Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Fridge

Fridge Brilliance

• Angel goes vamp when he kisses Buffy in season one because it was an event that approached perfect happiness, which would eject his human soul and turn him back into Angelus. Sex in season two brought it to completion.
• I always wondered why Sweet was able to break the contract associated with his talisman (that whoever summons him has to become his Queen), given the prevalance of Magic A Is Magic A in the Buffy-verse. Then the other day, it hit me: He was able to break the contract because the one who summoned him ( Xander) was male and therefore was unable to be a "queen" by the common definition of the word. It wasn't that Sweet could freely break the contract, it was that the contract couldn't be fulfilled. (At the time the talisman was created, "queen" would have meant "female".)
  • In the context of royalty, 'queen' still means female; a male spouse to a sovereign monarch is either a 'prince consort' or a 'king'.
• In the Musical Episode, Once More, With Feeling!, Sarah Michelle Gellar's voice is obviously auto-tuned. Now while we could just say that this is because Sarah was not a confident singer and this was to compensate for that, that would be lazy and not fun. I instead maintain that Buffy actually sang that way, because her singing, like everything she was doing in life since her resurrection, was simply her "going through the motions", faking it, rather than doing it with any feeling.
  • Buffy's Slayer powers give her enhanced senses and strength. What's to say that they couldn't enhance her singing ability? While they couldn't make her a better singer on their own, they can help the mediocre vocals she does produce (a la autotune).
  • Or perhaps the spell cast by Sweet simply *forced* everyone's voice into acceptable pitch while singing. To this troper at least, the idea of demonic powers literally pulling on your vocal cords is somewhat creepier than a compulsion to think out loud in rhyme.
• Season 7. Buffy is acting like a bitch, Up to Eleven. One would think she had gotten over the dying and resurrection by now, and for a time it looked like she had. She is so bad that the potential slayers want the newly arrived, reformed Ax Crazy Psycho for Hire Faith to lead them. The brilliance comes in that they are over the Hellmouth, Faith had been gone for three years, the cops are trying to kill the good guys, and Buffy had, aside from brief excursions, been over the Hellmouth for seven years, which would be working overtime to make her evil, crazy or dead. All her attitude, all of how much like First Evil! Buffy she is becoming, is because she had been on the Hellmouth too long and it is affecting her.
• It always annoyed me how much Buffy babies Dawn, especially in season five. At fifteen (the same age Buffy was when she was called as the Slayer), she's not allowed to stay home even for an hour or so without a babysitter (something that most kids start doing as preteens), she's often protected from truths she would be better off knowing, and she's discouraged from even helping the Scoobies with research. Of course, she's not very mature for her age, but a lot of that seems to be the result of her being treated like a child rather than the cause. Then I realized that, at the time when this is most prevalent, Buffy is cracking under the pressure that's been piling up on her over five years as the Slayer. There, in her house, under her care, is a naive fifteen-year-old who's suddenly been drawn out of her happy teenage life by the discovery of a connection to the supernatural that she neither fully understands nor wants. Sound familiar? Buffy sees herself in Dawn, and she's trying to give her the safe, sheltered adolescence that she, in hindsight, wishes she had had, even if others can see that it's not what Dawn wants or needs.
  • This is directly lampshaded on the show, literally almost as soon as Dawn shows up. From episode 5x02, "Real Me":

Buffy: She gets to be a kid, and she acts like it's the biggest burden in the world. Sometimes I would like to just curl up in Mom's lap and not worry about the fate of the world. I'd like to be the one who's protected, who's waited on--

