“The Body” — season five, episode sixteen of Buffy the Vampire Slayer — is the episode where Joyce Summers dies of a brain aneurysm on the sofa while Buffy is out. There is no monster. There is no villain to fight. There is only a body, and the unbearable ordinary grief that follows. Joss Whedon wrote and directed it, and he has now said, in an interview with Metro, that he considers it probably the best thing he will ever do.
“I think ‘The Body’ is probably the best thing I’ve done and the best thing I will ever do,” he said. “And I’m okay with that. You know, there are worse epitaphs.”
The personal dimension of the episode has been documented before. Whedon’s mother died in a car crash when he was 27, and the episode drew directly on that experience. “My mother died when I was 27 in a car crash,” he told Metro. “But I didn’t really think about mining [the experience] until around season 3. This is the moment [Buffy] says ‘I don’t know’, she hasn’t [dealt with this] before. There is a good kind of pain created from her situation that was particularly personal.”
The result is one of the most formally unusual episodes of the show’s run. There is no music until the closing seconds. The camera observes rather than editorialises. Every performance — Gellar’s opening minutes especially — is calibrated to the specific disorientation of sudden loss. Alyson Hannigan, Emma Caulfield, Amber Benson, Nicholas Brendon: everyone is doing something true. The word “mommy”, delivered by Gellar in the opening beat of the episode, remains one of the most purely affecting moments in the series.
Whedon also articulated why death functions so differently in Buffy than the supernatural threats that make up most of the show: “It doesn’t give you anything. Death is the thing [Buffy] cannot fight, but it also renders her meaningless. She’s not on a lot of committees, she doesn’t have a lot of hobbies, it takes away her identity.”
This is the paradox at the heart of “The Body.” Buffy can face anything the Hellmouth produces. She cannot face this. Neither could we.
Whatever one’s views on Whedon and the complications of his legacy, the episode exists and it is extraordinary. There are worse epitaphs.
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