There is a moment in “Bargaining,” the season six premiere, where Buffy claws her way out of her own grave and finds Sunnydale in flames, overrun with Hellions. She looks at the destruction around her and concludes, reasonably given the available evidence, that she has been resurrected into hell. It has always been one of the more quietly devastating moments in the series. What the show never quite made explicit is that this was not merely a misreading of her circumstances — it was a repetition of her worst nightmare.
“Nightmares,” the tenth episode of season one, does something the show would do several times over its run: it uses genre mechanics to access genuine psychological truth. When Sunnydale residents’ deepest fears begin manifesting as reality — conjured by a comatose child whose abuse has somehow bled into the waking world — Buffy’s fear takes a specific form. The Master buries her alive. She claws out of the earth. She discovers she has become a vampire. This, the episode establishes, is what Buffy is most afraid of.
Five seasons later, Willow resurrects her. The Scoobies perform the ritual but do not think to dig up the coffin first. Buffy wakes in the dark, in her own grave, and has to claw her way out. Again.
The parallel is not accidental. The season six writers understood what they were doing when they wrote that scene — they were literalising the callback, making Buffy live through her earliest Slayer trauma a second time, and making it real rather than supernatural in origin. In “Nightmares,” the fear was imposed on her by an external force. In “Bargaining,” it was imposed by her closest friends, who loved her enough to bring her back and did not consider what it might feel like to wake in a box underground.
This is, I think, the key to understanding why Buffy’s season six depression has always read as more than simple grief at being ripped from heaven, real as that grief was. She came back through her own nightmare. The first thing she experienced on returning to life was precisely the thing she most feared, and the people who put her there meant it as an act of love.
The Buffy who crawls out of her grave in season six is not just a Buffy who has lost heaven. She is a Buffy who has been forced to re-live the thing she feared most, through no malice but through a failure of imagination on the part of people who knew her well and did not think it through. The snarky sprightliness of the early seasons is not depression’s collateral damage so much as a logical response to that specific betrayal of trust.
Season one planted this. Season six harvested it. The show was doing this kind of long-range thematic work all along, and it is still revealing itself now.
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