• • And another Fridge Brilliance to go along with that: Buffy was tasked with protecting the Key at all costs. If the Key was just a physical object, it'd be a standard protection deal, but she's a 15 year old girl. So Buffy's task of protection goes beyond that of mere physical protection, she's compelled to protect her emotionally too, from things that might hurt her if she found out (such as being the Key, or even just the facts of life).
  • This is also an artifact of earlier season 5 scripts not having been fully updated to account for Michelle Trachtenberg's being cast; originally Dawn was intended to have been around 10 years old, not 14.
• One thing that was bugging me was magic. It seems like anyone can start picking it up (Dawn cast the resurrection spell in "Forever" and even Buffy used it to enter a trance in "Shadow"), so it was kind of bothering me that for something that seems pretty accessible, only Willow, Tara, Amy, and Jonathan seem to be doing it. And then I realized; of course many more people are using magic, the Magic Box has a steady stream of customers. Some seem to just be buying stuff as novelties, but you do see customers that are clearly buying spell components. And then it also hit me that just because magic is a key component of the show, it doesn't mean that they're gonna show us every single magic user in Sunnydale; even if they know about magic and demons, that doesn't mean they're gonna get involved with slaying, or even use magic all that often outside of their own home. So the magic = homosexuality connection (it was more prevalent before magic = drugs started) makes even more sense when you consider that there might be hundreds or even thousands of magic users in Sunnydale, but you couldn't tell from appearance.
• Willow says to Giles "I expected you would kill me and then you went all Dumbledore on me." Harry Potter shows that DD was always an evil mentor.
  • Well, I don't know about evil, but he was certainly morally grey--which Giles is as well.
• In Same Time, Same Place, Spike tells Buffy "I should hide... hide from you... hide my face... you know what I've done". He could be talking about his Attempted Rape, which is what the other characters seem to think, but once the episode is over it starts seeming like he was also giving away the twist in a Mad Oracle sort of way: It's possible that he's speaking about Willow in the first person, since it turns out that she unintentionally cast the spell that made her and most of the main cast mutually invisible, due to her nervousness about seeing them again after the whole Dark Willow thing...
• Xander doesn't like Spike, even after he gets his Morality Chip. This makes sense. Spike is still evil, and Xander would probably be the first to die if Spike started killing. He also doesn't like Angel. This could be said to be because he has a crush on Buffy,but this is no excuse for not telling Buffy Angel had a soul, just to get rid of him. However, he has no such hatred of Riley, and even convinces her to go back to him. Why such a change in attitudes? Remember in the second episode of the first season? "I don't like vampires. I'm gonna take a stand and say they're not good." Xander is a racist.
  • Except, it's not really racism, it's a survival instinct. You wouldn't willingly walk up to a lion, tiger, or bear (oh my) without some sort of protection. He's wary of vampires for the same reason most people are wary of psychopaths (people with no emotion): They're big nasty predators.
  • Xander's introduction to the supernatural culminated with him having to stake someone he'd known for his entire life and had grown up with since kindergarten. Lack of screen time on the show prevented it from being made obvious, but Xander and Jesse had to have been as much like brothers as Xander and Willow are Like Brother and Sister. Which other vampire hunters do we know had to personally destroy a close family member after they had been turned? Gunn and Holtz. Both of whom are as hardcore down on vamps as Xander is, if not more. Xander's had one of the classic vampire hunter origins, and the one out of them all that produces the most dedicated vampire hunters, so how is it remotely surprising that he's 100% anti-vampire? The mildly puzzling thing is that Gunn is as accepting of Angel as he is, but presumably the factors of 'not a teenager when they first met' and 'no romantic complications at all' helped there.
• The trio are some of the weakest enemies in the series, that Buffy would usually whup without a sweat. Three things: one they are human and Buffy is really hung up on killing humans, two she has so much on her plate there's scarce little time to focus on anything else, three she begins the season by being ripped out of heaven by her friends, clawing her way out of her own grave, seeing the Buffybot decimated, running for her life, wondering if she had somehow ended up in hell, and attempts to commit suicide. It takes her all season to get over this, had the threat been Angelus for example she wouldn't have lasted long.
• Remember when everyone was leaving the city in S7 and people were becoming more violent (the cops who tried to kill Faith for instance)? It was because of the Hellmouth activity, so as time went on, it got worse, but the rest of the city was gone, so nobody noticed. This explains the more hostile actions from the characters (Buffy threatening to let Spike kill Robin, Robin trying to kill Spike even though he was a good fighter and would be needed to help fight, them kicking Buffy out of the house, Buffy stealing that guy who stayed's house, and more) as the Hellmouth was making them all more hostile!
• In B:TVS Seasons 1-3, there is an establishing shot of three girls talking next to a fountain in the school courtyard (the one standing up has short dark hair and is wearing a yellow jacket). This shot got reused so many times that it broke my willing suspension of disbelief every time I saw it. Then, while rewatching "Homecoming" today, it occurred to me: Sunnydale High is on a Hellmouth. There must be some kind of time loop bubble thingy going on that nobody has ever noticed, and those poor girls have been stuck having the same conversation over. And over. And over. Again. For at least THREE YEARS.
• I though The Cruciamentum was a stupid name. Then I discovered that it's Latin. Latin for torture or torment.
• "Band Candy" had a bunch of timeline problems with Ripper, or so it seems. Giles was said to become Ripper around 21, but he could have used the nickname beforehand and most likely was already on his way to being the powerful warlock badass that Ripper has been hinted to be. However, he doesn't seem that powerful in "Band Candy", which makes sense, seeing as he's reverted to 16, before he really cranked up the badness. So his lower level of badness can be chocked up to already going by Ripper, but not actually being Ripper yet at 16. Had the candy made people go into their mid to early-20s, we can assume Ethan would have been killed very quickly.
• Dawn's frequent citing of The Monkey's Paw in S8 after Buffy gains a bunch of new powers makes a bunch of sense when you think back to the episode after "The Body". It was a Whole-Plot Reference to The Monkey's Paw and the frequent citing of TMP is most likely because she learned from her experiences.
• I just had a moment of Fridge Brilliance due to another page on here. In Angel, when he's locked in a steel box by his son for a while, he goes half-mad from the hunger after only 4 months. The Ubervamps were in the Hellmouth for millions of years. They might have been intelligent once, but they haven't eaten in MILLIONS of years, which is why they're both weak (besides for the one that escaped, who had at least fed and also was most likely their equivalent to Angelus) and why they're crazy.
• Spike mocking Xander as nothing more than a "glorified carpenter" in the season 5 finale. A year later in the season 6 finale, Xander saves the world telling Willow that despite everything she's done, he loves her. Know anyone ELSE who was literally a glorified carpenter and saved the world through talk of love and forgiveness?
  • Um...the actual epithet was "glorified bricklayer."
• Buffy Season 8 Fridge Brilliance moment: Xander and Dawn's relationship. At first, I felt like it was pulled out of the deepest ass in the 'verse. Then I realized that it made pretty good sense. Dawn's been abandoned or betrayed by just about everyone to ever grace the Buffy the Vampire Slayer opening credits. Tara leaving the Summers home, Willow's magic addiction, her mother's death, Buffy's death and then ignoring her, Giles going back to England, Spike having sex with Anya and trying to rape Buffy followed by his running off and she already hated Anya. But Xander had betrayed her once as far as I can remember, and she quickly got even by tazing him and knocking him out. Xander's basically the only one that didn't completely ignore her, leave her or die on her (or try to kill her). As for his side, the girl's had a crush on him for years and now she's legal, plus it was clear they were friends beforehand. Plus, they're the only normal ones in the group and the ones who deal with the most amount of Buffy's shit. They have plenty in common and they actually do work as a couple.
  • More than that, the one time Xander "betrayed" her was knocking her out and driving her away from Sunnydale right before the giant climactic battle to protect her. And he stayed by her side.
• I really hated a certain episode of Angel where they needed Angel to lose his soul and become Angelus to further the plot of the season. The attempt failed, but led to information concerning a mystical weapon they can use to defeat their enemy. This lead to an Indiana Jones-style temple of doom, and along the way, all hurt feelings are mended, romance resurfaces, father and son fight side-by-side, and the Beast is defeated. It was All Just a Dream. I hated the episode, thinking to myself "They can do better than this!" It wasn't until literally in the middle of the night, that I understood what the episode was about... Angel can save the world, but still he burns in the daylight and will lose his soul if he is happy. The dream represented Angel's desires and the ultimate darkness he must always be a part of.
  • The real brilliance of this though, is that when you think about that sequence, the revelation that it was a dream makes total sense. There are small details: when Wesley's hand gets stabbed, he just shakes it off like nothing; also, the fact that it would be incredibly stupid/unlike Cordelia and Angel to risk him losing his soul. These moments seem unrealistic or out of character until you realize they were intentional hints.
    • Far more brilliant than this is that the dream sequence was specifically designed to create a world in Angel's mind where events led to him experiencing perfect happiness... which is exactly what triggers his curse and the loss of his soul.
  • My immediate reaction to the final episode, "Not Fade Away", was initially something like "Joss, I loved you. BUT NOW I HATE YOU! HOW COULD YOU LEAVE ME HANGING LIKE THIS?" But the more I thought about it (and once I bought the series on DVD and watched it a couple more times), the more I realized that it was basically the perfect ending, and showing Angel and company charging into battle with little or no hope of winning was beautifully symbolic of the neverending nature of the battle against evil. Nonetheless, I was very excited when the Season six comics came out so I could see what had happened to all my beloved characters.
    • I've seen this line of thought so many times. What about all the talk of a final Apocalypse and the End of Days before this? The battle against evil had never been suggested to be neverending until this point.
      • Never suggested until that point? The battle against evil being never ending was clearly stated in SEASON 2, in the episode 'Epiphany':

Angel: "In the greater scheme or the big picture, nothing we do matters. There's no grand plan, no big win. ...If there is no great glorious end to all this, if - nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do. 'cause that's all there is. What we do, now, today... Because, if there is no bigger meaning, then the smallest act of kindness - is the greatest thing in the world."

• • • • Or in Orpheus:

Faith: "I did my time."
Angel: "Our time is never up, Faith."

