Season 7, Episode 5 | Aired: 22 October 2002 | Written by: Drew Goddard | Directed by: David Solomon
Anya grants a wish that kills twelve fraternity brothers. Buffy decides she has to kill her. The episode is structured around Anya’s backstory — a full flashback to Sjornjost, 880 AD, and Aud (her human self) — and a musical number cut from Once More with Feeling. It is the show’s most complete episode on the subject of consequences, and it gives Emma Caulfield the material she’d been waiting four seasons for.
What Happens
Anya, grieving and purposeless after the wedding, granted a wish and massacred twelve men. Buffy finds the bodies and hunts Anya. Xander objects. Buffy says if Anya were a vampire she’d have killed her already — the hypocrisy is Xander’s point. D’Hoffryn arrives; Anya, regretting the wish, asks him to reverse it. He can — but the cost is the life of a vengeance demon. He kills Halfrek instead. Anya is human again. She has nothing. “From now on, I’m going to live in this world as it is.”
Key Moments
The flashback to Aud: Emma Caulfield playing a version of Anya with no armour — curious, earnest, in love with a man who betrayed her. It makes everything she became legible. And Anya’s choice to become human again, at cost — knowing that D’Hoffryn might kill her and doing it anyway.
Monster / Villain
Anya — briefly, and by her own reckoning. D’Hoffryn, who is genuinely malevolent for the first time in the show.
Notable Quote
“I don’t talk to people much. I mean, I talk at them.” — Aud, in 880 AD. Nothing about this has changed across eleven centuries.
Where It Fits
Selfless is the definitive Anya episode and one of the season’s best. It completes her arc from Season 3’s vengeance demon through the Season 6 collapse and into something harder to name but more real. Drew Goddard’s first produced episode for the show.