Most Rewatchable TV Episodes - Buffy The Vampire Slayer: 'Hush'

 

A little introduction.

Like many who came of age in the 1990s, I was a devoted Buffy fan. I didn’t come in during the first season, but I did right around the time of ‘Surprise’ – a great time to become a fan – and I was devoted from then on. I watched every single episode from that point on, and when it went into syndication I watched almost every episode at least three or four times in reruns. (Except for the ones in Season 6 and 7 which I only watched twice because – well, you know.)

When the series left syndication I did not follow into stream but the fond memories never went away – until everything about Joss Whedon finally came to light in 2019 and, like fans of all things Joss, my world came crashing down.  I’d never loved anything he’d done as much as I had Buffy and Angel, but now it all seemed horribly and irrevocably tainted. Even reading fanfic of both shows – one of my great joys for nearly twenty years – was almost impossible for a very long time. There was a void in my soul that I did not think could be filled.

Then last year Comet, a cable network that specializes exclusively in science fiction and fantasy, began to rerun episodes of Buffy.  I hadn’t watched the show in nearly a decade and I wasn’t sure I’d ever be up to it. But one summer night I saw a rerun of ‘Some Assembly Required’ and I began to heal.

Over the past year I’ve begun to every so often watch episodes of the series when I have the free time. It airs in three hour blocks where I live, so there’s occasionally a period when I can. Gradually I’ve begun to remember why we fell in love with the show in the first place. And I began to find a way to enjoy it the same way that so many series that now seem  that now have problematic histories (House of Cards) and where certain truths are being ‘unearthed’ (I wrote about Lost in this respect earlier this year)

And honestly, it’s still hard not enjoy Buffy.  This is still one of the greatest TV series in history. In a way, it isn’t quite part of the revolution that lead to the era of Peak TV.  It debuted in January of 1997, two full years before The Sopranos officially ushered it in.  It even pre=dates the debut of OZ, the HBO prison drama which many consider the official precursor of all that was to come. And because it debuted not only on network television but on a network that disappeared from existence not long after Buffy ended in 2003 (and as we know wasn’t even on that network when it ended), it never quite gets ranked as part of it.  The fact that it was a pop culture phenomena that has lasted to this says paradoxically works against it: so many of fellow critics tends to diminish popular shows over critically acclaimed ones even if they manage to be both .

Perhaps they don’t like it as much because Buffy, unlike almost all of the series of that era was almost always fun in a way many of these other series just weren’t. No one will ever pretend that The Sopranos or 24 or The Wire or Breaking Bad weren’t extraordinary experiences but most of these series were focused on darkness and moral dilemmas.  Buffy was just fun and enjoyable to watch. There’s also the fact that unlike all of these series which focused increasingly on white male antiheroes, Buffy was predominantly female with almost all of the major characters smart, quippy women who had intelligence as well as good looks. (It is the feminist leanings of so much of Whedon’s work that made his fall so hard to watch.) I consider Breaking Bad one of the greatest series in history but there are more female regulars in the average episode of Buffy then the entire series, and all of them are wives or girlfriends. Yes all the women in Buffy had relationships but none of them were defined by them. A full quarter of a century Peak TV has still never caught up with the gauntlet that Buffy threw down.

And this applies to its format which no TV series had done before and remains nearly unparalleled in all the years since.  During the early seasons Buffy had a format that was very close to The X-Files Monster of the Week, a term that is literal in the case of Buffy. Every week she was dealing with a new source of vampires, demons, witches or forces of supernatural life that came part and parcel with living on a Hellmouth. As the season progressed a ‘Big Bad’ would become more apparent, a threat that the Scoobies were going to have to face head on at the climax of the season in an epic battle.  As a season would progress the two worlds would increasingly collide and new threats would often emerge. In Season Two, it seemed like Spike and Drusilla would be the main threat but at the halfway mark of the season Buffy and Angel had sex and the resulting consequences led to Angel becoming his old form of Angelus – and essentially becoming the major threat of the season. In Season Three, arguably the best season the show ever did, we slowly became aware of the underlying threat being the Mayor of Sunnydale (I sometimes wonder if Vince Gilligan imagined Gus Fring in this regard, the public figure of benevolence whose monstrosity is only beneath the surface) and then halfway through the season, one of the key figures of good, Faith has an encounter that causes her to teeter and eventually jump on the Mayor’s bandwagon.

Season Four follows much of this same format. We have spent much of the first half of the season becoming aware of a military presence ranking in Sunnydale University.  Then we learn of The Initiative, a military funded project that has been working with the government to hunt and control the demon population. We also know that Buffy, still reeling from her breakup from Angel at the end of Season Three, is now interested in Riley Finn, the TA of Professor Walsh. She does not know that she is the head of the Initiative and that Riley is her most trusted soldier.