• • • How about this one? When the Shanshu Prophecy is first discovered, it's mentioned no one knows which side Angel will fight for at the apocalypse? That's because it doesn't matter which side he'd on. Angel's big importance will be triggering it. In season 1 of Buffy, he delivered the Codex to Giles which led to the prophecy of Buffy's death. In season 2, Angelus opened Acathla, a potential apocalypse without a ton of demon fighting. In season 4 of Angel, his actions made Jasmine's existence possible and in season 5, his actions allowed the Circle of the Black Thorn's army to appear in the real world.
  • I thought it was a bit incredulous about how big a deal they make out of humans not being able to handle the Visions, but when Cordelia is shown by Skip an alternate reality where she was doing great in her movie career, doing fine, but in her perfect world, she is yanked out to help her friends and eventually finds Angel tormented by the Visions, where she kisses him and takes the Visions for herself again, I kind of eyerolled at it, wondering why Angel was affected so badly even he himself was a demon. But then I realized Cordelia had been repeatedly set up as a terrible actress in the series and that this whole thing was just part of Jasmine's plot to get herself incarnated into the world. Granted, it put the Idiot Ball in her court, but it was good for foreshadowing Skip wasn't on the level.
    • He was tormented because he's Mr. Isolation and had no Cordelia. In the Season two episodes where Cordelia was acting, she was good.
      • She was a good actress when she wasn't trying to act (i.e., going undercover).
      • Word of God confirms that Angel wasn't driven insane because he had the visions, it was because he didn't have Cordelia.
    • To be specific, the exact reason Angel was so tormented was because he had NO-ONE. Think about how Angel is, during the intervening years between first regaining his soul and moving to Sunnydale. When Whistler first met him in the flashbacks of "Becoming", Angel was a wreck who simply lived out his existence day in and day out, deliberately suffering for his sins as Angelus, not even bothering to BUY blood - he'd 'hope to catch one rat a month' to feed himself. Angel is, as is also seen during the 'Are You Now Or Were You Ever?' flashbacks, a VERY dark, closed off, even ruthless individual, and not just because of the curse. He needs human company - he needs friends around him to keep him stable. Notice how he steadily became a more light-hearted and less broody person the more he spent time with Buffy (before the curse was lifted, anyway)? Notice how it was her love - unconditional, forgiving - that helped him recover from Hell? Also, take note of what Doyle said when Cordelia first implied working for Angel in "City Of" - "She's got a real humanizing influence." Finally, take note of how Angel fired everyone in "Reunion" - it was in RESPONSE to Wesley's statement that the three of them were all that kept Angel from total darkness. Because Angel is a person who can never, ever allow himself to be happy, and because he has the guilt of countless atrocities weighing on his mind - guilt which may well go on for eternity - he needs the humanity of his friends to keep his feet on the ground. In the alternate world in "Birthday", Wesley and Gunn were clearly not his friends - Wesley had lost an arm early on fighting a demon, and Gunn was probably even less comfortable working for/with a vampire. Fred - the only member of AI who was always loyal to him besides Cordy - was either dead or still trapped in Pylea. In the end, Cordy is the catalyst - Angel could have handled the visions rather well, I imagine, if he only had Cordelia around to help him cope with them. It may have been part of Skip and Jasmine's Gambit, but one thing which is certain is that they navigated events REALISTICALLY to reach their goal.
  • A 4th season episode has Darla begging Connor to not kill an innocent to quick-start the birth of his and Cordelia's child. For a long time, I wondered just how or why Darla, a soulless vampire, would care. However, I realized that season 4 of Angel and season 7 of Buffy were simultaneous and therefore the First Evil is about and the Buffyverse has a long history of baddies wanting the apocalypse to be their responsibility. The First Evil impersonated Darla in effort to prevent Jasmine bringing the end of the world/world peace.
    • It's not just that. The First is powered by evil. Jasmine eliminated evil. Had she won, it would have died.
  • Alternatively, it's not really Darla. Darla said in Season 3 that Connor's soul was essentially infecting her actions. The memory of a soulful Darla is lodged somewhere in Connor, and it came out to act as his conscience.
    • If that was Darla, it was the human soul, not the demonic vampire.
  • It took the troper a while to realize the significance of the name of Angel's hotel base - Hyperion is usually related to the sun.
    • And why was Angel so obsessed with it in "Are You Now or Have You Ever"? I didn't get it until, watching it for the third or fourth time, I really listened to what Wesley was saying. The hotel has the same history as Angel himself.

Wesley: For the better part of the last century, this place has been host to not only a malevolent demonic presence, but also to the worst faces of humanity! This is a house of evil.
Angel: Not any more.

