Buffy: The Body (5.16)

Numb. That's probably the right word to use. The Body is about loss -- the searing, unexpected form of loss that smacks into you like a freight train and leaves you standing around searching for some form of release. Buffy's life is defined by the death around her. She kills on a regular basis, she's lost people close to her, she's killed people close to her. But nothing ever felt as cold and abrupt as the sudden passing of her mother. The Body artfully conveys every emotion and discomfort and disorientation that follows a death. It's one of the most difficult episodes to watch, but undeniably one of the series' strongest.

Dawn's teacher talks about drawing the 'space' around the body, coloring in the outside rather than the empty particles in the middle. Joyce is gone, no longer Joyce Summers or a mom, but a shell. She's a presence in a room, but not a being anymore. Unlike a vampire that crumbles to dust, Buffy doesn't know where Joyce went, or what exactly went wrong and killed her, but she knows that the shell of her mother is just that. A shell, a body.

When the paramedics first arrive, they treat Joyce as something they're operating on, they don't know her name or her history. They later describe her as a 'body', while Buffy feels abject horror when she too joins in and calls her 'the body'. The coroner performs an autopsy, not on Joyce but on the shell that's left behind. These official people with serious jobs desensitize themselves to death, while the close family and friends affected have to pick up their feelings and their sadness.

Joss Whedon creates a world that is so familiar yet suddenly so alien. Buffy has never appeared more small and vulnerable than when she's speaking to the paramedic. The light is suddenly overly bright and fuzzy. Buttons on a phone look enormous. You see through the jargon of what a doctor has to routinely say ("I have to lie to make you feel better"). All the characters are so static, and Whedon photographs the hour in such a way that everyone looks and feel so isolated, even if they're being held or spoken to. Our perspective is shaken up, too. We don't see the paramedic's face; we're suddenly a Sunnydale High student watching as one of our classmates receives what is obviously horrible news.

Each character has devastating moments of mourning. Willow's disorientation is so gorgeously played, especially that black-comedy moment where she hates herself for only owning stupid shirts with stupid fabric cut-outs stuck to them. Anya has one of the most painful scenes in the episode, as she explains how she has no idea how to react to all of this. Her asking questions is so painfully honest, and Emma Caulfield adds such a depth of longing and unawareness to her lines. Xander is just angry, trying to find something to blame since this can't just be natural or ordinary. This is Sunnydale, every death and every event is somehow supernatural or extraordinary. Nobody just stops breathing and passes on...

Tara is awkward and unsure of how to act. She also has a better understanding of what is happening since she herself lost her mother several years ago. Even though she doesn't have the strongest of relationships with Buffy, she opens up to her at the hospital while they're alone and offers a shoulder to cry on: a huge leap of confidence for somebody so insecure and nervous.

Some people often criticize the last scene in the morgue, but I always felt it worked somehow. The vampire is unnecessary, and feels entirely out of place. But isn't that kind of the point? In a day of complete devastation and distraction, this irrelevant creature appears and Buffy has to do what she always does. It's not like slaying this random vampire is hard for Buffy, but it's something normal, and easy to handle. Not like the death of her mother, which is something so unimaginably horrible and shocking. But it's a sign that this is just one day where something happened. Life continues, people sleep and then get up again, vampires still rise from the dead and seek blood. Buffy, Dawn and everybody else will move on.

The Body is by no means entertaining, but it's a truly vivid and painful expression of loss and mourning. Everything is so damn raw and honest. There's none of the angsty faux-emotion of death as its usually depicted on TV, where there's crying and a funeral and a wake or whatever. This is death, the truest depiction of that inevitable phenomena on a show that week in, week out is all about death and violence. It's a complete masterpiece. A+

Credits
Guest stars Randy Thompson (Dr. Kriegel); Amber Benson (Tara Maclay); Kristine Sutherland (Joyce Summers)
Writer Joss Whedon Director Joss Whedon