30 Days of Buffy: Day 16

Day 16: Episode You Like That Everyone Else Hates

There was a whole lot of backlash against the season 6 episode Normal Again.  In this episode, Buffy is stung by demon and the venom causes her to hallucinate.  In her hallucinations, Buffy is a patient in a mental institution.  Her parents are alive and together.  Dawn was never born.  Nothing that happened in Sunnydale is real.

Back in Sunnydale, Buffy's friends are trying to find the antidote for the poison.  But Buffy herself isn't sure what's real.  I mean, a girl in a mental hospital does make a lot more sense than a girl with superpowers battling demons.  So, with the help of her doctor, Buffy starts taking steps to break ties with the Sunnydale world by rounding up her friends and locking them in the basement with a demon.

Of course, Buffy ultimately chooses Sunnydale, drinks the antidote, and is cured.  But the last shot of the episode is Buffy in the hospital, catatonic in the corner.  The doctor is shining a light in her eye, saying "we lost her" and Joyce and Hank are holding each other, grieving.

The choice to make this the final shot, along with the hint that when Buffy died she actually awoke and lived in this "normal" world, angered a whole lot of fans.  They claimed that it destroyed the past six seasons by implying that everything happened in Buffy's head.  A lot of people simply choose to ignore that this episode even happened.  Which is a shame, because it really is a great episode.

This is the episode where Buffy stops complaining about how life was so much better when she was dead and decides to get back to the business of living.  In the midst of the incredibly depressing sixth season, things finally start to look up.

I had a slightly different reading of the ending of this episode than most of the fans.  Why can't both worlds be real?  BtVS has played with the idea of alternate dimensions before, in both The Wish and Superstar.  So there's no need for one reality to be true and the other to be nothing more than a hallucination.  I like to think that when Buffy finally does die once and for all (third time's the charm), she'll wake up back in the mental hospital, magically cured of everything.  She'll get the one thing she's always wanted more than anything: a normal life.  She'll get to hang out with her family and shop and date.  She'll be warm and loved.  And she'll be done trying to save the world.

And I think that's why I love this episode so much.  It lets me give Buffy the happy ending she'll never really get as the slayer.  Because as long as she's the slayer, she has to fight and lead and inspire and save the world.  But after she dies, she gets a happy, normal life.  We'll just skip over the whole part where she'll have spent her late teens and twenties in a mental institution.