• • It is small, not even relevant to the plot of the show, but for years a reference to Les Misérables that Spike made just confused the heck out of me. Angel had mentioned that he had never seen the play, and Spike explained that, by the end, Angel would be eating people again. To me, that just never made sense, I just did not get it. Was Spike saying the play was so bad it would drive somebody to murder? That was the best explanation that I could come up with, and I figured it was just a Joss Whedon dig at the show (I, of course, did not agree, since Les Mis is one of my favorite Broadway shows, and by some bizarre happenstance Do You Hear the People Sing? actually began to play on my computer as I was typing this entry, but not everybody has to feel the same way). Then, just yesterday, it hit me: It is a compliment! Angel loses his soul when he experiences a moment of pure happiness, of unadulterated bliss, and Spike said that he would be evil again after watching the show. He is saying that seeing that show is an experience of true joy. I don't know why it took me so long (it's been more than four years since I saw that episode), but it just hit me!
  • Why did the Loa lie to Wesley? Season 3, episode 15, "Loyalty", worried about the prophecy "the father will kill the son", Wesley asks a Loa if it's true. The Loa replies "That the vampire will devour his child is certain" and "The first portent will shake the earth. The second will burn the air. The last will turn the sky to blood." Spoilers for seasons three and four. Wesley thinks those portents are confirmed at the end of the episode when (1) an earthquake causes (2) a gas stove to explode, and Angel to get a cut on his forehead and (3) bleed all over Connor's sky-patterned blanket. I can get behind the earthquake; it's epic. I can even be okay with the stove; pretty big. But a little blood on Connor's fuzzy wuzzy wittle binky? No. Just no. Stupid. So why did the Loa lie? He didn't. He didn't say "son", but "child", and those three portents occur in season four. (1) The Beast arises from the ground at the place of Connor's birth. (2) At a popular night club, it uses the Eye of Fire to, get this, cause fire to rain from the sky. Then it uses various artifacts to (3) blanket the sky in darkness. Now that's some epic, apocalypsy action. The kicker? The Beast was killed by Angelus, not Angel. The vampire, not the human soul. Of course, the act of devouring might be talking about Angel slashing Connor's throat to kick off the memory spell at the end of season four.
    • I hate to burst your bubble but the Loa WAS talking about Connor. Wolfram and Hart were spiking Angel's blood with a sample of Connor's they'd stolen. Angel was literally devouring his child without realizing it.
    • Come on, this is Angel. Most of the prophecies in that 'Verse come true at least twice, if not more, and the characters are never sure which one, if any, was the real fulfillment.
• On the issue of the prophecy, it occurs to me that Sahjahn was lying about it being fake, probably to drive a wedge between Wesley and Team Angel. Why do I say this? Because Angel DID kill Connor at the end of season 4, to stop him from murdering other people. Just like previous prophecies in the Buffyverse (such as the one in "Prophecy Girl"), this was misleading and ultimately self-fulfilling. Wesley's actions to avoid the prophecy actually made it come true, by resulting in Connor becoming the very person Angel would have to kill. Sahjahn was a liar, and the prophecy was real, but not in the way they thought.
• In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I grew annoyed with Xander's uselessness. But this changed when I was watching the interview with Joss on the first season DVD when he explained about Buffy being a brilliant subversion of the Helpless Blonde girl so often seen in horror movies. I realized that by making Xander more or less useless in the series was just an extension of that subversion. Xander is in more ways than one the Helpless Blonde girl for the Buffyverse, at least in the early seasons. Whedon turned the whole Horror genre on its head with the Xander being impotent, but I feel that this might actually still be a problem. Whedon comments on the DVD that he wasn't used to television, films were his forte, and I think Xander's helplessness is an aspect of that. The idea of Xander being the damsel in distress might work for an episode or two, but it leaves him with no real purpose on the show, it would work better in the form of a film. Xander doesn't fit in with the girls for Brains, Brawn and Beauty because Willow's the brains, Buffy's the Brawn and Cordelia was the Beauty (however, if we weren't counting Cordelia, Buffy easily fills the void of both brawn and beauty and if we weren't counting Willow, Giles is there for brains, and if we weren't counting Giles, well then that would be a crappy show because it just be Buffy and the inept, not particularly smart, and impotent Xander). Sure, Xander's the snarky guy member of the group, but generally everyone on the show are either sarcastic or witty. So he's there really just as the teen guy, but he's still useless as he serves the show in no way what-so-ever. I know this probably belongs in the IJBM, but I thought it should be said here.
  • In the commentary for an episode of season seven, Joss reiterates what was stated in the penultimate episode of the fourth episode, that Xander is the heart of the team. Specifically, Xander backs Buffy up on her play to go into the vineyard after Caleb, and everyone falls in line. Then in the next episode, Xander has lost an eye and no longer supports Buffy. The team falls apart. The metaphor for this in the seventh season is that Xander is, literally, the one keeping the house together.
• A weird case: Buffy the Vampire Slayer has an episode dedicated to Riley Finn return with his new wife, The Ace; she seems to be everything that Buffy is not (including annoying)... until you realize that Spike had absolutely no reason to use the alias of "The Doctor", but she would have, various minor, deniable clues were dropped to that effect.
  • As Season seven went on, people started acting more hostile. Then I remembered, the Hellmouth was acting up, making everyone more hostile (remember the cops who tried to kill Faith?) and also caused most people to leave. Suddenly, every overly hostile act committed by the characters makes sense, they were under the same effects as everyone else!
  • In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Jenny refers to football as "my country's national pastime." Given that the title "America's national pastime" has traditionally referred to baseball, this is a Gretzky Has the Ball, and at first glance it seems like a needless one. But later in the season it's revealed that Jenny is secretly a Gypsy, whose name was Americanized from Janna Kalderash. So it makes sense that Jenny would make that kind of mistake about American culture, and at the same time, she might be eager to make this kind of patriotic remark in order to affirm her cover story.
    • And I just disliked the name "Jenny Calendar" for sounding made up. It seems there's a good reason for that after all.
      • While we're on the topic of Jenny Calendar... her name is Jenny Calendar because her days are numbered. Classic Joss.
    • Jenny Calendar is right. Football is America's national pastime (there is no national Xday Night Baseball). And that is the sort of thing an outsider immersed in a new culture, one who didn't grow up hearing that baseball is the American national pastime, would be more likely to realize.
    • And I reckoned she was American; third, maybe second generation. Not as enamored of 'the old ways' as her elders and all...
    • Even cooler subversion... if she's not really American, then the "football" she's referring to is what Americans call "soccer". Which really is the national pastime in most other countries.
  • So I finished watching the Buffy episode "Normal Again" and had stood up to refill my drink when suddenly I stopped and literally yelled out "HOLY SHIT! THE ENTIRE SHOW IS A FAKE! IT'S ALL PART OF HER SCHIZOPHRENIC DELUSIONS!" Because it all made sense. And now, the Word of God has said that this conclusion (that Buffy's crazy and she was just imagining she was a Slayer) might very well be the correct one.
    • Then more FB comes in. Joss is fucking with us. Remember Season 6? The Trio talk about Doctor Who and Red Dwarf. Remember any modern pop culture references from Post 1996? Heck, remember Angel? If they were dreams, then the references (ESPECIALLY to Red Dwarf) wouldn't be there. Remember, Buffy got her Slayer abilities back when she was the typical high school blonde. There's no way she could have known about them. They were British shows that weren't and for Red Dwarf, still aren't, well known in the States by non-nerds. Plus, it's too well done. The mythology, the backstory, the plots the EVERYTHING! It's too good for anyone but a skilled writer to make, and a skilled writer she is not. Joss is laughing his ass off over these reactions.
  • In the second season episode Halloween, Buffy dresses as an 18th-century noblewoman and thus becomes one. The scenes seem to be You Fail History Forever at first, until you realize that Your Mind Makes It Real and it's Buffy herself that has a poor grasp of history.
    • On the other hand, Xander-as-a-soldier apparently gains knowledge and skills--some specific to the local Army base, even. He uses this knowledge later, most notably in "Innocence," so it's fair to say that his costume-persona, at least, was not taken from his own knowledge of soldiers.
  • I personally disliked Mayor Wilkins when I first saw him. I found his folksy personality to be inappropriately comic, for a character who was supposed to be a big bad like Angelus or the Master. Then it occurred to me, he's an American small town politician; even if he could keep power through demonic assistance, he still needed to seem like somebody who could be elected. - benj
    • But, the Mayor is really like that. He is a 1950's sitcom character rolled into a Buffy villain. Think of this way: Season 3 is all about duality. 'Good' Buffy vs. 'Dark' Faith. Giles vs. Ethan (briefly). Even Kakistos (stupid, traditional ancient villain) vs Mister Trick (clever, stylish, modern). The Mayor vs. Balthazar. It only makes sense that the Big Bad of the season himself has two sides, albeit rolled in one. Woah, I think I just got the Fridge Brilliance just writing this.
  • In the episode Doppelgangland, Buffy is about to stake Vamp-Willow, and manages to halt it mid-strike when Willow calls for her to stop. I'd assumed this was just to contrast Buffy with the impulsive Faith, who didn't stop when Buffy called, and accidentally killed a guy. Then I caught on to Buffy's casual "Well, I work out" and remembered how, at the start of the episode, it was mentioned offhand that she'd been training harder than usual. And it hit me: Buffy had been training her reflexes so that what happened with the Deputy Mayor would never happen again. Along with the usual Fridge Brilliance reaction, it gave me a new respect for Buffy.
    • What was Deputy Mayor Allan Finch doing in that alley in the first place? Was he going to betray the mayor to the slayers? Actually, no, he was betraying the mayor to Balthazar. That's how the vampire got all the way into the mayor's office earlier.
  • I wondered a little about how convenient it was that Angelus, Drusilla and Spike all came from the same line of vampires. Indeed, they seem to be the only ones they have sired, as they travel around together in their little four man band around the world. But thinking about it, it actually fits with Angelus' depiction perfectly. He kills for pleasure, planning out the murders for prolonged enjoyment. It makes sense that he would only sire somebody unique like him, and he saw a tool as well as a companion in Drusilla. From then on, he could plan his actions using Drusilla's gift of prophecy, leading to their discovery of one of the most rebellious vampires of all time. Angelus never picked his family by chance; he planned his family, just like he plans everything.
    • And, in light of the way Spike thinks of blood as "life", it explains why the vampires in Angel's family are closer than other throwaway vampires on the show, as they treat siring as the giving of life, and not to be taken lightly.
    • Something that just now hit me. One of Buffy's themes is that Buffy survived so long because she had her friends & family to back her up. In other words, friendship and family give you a reason to keep on going. And that's exactly why Angelus & co. survived so long! Because they were also a family!
    • An interesting contrast there: Angelus plans everything with a genius, sociopathic detachment. Angel can't do that. He ends up with True Companions like his original "family," but they're not planned. Angel's team seems to be made up of whoever happens to wander in and sticks around.
    • And Spike isn't such a bad pick to sire, either. Becoming a vampire makes you violent, psychopathic, and impulsive. So most vampires become overconfident and get themselves slain forthwith. It's the ones who are the most cowardly and inhibited in life (Spike, Dru, and Angel at least, and probably Darla also) who get just crazy enough, but stay relatively careful by vampire standards. So thank Joss that Angelus never thought to sire Jonathan!
  • Moloch wanted Willow so badly because he could sense her potential.
  • The end of "Normal Again" just represented the fact that Buffy wasn't responding to the hallucinations anymore. She hadn't taken the antidote when the episode ended.
  • I'm watching Buffy again since the first time it ran since it's now up on Netflix, and I notice that Amy and Ethan's magic incantations both supplicate to Roman gods, Diana and Janus, respectively. I also happened to be playing Assassin's Creed II and the same time, which, with its Gratuitous Italian, is how it clicked for me. The magic spells on this show, like in many other works, are in Latin. Who but a Roman god would understand Latin spells?
  • "I'm a hair's breadth from investigating bunnies." It's been easily six months since I watched "Once More with Feeling", and OUT OF NOWHERE tonight I got hit with the realization that that was a pun. A clever little pun that Giles made to amuse only himself and no one else.
