Buffy’s story has always revolved around death. Throughout its seven-season run, Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar) has wanted to escape from it or, boldly, return to it. Upon a rewatch, death is one of the clearest themes of the series — this wasn’t the case on my first time watching, when I reacted in disbelief every time the series brought up the possibility of Buffy dying. Surely, they wouldn’t go there. But they did.
In the Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 5 finale, Sunnydale is collapsing, and Buffy’s allies have nowhere to go. Her little sister, Dawn (Michelle Trachtenberg), is the reason why a dangerous portal has opened, and she tries to jump in to close it. But Buffy stops her. “The hardest thing in this world is to live in it,” she tells her. “Be brave. Live. For me.”
The hardest thing in this world is to live in it.
The two share the same blood, so Buffy is capable of closing the portal on her own. She jumps in and dies. It’s a moment that closes out an arc that had been teased since season 1.
A sister out of nowhere
Season 5 is one of Buffy’s most emotional seasons. It’s also one of its boldest, committing to a new central dynamic: Buffy and Dawn. Maligned series creator Joss Whedon shared that he introduced Dawn as a way of giving Buffy an intense dynamic that wasn’t based in romance. After seasons of Angel, Riley, and hints of Spike, it feels like a breath of fresh air to see Buffy get mad, angry, happy, and distraught over a different type of relationship.
One of the show’s biggest twists was the introduction of Dawn. Buffy, a notorious single child for most of the show, suddenly has a sister, introduced in a throwaway moment that made me think I had skipped a few episodes. But Dawn’s introduction is not a plot hole. The season spends the rest of its runtime deconstructing this, revealing that Dawn is a Key made up of ancient energy that was put into the body of a girl, with monks giving Buffy and her friends memories of her.
With Dawn’s arrival, Buffy’s era as a teenager is officially over. The season is all about making her grow up fast, stripping her of almost everything that gave her a sense of safety, including her human boyfriend Riley and her mother Joyce. It’s the end of Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s lighter era. From then on, you can’t say that the series is about a scrappy group of teens trying to save the world.
What Buffy leaves behind
“The Gift,” written by and directed by Whedon, neatly closes all of the storylines that it introduced in its first episode. Throughout the season Buffy and Dawn’s dynamic morphs, from annoying siblings to Buffy becoming Dawn’s caregiver. Buffy learns that Dawn isn’t real early on, but the discovery changes nothing. To Buffy, Dawn is the most important person in her life and only family left. In the finale, when Giles brings up the possibility of sacrificing Dawn to stop a ritual, Buffy immediately shuts him down.
“The Gift” takes its title from a line in “Intervention,” where Buffy goes on a vision quest to meet the First Slayer, a prehistoric girl who tells her: “Death is your gift.” The line reinforces one of Buffy’s biggest fears: that she’s a killing machine, closer to the vampires and demons she hunts than to the human world she’s so desperate to belong to. But Buffy’s words to Dawn show what her gift really means. For Buffy, being the Slayer has never been about strength or power; it’s about sacrifice. With her death, Buffy tasks her sister with living, no matter how difficult and lonely it gets. Those words will haunt her in season 6, finding Buffy at her most anguished and destructive after being ripped out of heaven and coming back to life.
While we now know that Buffy the Vampire Slayer continued for two more seasons and that it ended on a relatively happy note (at least she’s alive), the writers didn’t know that. Season 5 was the last to air on The WB, before the series found its final home on UPN. That uncertainty is why Whedon and company treated “The Gift” as a series finale, wrapping up Buffy’s story while engaging in a conversation with “Prophecy Girl,” the season 1 finale. That episode shows a younger Buffy, one who’s so afraid of dying that she can barely face the Master. This time around, Buffy chooses death calmly, because it means saving her sister.
“The Gift” ends with an indelible image. As Buffy’s friends mourn her and Dawn remembers her sister’s final words, we pan over Buffy’s body over a pile of rubble. We cut to her tombstone: “Buffy Anne Summers. Beloved sister. Devoted friend. She saved the world a lot.”