It was inevitable given how the show worked that these two world would collide but not even the most devoted Buffy fan could have expected how. Perhaps that is why, even more than twenty years, I am still inclined to find ‘Hush’ the crowning achievement of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and certainly its most terrifying episode.

The episode begins with Professor Walsh apparently holding a class about communication. Buffy and Riley come down to the front of the class for interest and then Buffy hears a young girl chanting. We realize quickly that this is a Slayer dream and that this girl is giving her a warning that sounds like a nursery rhyme: ‘The Gentlemen are coming bye, Can’t even talk, can’t say a word. You’re gonna die screaming but you won’t be heard.”

 In the immediate aftermath everyone is dealing with ‘normal’ college stuff aside from the dream. Buffy is talking with Willow about wanting to reveal her identity to Riley. Riley is saying the same thing to his friend Forest.  Willow is going to a Wicca group and is disappointing that there’s no actual magic involved.  (Did she really expect that even in Sunnydale?) Spike is parked on Xander’s couch and is annoyed at the fights that Xander and his ex-demon girlfriend Anya are having. And Giles is having a ‘friend’ come over from England.

Then that night we meet some of the most memorable monsters in a series full of them. The Gentlemen have the appearance of ‘demonic well-dressed tailors’ and indeed they are among the  most polite monsters in all of the Slayer-verse.  They applaud politely when they have a victim’s heart, they never stop smiling (which if you can ignore how garish their grins are would be charming) and even when they are about to cut a teenager’s heart out, they gently tap their knives together before the carving begins.  You almost think the reason they make sure all the voices are stolen from the town before they begin their reign is (apart from the obvious) that they just don’t like it when people speak out of turn.

That doesn’t mean their presence isn’t among the most terrifying in Buffy lore. I am still haunted by the sight of them silently levitating through the town, not making  a sound as they pass by and then in a shock appearing by someone’s door or window. Are they too polite that they don’t want to disturb the townspeople slumber? Throughout the episode they never pause or even slow down when they are.. well, chasing doesn’t seem an appropriate word. ‘Relentlessly floating’ is the best term I can think of and it sounds silly until you realize you can’t escape from them.

In a medium that is increasingly dialogue driven and particularly for a show such as Buffy where the dialogue is much of the draw, Whedon’s decision to essentially create a silent movie and then advertise it in the trailers might have been the most radical thing he ever tried to do. It’s clear watching Buffy that Whedon had studied the great F.W. Murnau film Nosferatu as one of the models for his creatures;  The Master was a primitive version of Count Orlok and the Ubervamp of Season Seven would essentially be hundreds of them. But ‘Hush’ is where he leans in to it the most. It’s not that the Gentlemen represent vampires in the traditional sense; it’s that Whedon has tapped into the most primordial force that of terror of having  nowhere to go and no one can hear you. The tagline for Alien one of the masterpieces of horror was ‘In space, no one can hear you scream.” Whedon gets to a far more frightening idea by having it happen on Earth.

And it’s even more remarkable than for all the fact there is no dialogue, we are still in the world of Sunnydale. There are often hysterical moments throughout the show: when Buffy tries to call Giles and realizes that the phone doesn’t work; when Xander wakes up, can’t talk and automatically blames Spike, when Riley tries to use voice command, forgets he has a voice and nearly causes an emergency protocol to unfold – and the punch line to that is hysterical; when they see someone ripping people off selling blackboards and are outraged, and then the Scoobies all arrive with whiteboards around their neck, and when Giles gives a lecture on the demon to the music of Danse Macabre and the Scoobies, even without their voices are exactly the same. Who can forget the image of Anya looking on through all this, eating popcorn?

Whedon also does everything in his power to remember continuity. During this episode we are introduced to Tara (Amber Benson) for the first time.  We saw her at the Wicca meeting and she seemed to be trying to blend into the scenery. She goes out of her way during this episode to find Willow and while she is looking she runs right into the Gentlemen. Willow encounters and the two run away in terror. They manage to get to a room and try to barricade the door. Willow, who has been trying to learn magic but has been getting nowhere, makes an effort to use telekinesis to move the soda machine. It barely budges. Tara runs over to hear over the alarm on Willow’s face, takes her hand – and the soda machine practically leaps to the door. If we weren’t focused on everything else we might have realized the implications – but in 1999 TV was still dancing around LGBTQ+ characters in adult TV much less teenage series.  For all the justifiable rage about the end of the Willow-Tara romance, to deny the courage it took to do this in 1999, particularly for a character as beloved as Willow was a daring move and Whedon still deserves to be applauded for it.