  • Something I noticed in the season 6 episode "Tabula Rasa" is that when the group all pass out and wake up, they are each with the person they will be with in the season finale. Willow and Xander are together (Willow will be crying in his arms after being restored to normal), Giles and Anya and Buffy and Dawn are also together. Of course, Spike and Tara are both alone.
  • Something curious that struck me is that Buffy has died three times on the show and each time she has, one other member of the "Core Four" (Buffy, Xander, Willow, Giles) has resurrected her. In "Prophecy Girl", she drowns and Xander brings her back to life. When she dies properly at the end of season 5, Willow resurrects her with a spell. As for her death in "The Wish", Giles technically saves her by smashing Anyanka's pendant to reverse the wish and return the world to normal.
    • This just made this troper realize that it may be An Aesop on being morally grey. Notice how all of the people who've brought her back are all morally grey? Giles is willing to go to some lengths to protect Buffy or save people (killing Ben for example), Willow is willing to do some very grey things for those she cares about, like her assault on Glory or resurrection of Buffy, and Xander tends to do some very grey things as well. It's a deconstruction of the Poisonous Friend, showing they're important for the good guy to not go down a path of darkness or die! Wish!Buffy was basically Nineties Anti-Hero Buffy, and she died. She needs her friends, as they're the morally grey ones.
      • Alternatively, Buffy herself is morally grey and needs her friends to keep her from becoming darker. Word of God himself said that Faith was what she would've become if she didn't have a good support system.
        • It's both. Think about it, Faith had nobody to do the grey things for her, and Buffy wouldn't if her friends weren't around. They all need each other to prevent any of them from becoming evil. They spread they grey out between each other so that none of them go into the black:
          • Willow - Friends = Dark Willow
          • Giles - Scoobies = Ripper (in fact, S8 Giles is basically Ripper because he's been cut off from everyone else and is now working with Faith).
      • Xander - Friends = Asshole.
      • Buffy - Friends = Wishverse Buffy.
      • Spike - Everyone = S2/S3/S4 Spike.
      • Anya - Friends = Anyanka.
      • Angel - Friends = the Angel who fed Wolfram & Hart employees to Darla and Dru.
      • Wesley - Friends = the Wesley that betrayed Angel and gave Conner to Holtz.
      • Cordelia - Real Friends = BTVS Cordelia.
      • Fred - Friends = slightly darker, crazy, trapped in Pylea Fred.
      • Gunn - Friends = morally grey Gunn.
      • Tara, Lorne and, as much as I hate to admit it, Riley, are the only people not suppressing Anti-Hero or even evil tendencies. They all need the others so they can spread out their darkness.
  • Why are the Turok-Han so easy to kill in the series finale? The one that got out first was so badass it almost killed Buffy. Twice. Whedon admitted that he nerfed them to make the final battle work. Simple hand wave, though; they've been trapped in a hole under the ground for god knows how long, not feeding. The one that got out was badass because it had fed, but the ones in the hole are weak because they haven't.
    • Another reason for the Badass Decay of the Turok-Han - The first one to come out was their best fighter, their champion. If they've been trapped down there since before time and they're given a chance to let one out to wreak havoc, then they're going to send their best. Of course they're not all up to the first one's level - it's like expecting the Initiative soldiers to be on the same level as Buffy. This revelation actually came while in front of a fridge.
      • A throwaway line in a later episode made this click for me. Giles mentions that the First is on the back foot now that the Turok-Han had been killed. Why would that matter if the First had thousands of them? Obviously the Turok-Han was a leader or a champion. He is to regular Turok-Han what Angel and Spike are to newly-sired vamps.
  • I was always bothered by something -- can't remember if it was a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode or an Angel one, but eh. At one point, in Flash Back-format, we see moments before Spike's siring; Angelus has just jokingly mentioned to Drusilla that maybe she should just sire the next person she sees, and at that moment, William the Bloody (awful at poetry) runs by, holding back tears. Drusilla smiles, and we apparently learned why Spike was sired and brought into Angelus and Co.'s little group. This bothered me both because the implication that Spike was chosen entirely at random seemed like a rather unnecessary jab at his character, and it seemed inconsistent with the standard set by the other vamps. The human Darla was apparently at least somewhat carefully selected by The Master, who visited her during the daylight very specifically to sire her; Darla followed Liam around for at least some time before siring him; and, Angelus "made" Drusilla, torturing her, making her his "perfect work" by breaking her brain completely. Each chosen with varying degrees of care; considering these vampires seem to have only ever sired each other, this made sense, tying this back to the "they worked as a family" point mentioned previously. So, why on Earth are we supposed to believe Spike was sired at random? Then it hit me: Drusilla sired Spike. As in, Drusilla, who is psychic. She could have known exactly what kind of vampire she was about to create, better than any of the others. In a way, this makes Spike the most carefully chosen of the group. Thank you, Refridgerator.
  • Same troper as before, this time about the whole "Normal Again" discussion above: when I first saw that episode, he thought it was a pretty cool "What if?" sort of scenario. What if the whole Slayer thing were just some psychiatric patient's fantasies? What if Buffy's just some crazy chick in a madhouse? In other words, pretty cool Filler, but Filler all the same. Then I realized that this episode actually DOES have Arc Significance. In the episode, the hallucinations Buffy experiences of being in a mental institution are related to the previous summer, that is, the time when she was dead between Seasons 5 and 6. Therefore, Buffy thinking in the episode that she'd rather escape her current life and just be a normal girl again is symbolic of her ongoing suicidal tendencies since being brought Back from the Dead (this time around), and Buffy ultimately deciding to keep her life the way it is and give up those hallucinations of a normal life represent the beginning of her overcoming those tendencies. This episode just got a whole lot deeper.
  • One more Buffy thing (can you tell I'm a fan?): in "The Wish" (3.09), it struck me as odd that Xander and Willow just happened to be so high ranking in The Master's vampire army. Before they both met Buffy, they were both just ordinary high schoolers, so there seemed to be no reason why they should be "special" in this world. Then, I looked at the situation in a different light. It's not some weird coincidence that the two people from Sunnydale High who should have gone on to be huge players in the fight against evil are just as big fighters for evil in this reality; it's destiny. It's the same as The Master killing Buffy in that episode, just like he did in the regular reality (even though in our world, She Got Better), or how Angel in Angel was destined to be important in the apocalypse. Xander and Willow were pivotal figures in the fight between good and evil because they were fated to.
    • Even if this is wrong, it still makes sense that they were turned. Look around Sunnydale. Out of all the human beings from there, who became the most sadistic, homicidal, destructive force of nature as soon as they turned evil? Willow. Who there seems to want to kill a whole lot of people, no matter how friendly? Xander (he wanted to kill Angel at times!). The two of them would make GREAT vampires. Imagine if Xander had the ability to kill as many vampires as he wanted? He'd be happy. Now, imagine he switched sides and GOT that power, but hated humans instead. See the threat? Willow can just be explained by pointing out what happens when you remove her goodness - Dark Willow. I'd make a bet that if Dark Willow met Jasmine, we'd have 1 dead ex-Power That Be and an even more violent Dark Willow. Give them the power to kill as many things that they're hostile to and the will to use it, and you'll have a pile of corpses.
    • Actually, go back to the pilot episode. Who are the two sacrifices to be brought to the Master? Willow (who Buffy saved) and Jesse - the two people Xander was closest to. Either he would've suicidally charged in to save them, or one of the two of them would have immediately have sired him. Jesse was just as much of a failure in death as in life in the pilot (being killed by Xander FFS!), it makes sense that Jesse would've been one of the first vampires to get staked by the AU Scoobies. Handwave Darla as going off with Spike and Dru after they return to Sunnydale to revitalize Dru (unimpeded by a Slayer) and possibly going to Cleveland just to chase down the Slayer and Luke as doing something stupid (his death in the pilot shows him as not exactly very sharp), and it makes sense that Xander and Willow would be The Master's lieutenants. They're the oldest of his disciples still in Sunnydale!
• In the final episode of Buffy, Spike tries to use an amulet to sacrifice himself and Buffy tells him she loves him to get him to stop. He says "no you don't" and dies. If you're a Spike/Buffy shipper or not, it's annoying that they hinted that Buffy might have feelings for him, only to have it blown like that in the last two minutes of the series. Here's where fridge brilliance comes in. This is actually a subtle call back to season 6's "Dead Things". It's the episode where Buffy and Spike act like they have a relationship for the first time. In it, there's a similar exchange where Buffy thinks she killed a girl, so tries to turn herself into the police. Spike tells her he loves her to try to get her to stop and she says "no you don't" and fights past him. In his final moments before he "died", Spike was remembering one of his first real relationship moments with Buffy.
  • I saw it more as an expression of Spike's guilt; that he didn't feel himself worthy of someone like Buffy. As in, "You love the man I wish I could be, not the man I am."
    • Watch that scene in Buffy and then watch it in the second episode of season 5 of Angel. On Buffy, from Buffy's point of view, she says "I love you" to which Spike replies "No, you don't." On Angel, when the episode flashes back to Spike's point of view, no one mentions love, there is simply a joining of hands and a dewy, mushy, sad look between the two. People often remember events very differently, and the show is brilliant in showing Buffy's point of view - a platitude and morsel of pity thrown out in response to a great sacrifice, which is summarily rejected, and Spike's point of view, where Buffy finally gave him what he always wanted - she didn't say she loved him, she showed him she did. Much more powerful to such an emotional character.
  • In one of the first episodes of the 7th season, "Help", the psychic girl Cassie tells Spike, "Someday she'll tell you." That entire episode is full of Fridge Brilliance though.
• Spike's lack of smoking when he came back in the 5th season of Angel. At first, I just thought it was the censors clamping down on his bad habits (and James Marsters admitted to both hating the menthol cigarettes he had to smoke, and being very conscious of the show's younger audience). Then after a while, it hit me - Spike had been incorporeal for weeks and months after coming back. He couldn't smoke because as a ghost he couldn't pick up a lighter and cigarette. After a long time, it took him a great deal of effort and concentration just to move a cup or throw a punch. So even if he tried to smoke, it would have been too much effort and no reward to even get the damn thing lit. Once he's made corporeal again, we never see him with a cigarette. So essentially, Spike quit smoking by being dead! Fridge Brilliance or what?
  • It's also possible that Spike, being hypersensitive to fire after having been cooked alive, now has a phobia of fire and simply refuses to 'light up' anymore. "Help! I'm on fire! Oh, never mind."
• I'm actually pretty much new to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, believe it or not (I remember seeing a handful of first and second season episodes when it was still new but that's about it). I just recently watched "Out Of Mind, Out Of Sight", and Cordelia's "twinkie defense" reference early in the episode seemed kind of out of character to me - it just didn't sound like anything she'd be familiar with given how she's depicted throughout season one. Then I realized that 1) it's entirely possible that a high school history course might cover that trial, and 2) as that very scene was demonstrating, for the Alpha Bitch she's apparently a pretty active participant in class discussion, so it's more likely than one might think that she'd actually be paying attention in History. And since later on in the same episode she comes to Buffy and friends for help and is treated sympathetically for the first time all season, the scene could be an early hint that things are going to be just a little bit different.
  • Oh, and speaking of, while writing this, I just got that the episode title has kind of a double meaning, since being ignored causes Marcie to literally become invisible, and in turn becoming invisible drives her out of her mind.
• A minor one: Jasmine briefly took over the world at the end of Season Four of Angel. So why was there no mention of this on Buffy? Answer: Sunnydale lost power before this, and Jasmine's takeover was done via mass media. In fact, as the power failure had no other plot significance, it must have been specifically written in to save the Scoobies from Jasmine.
• In the season 6 finale, the whole "Power of Love" ending with Xander calming down Dark Willow kind of bugged me. That is, until I connected his whole "I love crayon-breaky Willow and scary veiny Willow" speech to what Dark Willow herself had told Buffy in the previous episode:

