations could be real. If Joyce had institionalized Buffy at 14, there is absolutely no way that Joyce would have reacted the way she did in Bad Eggs, or Becoming 2. Institionalizing your child is NOT something a parent forgets about.

Eric Hunter

This is, in my opinion, one of the best BtVS episodes not written by Joss, or one of the other core writers. BtVS is a Hero's Journey tale, and one of the standard tropes of that sort of story is Death and Resurrection. Buffy died (twice), and was physically resurrected in Bargaining, but throughout this season she has suffered with depression and PTSD. This episode represents her Spiritual Resurrection. Joyce's encouragement gives Buffy the strength to decide to be Normal Again, which for her means being a Hero.

Eric Hunter

Fuck you and your condescending bullshit. As if the vast majority of Angel the series couldn't run circles around most of season 6 of Buffy. And "tie up with a bow"? Like that's not somehow exactly what happened here? As if there was even the slightest chance the series was just going to abruptly end with this episode, revealing that everything up to that point was Buffy's hallucination? Teasing that it might be isn't clever by half, when prior shows that actually committed to the premise and actually said, "oh, this season was a dream," or the entire fucking series was a figment of someone's imagination, resulted in those moments going down as some of the most heavily criticized moments in television history. The only series that did the premise effectively was, Awake, where it was built into the core premise the uncertainty which of two realities the main character was experiencing was real or a dream. For a long running series to do that is dumb, because they either *try* to be clever by winking at it, like this episode, while ignoring anything of real substance; or they pull a St. Elsewhere. Either way it's condescending to the audience. It's like some idiot chiming into a discussion or debate about a work of fiction, by saying, "well, it's not real." No shit. The vast majority of people watching TV can tell the difference between reality and fiction (except maybe Fox News... 😞) When engaging in a work of fiction, the implicit conceit between the author and the audience is that none of this is real, but the audience will suspend their disbelief and engage it on the level of something adjacent to reality; experiencing the highs and the lows, the laughs and the sorrows with these characters. To make it all unreal within the accepted unreality, undermines all of that; and removes any consequence from the story down to its foundation. Frame of Mind was a good mind fuck, keeping you guessing how it would play out, and even allowed for the conventional reality to be a false one, without betraying the audience's trust for the series as a whole. Far Beyond the Stars was Star Trek at its most quintessential; exploring the many facets of humanity, the good and the very worst. Next to Normal offers nothing but to shit on Buffy some more, in a season that never seems to stop doing that; making her twist in the wind, while sharing some of the pain with the others.

Stargazer1682

Buffy hadn't taken the remedy even at the end, so she was still pumping in and out of her hallucination. A Genious Ending that pushes the audience to question everything for at least a week. Comparing this to The Sisko vision given to him by the prophets or Riker's subconscious fighting off a mind probe. Where in the end, it's business as usual, all tied up with a bow and NOT questioning everything that has been presented up to that point. You haven't been paying attention. If you want to complain about bad writing, then watch Angel. There are plenty of silly things to complain about there.

Thomas

Why make these comments here? Why not make them on the relevant episode?

Thomas

I don't like this episode. Not just because of the "is Sunnydale really real...? (Nudge, nudge, wink, wink)" ending, which never works on an established show; the retcon of Buffy saying she had actually told her parents she as Slayer before coming to Sunnydale and was committed is completely asinine. The episode itself, like much of this season, has a lot of potential, but doesn't live up to it. When you have DS9's "Far Beyond the Stars," and TNG's "Frame of Mind," or Batman TAS "Perchance to Dream," among others, this one just doesn't do the premise justice.

Stargazer1682

As said in response the other post, if the Wish didn't rewrite reality, there's really no imperative. Destroying the power center would do nothing; and there was never any actual threat; as the audience is taken on a casual stroll through what-if land. Presumably the "temporal fold" Anya wanted to create didn't reach through to another existing dimension, but into the past when the Wishverse briefly (but finitely) existed.

Stargazer1682

The wish Cordy made created a different version of the same reality. Only one where Buffy had never went to Sunnydale. But if that reality didn't have existence beyond the wish, then Anya couldn't have been able to pull vamp Willow out of it. There couldn't have been two Willows in Buffy's reality. She had to come from somewhere. If there can be two Willows there can be two Buffys. Perhaps something did happen in that clinic long ago that created that split. But she was the Slayer before that, so we know that is her real path.

Bud Haven