This serves as a subplot because Buffy and Riley are still doing their ‘jobs’ around Sunnydale. At one point, they encounter each other, forget they can’t speak and try to anyway. Buffy is always trying to be strong, so it says a lot about how frightened she is that she embraces Riley. Then in the final act, their worlds collide as we see Buffy and Riley facing off with a gun in each other’s face. (Well, a crossbow and a taser, but that’s the same thing in Sunnydale.)

Buffy is aware of her mission and begins the stalk the Gentleman. A vision from her dream helps her realize where the voices are being kept.  She tries to imply it to Riley, who screws up the first time and comes through the second. How ironic in a series about female empowerment, the weapon that destroys the most horrible MOTW they’ve faced so far is a scream from a trapped woman. Even if it is a Slayer.

Of the many crimes that the Emmys committed over Peak TV among the most unforgivable is the complete shafting of Buffy.  Many have argued that the Emmys have never known what to do with science fiction and fantasy, but that was always a myth: just a few years earlier The X-Files would be nominated for Best Drama four consecutive seasons and Lost would win Best Drama from the Emmys two years after the series finale of Buffy aired. I think the bigger sin was that the Emmys never considered the WB (and to a certain extent, the CW) a producer of great art no matter what they created; such masterpieces as Felicity and Gilmore Girls would receive nominations from other awards shows (as would Buffy) but never get a major nomination from the Emmys. To ignore something this magnificent as ‘Hush’ was too much even for the Emmys to do: it was nominated for Best Teleplay in a Drama in 2000, though again the entire cast from Sarah Michelle Gellar to James Marsters were ignored. That was as close as Buffy would come to a major Emmy its entire run: it is still a matter of great rage among critics that episodes like ‘The Body’ never got even a nomination from the Emmys.

I don’t agree with the common theory that Buffy peaked in high school: while the Big Bads could never come close to what we had gotten in Season 2, many of the greatest individual episodes came in Season 4 and beyond. Not long after this we got the incredible two-parter ‘This Year’s Girl’ and ‘Who Are You’, which brought back Eliza Dushku’s incredible dark slayer of Faith and began a redemption arc that is one of the great one in TV history. The series finale ‘Restless’ was an exercise in surrealism on par with the work of Twin Peaks and deserves to compare favorably with the Season 2 finale of The Sopranos which also had Tony Soprano engaging in a series of very real dreams, and at the end of them coming face to face with a horrible truth. (Buffy and her friends have to escape their demons; Tony and his crew create another one.) ‘Fool For Love’ in Season Five tells us the saga of Spike’s origin and how he killed two slayers, while showing an image of him with walking through chaos in China with Angel, Darla and Drusilla as if they owned the world that has gone down in television history. (On DVD; sadly all syndication seems to have cut it out.) And while it might have been best for the series legacy that Buffy had been cancelled in Season Five, then we would never have gotten ‘Once More, With Feeling’ or such undervalued gems in Season Seven such as ‘Conversations With Dead People’ and ‘Storyteller’ or seen the incredible work of Nathan Fillion as one of the greatest monsters the show would ever produce.

There’s also another message underlying ‘Hush’ one that Whedon could never have foreseen in 1999, when punditry barely existed and no one had heard of Twitter yet. In Hush Whedon argued that when ‘we stop talking, we start communicating.” These days it seems that all we do is talk – we never shut up, and we don’t listen to anyone. We live in a world where everyone talks over each other and we only listen to people we agree with. When anyone says something we disagree with, we say they don’t have the right to exist anymore – in the world of Cancel Culture and partisan divides, we’ve basically decided to only talking matters. We even argue that was a person says means more than anything they might have done or accomplished. J..K. Rowling might have created a world of magic with Harry Potter and Dave Chapelle might have revolutionized the world with his comedy, but now we don’t like what they have to say any more so they don’t get to say it. Joss Whedon himself has fallen victim of this, though, because of what he did rather than what he said. For all the arguments of how social media has advanced communication, all its done is have us talk at each other. (You can’t imagine ‘Hush’ being made today now that everyone can just text to get their point across.)

But that’s the thing that Hush makes clear. Despite the monsters taking away their voices, despite not being able to say what they feel, despite not even being able to say anything, connections are made that are deep and will last. They may not end happily but they are built on the ideas that at some point they stopped communicating. In this episode Whedon argues that even without being able to say a thing, a girl can save her town and possibly the world. Is there any statement about Buffy more powerful than that?