Let me tell you something about Willow. She's a loser. Always has been. She got picked on through junior high, high school, right up until college. With her stupid mousy ways. And now? [laughs bitterly] Willow's a junkie. The only thing Willow was ever good for... the only thing I ever had going for me were those moments... just moments... where Tara would look at me and I was wonderful. And that will never happen again.

• • Xander's speech is really all about how he love Willow no matter what, and she'll always be wonderful to him. So Dark Willow's angst about being a loser to all but one person is disproved, and she can go back to being just Willow.
• Season 7 of Buffy/Season 4 of Angel. In both seasons, the main plots of both shows were implied to be the biggest of the big apocalypses, that either could become the previously hinted at "Final Battle". But they were in fact averting the same apocalypse. In Buffy, they were stopping what was essentially Satan from raising a vampire-army to overtake the Earth and flood it with bloodshed and Hellmouth energy. In Angel, they were stopping what was essentially a fallen angel from mind-raping the Earth into dogmatic order. What would have happened if The Scoobies and AI both failed? Both series' respective Big Bads would have met and turned on each other. This is further supported if you assume Ghost!Darla was actually The First trying to sabotage Jasmine's plans, and also by the well-timed blackout in Sunnydale (The First didn't want any Jasminites in Sunnydale making things harder for it). The "Final Battle" was never about The Scoobies and co. VS. the ultimate evil or AI VS. the ultimate evil, as awesome as both teams are they're too small and low key to represent the entire side of good in any prophecy. No, the Final Battle was always going to be The First VS. Jasmine, with humanity caught in the middle. The Scoobies and AI just successfully sabotaged both sides before it got to that point, so there was no "Final Battle".
• I never understood why Tara messed up the demon locator spell. She had helped Willow do plenty of spells since then without sabotaging them. Then as I rewatched the episode "Family" it hit me, she thought she was a demon and didn't want Willow to know.
  • It took me a little while to pick up on that as well XD
• Nowhere does it say that the Shanshu prophecy is about angel, just that it is about a 'vampire with a soul' who 'has a role in the apocalypse'. So it has already been established that it equally could be about Spike. The part about becoming human has already been misinterpreted as being 'death' by Wesley early on in Angel, and its been said that it means the life/death cycle, which they assume to mean the restoration of humanity. But the translation is fairly subjective and could easily still be a misinterpretation of the true prophecy. So this troper's opinion on the matter is that the prophecy predicted Spike's resurrection and has already come true. (Call me out if you disagree! I could have missed something that disproves this)

