The introduction of Dawn Summers at the end of “Buffy vs. Dracula” is, on a purely narrative level, quite bizarre. The episode is largely a self-contained adventure — Dracula arrives, is mildly ridiculous, is defeated — and then, in its final moments, a teenage girl appears in Buffy’s house and calls her “sister.” Buffy’s face suggests she knows exactly who this is. The audience has no idea. Credits.
It is an abrupt beginning for what becomes one of the most discussed storylines in the series.
The premise, once the show bothers to explain it, is admittedly strange. A group of monks, protecting an ancient mystical key from a hell-god named Glory, transformed it into human form and implanted false memories in everyone around Buffy to make Dawn feel real. She is, biologically and emotionally, Buffy’s sister. She is also, in some fundamental sense, not a person in the way everyone else is. The show takes some time to decide how heavily to lean into this discomfort, and gets it wrong in both directions at various points.
What the Key storyline does well, it does very well. Joyce’s illness and death land harder because Dawn is there — because Buffy now has a dependent, someone she is responsible for, someone who needs her to hold herself together even when she cannot. The ordinariness of grief, explored in “The Body,” is inseparable from the fact that two daughters are now without their mother. Dawn is not incidental to that episode. She is central to it.
Spike’s protectiveness of her — “little bit,” he calls her, with a tenderness he seems almost embarrassed by — adds a dimension to his character that carries through to Season 7. The relationship between Spike and Dawn is, quietly, one of the more affecting things in the back half of the series.
Glory as a villain is the weaker element. She is entertaining in small doses and becomes repetitive in larger ones, and the internal logic of the Key — that Dawn’s blood opens the portal, that Buffy’s blood can close it because they share the same essence — is the sort of rule that sounds reasonable in a writers’ room and gets shakier the longer you stare at it.
But Buffy’s sacrifice at the end of “The Gift” does not require the logic to be airtight. It requires the emotional truth to hold. And it does, because by that point Dawn is real to us — not because the monks made her real, but because the show made us believe in her relationship with her sister. The final image, that headstone, earns everything the preceding season put in.
The Key storyline made no sense. It was also essential. The two things are not in conflict.
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