By Chris Snellgrove | Published
When most Buffy The Vampire Slayer The fans have seen the show, they fear arriving in season 6 because it is such a Downer. Not only Tara dies, but this is the season when we look at Buffy to have a toxic relationship squarely with the spike of vampires and adopt us in another behavior outside characteristic to face the stress of being brought back from the dead. Interestingly, however, this horrible season is actually prefigured by one of the best and first episodes of the series. We are talking about Buffy Episode of season 2 “When She was bad”, which also involved the slayer acting out of character due to a huge stress.
Buffy The fans had no way of knowing it when the episode was presented for the first time, of course, but “When She was Bad” presented in preview the sixth season of the show by putting everyone (fans and characters) angry with the main character. For the context, Buffy literally died in the master’s hands in the final of season 1; However, Xander brought her back to life via the RCR and she defeated the vampiric villain. But during the premiere of season 2, she is notably out of character: she switches to Willow, she is cruel to Cordelia, and she is cool to Angel, going so far as to flirt with him to annoy her lift-duty boyfriend.
If you are a Buffy Fan while watching “When She was bad” for the first time, you probably spend a large part of the episode shouting on television and wondering why the slayer suddenly became so indifferent and nasty during the summer. However, it turns out that all this is a manifestation of Buffy’s trauma from his fight with the master, and she returns to her old self after having broken the vampire bones, effectively destroying all the chances of her resusciation via black magic. For the most part, this is a renowned episode, which is ironic because it foreshadows the main aspect of season 6 that so many people hated.
It is easy to isolate the individual elements of season 6 that countless fans hated, including Buffy’s terrible relationship with Spike (who culminates in the attempted rape). However, this relationship and therefore other bad decisions are motivated by the fact that Buffy’s friends raised it after his death of season 5; They estimated that it could be stuck in a hellish dimension, but Buffy later revealed that they had accidentally pulled it from the sky. This, combined with the trauma of Buffy’s mother who dies the previous season, assured that the killer spent the season in a depressive state when she was tackling banal things like the bills as well as the undead monsters.
Given what we know of Buffy in season 6, it is just to say that “when it was bad” foreshadows this later season by showing how it reacts to trauma by making bad decisions, especially romantic decisions. In the previous episode, this may be better illustrated by his frequently reduced Angel and even at the head of Xander with a sexy dance in order to make his toy of vampire jealous. We do not want to minimize the previous trauma of Buffy, but if you were killed and then resurrected caused all this romantic drama, it is perfectly credible that heaven after the sky after month would lead to a toxic relationship with Spike.
Unfortunately, what the Buffy Writers and producers have not seen, it is that “when it was bad” was effective in particular because it depicts an arc from an episode in which the killer triumphed over his trauma when the credits rolled. It is good to have a single episode or a single arc where our hero is on the rear foot, but as season 6 shows, nobody really wanted a whole season From our title character who gets paid for by his depressive trauma.
For the better or for the worst, however, it brought Buffy fans closer because the sixth season is a trauma that we have shared together, although only the slayer was able to face his stress by having overwhelming sex with a hot vampire. In this way, you might say that all trauma is created equal … Some are simply more equal (and path bizarre) than others.