Fridge Horror

• It's made very clear to Warren, Andrew and Jonathan in "Dead Things" that their use of magic to obtain sex with Katrina is just rape. Now, remember those Swedish blonde twins who Johnathan had in his house while under the "Superstar" spell, who asked him if he "was coming to bed..."
  • It isn't quite the same thing; Jonathan really was smart, witty, strong, famous, and rich while a superstar. The Reality Warper thing at the heart of the spell made him exactly what they were attracted to. On the other hand, there's evidence that what it didn't change in Jonathan, the spell changed in others; Jonathan was still a short guy, so Riley found himself "too tall." The wimpy Buffy we see at the beginning of the episode is something else; it's not clear if this version of Buffy never needed to grow into a real slayer because Jonathan was around, or if the spell befuddled her to make Jonathan look better. It doesn't help that the spell blurs the lines between Alternate Reality By Design and straight up Reality Warper.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: In "Empty Places", as the understated beginning of a conversation with the First Evil, Caleb says he's realized that every high school from one end of the country to the other smells exactly the same.
  • If it makes you feel any better, he's only a serial killer, not a rapist.
• Tara's body was in a very similar position to Joyce's after the aneurysm. Not only did Dawn have to deal with the horror of finding Tara dead, it most likely, intensely, brought back memories of her mother beginning to die hardly a year earlier. Then you realize how many loved ones, human loved ones, died (or in one case were found dead) literally in front of Dawn, once as a direct result of her existence, and you have to wonder exactly how deep her angst over being left alone really went.
• Vampires. Not so much Fridge Horror as they are repeatedly and intimately explored, with the exception of one little aspect that the series seems to completely ignore: they are fucking everywhere. Even in places with dedicated, highly effective vampire hunters, vampires are always a problem. Beings that are far stronger and faster than any human, that feed on an almost nightly basis or whenever it would be fun, and that are easily and swiftly capable of creating entire armies of their kind are probably the single most common demon on the planet. Considering that in Season 4 of Angel, it was only a matter of days after the sun was blocked that the entire city became swarmed with vampires that were feasting with abandon, it seems that there is almost nothing stopping vampires from simply overwhelming humans with a sheer force of numbers.
  • Actually, it's stated that the reason all those vampires/demons/boogeymen/telemarketers are hanging out in Sunnydale is because they're attracted to the evil of the Hellmouth. And it's not stated, but the Los Angeles situation is likely similarly explained by the city being built around Wolfram and Hart, which is stated to be one of the last surviving Great Old One deities that lived before humans.
    • Los Angeles was the site of Illyria's temple. Illyria, "God-King of the Primordium". It may very well have been the capitol of the world during the reign of the Old Ones.
• Also in Buffy, when we first meet Whistler, Angel's good demon guide, we find out that Angel has been watching Buffy since she was at her old high school in Los Angeles, an unrevealed amount of time after he lost his soul. Later in a heartfelt moment, he confesses that he loved her from the first moment he saw her, which he explains was back in Los Angeles right before she obtained her powers. Buffy is very moved by this. The Squick comes in when you realize that Angel, who has been an grown adult for 200 years, "falls for" a fourteen-year old girl and then deflowers her a full year before she can give legal consent.
  • Actually, wasn't Angel 19 when he was turned? Meaning he's been a 19 year old kid for 200 years. Only a two year age difference, really.
  • Actually, if I recall correctly Buffy is sixteen by the time she and Angel had sex--in California (where Sunnydale is), 16 is the age of consent. Still squick, but semi-legal squick.
    • No, Buffy was seventeen. It was her seventeenth birthday when she and Angel had sex.
      • The age of consent in California is actually eighteen, so, still illegal. However, seventeen is at or over the age of consent in most of the civilized world -- including the United Kingdom and Ireland -- so not massively immoral, just a function of being over the wrong state line at the time.
• Even the optimistic view of the series finale (Slayers will finally get to live relatively normal lives) still means that Buffy and co. still are going to be subjecting thousands of girls to an extremely dangerous lifestyle (although safer than what Buffy went through though) filled with things that will give them nightmares for the rest of their lives.
  • But monsters would exist regardless, and by giving them all the power, they could now fight back against the darkness rather than be victims. And if they don't want to, they don't need to, because they don't have the burden of being the only one. What's scary is that there are now hundreds if not thousands of newly minted Slayers with no idea what they have become, so they probably ended up causing a fair amount of damage, not counting that Slayers are still human and their may be dozens of Faith-like girls who'll exploit their newfound powers for evil.
  • Speaking of nightmares - based on the experience of those Slayers we've seen in the series, we know that Slayers experience the memories of all the slayers who've died. Now think of all of the horrific things that Buffy went through during her time as the Slayer. Now realize that her experience, judging by her advanced survival, was one of the least horrifying histories of any slayer, which means that the other slayers were worse. Now think about it. Every single slayer goes to sleep one night a normal girl and wakes up with the worst Nightmare Fuel in the world since the beginning of time has just been crammed into the brains of these utterly unsuspecting young girls. Who here thinks Dana's gonna be the only one in the end, raise your hands?
  • Then there's the fanon involving Buffy activating all of the Slayers lineage at once resulting in the situation of Fray where after Buffy's generation die out, there are no more Slayers because all of the magic was used up.
  • "Into every generation a Slayer is born: one girl in all the world, a chosen one. She alone will wield the strength and skill to fight the vampires, demons, and the forces of darkness; to stop the spread of their evil and the swell of their numbers." And there's one. One. And this one lives in a small town in California. Granted, it's on a Hellmouth, but that's kinda the problem; a Hellmouth. As in, there are more of them (Cleveland is referenced occasionally). So, how is the entire world not overrun if all that's standing between demons and humans is one girl who usually doesn't live past her twenties, the odd reformed demon, and whatever the heck Whistler is? They can be all the kickass they want, it's not possible for someone to cover that much ground.
    • To make it worse, when Buffy died at the end of season five, her death did not activate a new Slayer. At first, you would think it wouldn't matter because Faith was still alive. But then you realize that she was in jail and didn't break out until season four of Angel (season seven of Buffy). If Buffy hadn't been brought back to life, the world would have gone without a slayer for at least a year and a half.
      • Not necessarily; once it becomes an immediate necessity the Council (which still exists at this point, and will for another year) would either take legal action to secure Faith's release, or illegal action to ensure that the Slayer line, ahem, passes on. Of course, that latter possibility is still definitely Fridge Horror.
• In the Buffy musical, besides the people bursting into flames, the main problem with the seemingly awesome concept of a demon who makes life into a musical is that people tend to reveal their deepest, darkest secrets through their songs with no control over it. While the non-cast songs we see are mostly innocuous, think about the fact that this happened to an ENTIRE CITY. Even if not everyone did it, a good percentage of people suddenly revealed that they were secret murderers, cheating on their wives, etc. Not all of us have personal lives as convoluted as the Buffy cast, but everyone has something they want to keep hidden. Imagine this happening to you in high school. Or at work! The rest of the season shows us the horrible fallout of the Buffy cast learning those hidden truths--now imagine the hundreds or thousands we didn't see.
• Faith gets one after Buffy puts her in a coma.

"Little Miss Muffet counting down from 730."

• • Word of God this was the exact amount of days until Buffy died. That's pretty horrifying, her arch nemesis accurately predicting her death.
  • Not particularly scary but worth mentioning: Dawn/The Key is often used in reference to to the same poem. First by Glory, then by a crazy man later directed at Dawn as he gibbers on about 'curds and whey'. More worryingly in Buffy's dream in "Restless" she sees a clock reading 7:30, which Tara claims is all wrong. Buffy knows her own death is coming, but is in denial.
• Buffy's experience with Parker in Season Four just seems like a mundanely unpleasant experience... until you go back and watch "Innocence" again and see how similar Parker's rejection of her after their one-night stand is to the way Angelus toys with her after their first time, taunting her about how it was good but nothing special, expressing surprise that it meant more to her than it did to him, etc. Just think about all the unpleasant, deeply traumatic memories that must have been brought up for Buffy.
  • Worse yet, Parker looks very much like Xander. Not only is Buffy living through that nightmare again, yet again its coming from a stranger wearing the face of someone she trusts and cares for. Talk about trigger-y!
• In season 6, Xander is the most upset with Spike's Attempted Rape of Buffy. This would just be Xander's concern for his best friend, but it becomes fridge horror when you remember the season 3 episode Consequences in which Faith attempted to rape and choke him.
  • The horror gets deeper (and makes even more sense) when you recall that early in the Season 1 episode The Pack Xander was possessed by a heyena spirit and tried to rape Buffy. Part of his rage at Spike is actually repressed rage at himself because he never faced any consequences for that action.
• Then there's the Willow/Tara scene from Once More, With Feeling. It took me a long time to realize it, but then I realized Willow basically magically roofied and then raped her girlfriend--and this was after Tara had been mindraped horrifically by Glory. No wonder Tara was horrified when she found out.
  • This troper had always been under the impression that this wasn't supposed to be fridge at all. I was downright horrified when the memory spell went up, and almost sick when Willow went ahead and had sex with her anyway.
• After Faith's Face Heel Turn, Mayor Wilkins basically becomes her substitute father. Then in Enemies, Faith tries to seduce Angel in order to make him turn evil. Afterward, she goes back to the Mayor, sad because she failed. The Mayor acts all motivational, telling her to try again. The conversation pretty much implies that the Mayor was the one who made her do it. In other words, he took in a seventeen-year-old girl, set himself up as a father figure, then ordered her to go have sex with a guy who's 242 years old.
• During Buffy's stay in LA in the episode Anne, someone tells her this about LA - "This isn't a good place for a kid to be. You get old fast here. The thing that does it, that drains the life out of them: despair. Kids come here, they got nothing to go home to and this is the last stop for a lot of them. Shouldn't have to be that way." A description which perfectly matches and foreshadows....Cordelia Chase. Barring the despair, a lot of this is true for her journey in LA. She has no home in Sunnydale after her parents lose all their money, she's living in a horrible apartment as her last stop, she is forced to grow up because of the trauma of life in Angel Investigations, her brain starts to deteriorate because of her visions, literally getting old fast and even becoming a demon doesnt help because she still dies regardless.
• The brief bit with the Warrenbot in Villains became just slightly more unsettling after I thought about it for a while: the scoobies' treatment of Buffybot raised the What Measure Is a Non-Human? thing enough, but Warren created an arguably sentient being specifically for the purposes of being a decoy that would most likely get destroyed within moments of its existence...at least, since we never heard anything about there being a Warrenbot before, I assume he either put it together really quickly while on the run, or else was Crazy Prepared enough to just have an already completed but not activated robot double hidden someplace in case of emergency.
  • Warren's a genre nerd who was spending that season trying to be a comic-book supervillain. Of course he'd build himself a Doombot. He was probably intending to let it get arrested and sit in jail if the cops ever came for him, while he himself caught a fast bus to Mexico.
• As shown in "The Body", Anya's been a demon so long that she doesn't really understand death any more. She doesn't understant why Joyce died, and why she's no longer with them. Now think of all the men that she's killed. Hell, she basically caused the Russian Revolution. Anya's probably just realizing how many people she's killed and maimed over the years, and how many families and lives that she's destroyed. It's touched upon a bit in the season 7 episode "Selfless", but still, she's killed so many people and is only just realizing now what death really is.
• All vampires eventually end up looking like The Master, Kakistos, the Turok-han, etc. This includes Angel and Spike.

Fridge Logic:

• How the hell was Jonathan planning to commit suicide without killing anybody else (thus ruling out suicide-by-cop) with a high-powered rifle?!
  • Jonathan can't even commit suicide right.
  • Easy. Put the butt on the ground, lean over and tuck the barrel under your chin, and then step on the trigger with your big toe.
• It's possible to revive someone who dies due to magic, right? So why doesn't Willow fireball Tara while she's bleeding out? If it's the magic that killed her, rather than the gun, it becomes possible to bring her back.
  • Look at the location of the exit wound. Tara took that round directly through either the heart or the aorta. She'd be dead in moments. The only way she could be deader is if she'd taken the hit at the base of the skull... which is one for Headscratchers, that Warren's blind, wild shot in through the window could be that precise. Diabolus Ex Machina indeed.
    • I've always assumed it was another sid effect of the resurrection spell they weren't aware of. Willow was granted a life (Buffy) at the cost of one of the casters (Tara).
  • Besides, there's that pesky issue that magical resurrection often leaves you in the same state you would've been in without any magic at all; see Darla's syphilis. Burning Tara alive so Willow could revive her as a gunshot victim isn't likely to help.
  • Two things: 1) Could you really fling a fireball at the person you love and kill her on the off chance that it MIGHT lead to her later resurrection? Willow wouldn't have had long, and she's loves Tara way too much to destroy her personally even if it meant that there's the possibility of resurrection. And 2), the Urn of Osiris was destroyed after Buffy's revival, and it was unique, the spell couldn't have been cast again.
    • Three: Did the spell come out wonky at all? Even if it worked right was Buffy meant to have ended up in her own grave? This drove her to near suicide. Who's to say things would have gone any better for Tara even if they had what they needed, or this act didn't set off Willow thinking Buffy (and by extension Tara) were better off dead than living hell on earth?