"The Body" is the sixteenth episode of the fifth season of the supernatural drama television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The episode was written and directed by series creator Joss Whedon and originally aired on The WB in the United States on February 27, 2001. In the series, Buffy Summers is a teenager chosen by mystical forces and endowed with superhuman powers to defeat vampires, demons, and other evils in the fictional town of Sunnydale. She is supported in her struggles by a close circle of friends and family, nicknamed the "Scooby Gang". In "The Body", Buffy is powerless as she comes upon her lifeless mother, who has died of a brain aneurysm.
Although Buffy and her friends deal with death every week, often in very gruesome and fantastic ways, in this episode they are bewildered by the natural death of Joyce Summers, the divorced mother of Buffy and her sister Dawn and occasionally a mother figure to their friends. They struggle to comprehend what the loss means to each of them and the group. Buffy must begin to face her life and her duties as the Slayer without parental support and comfort. The episode was stripped of all music, and disorienting effects were included to convey the sense of displacement and loss associated with the death of a close family member.
"The Body" aired to wide acclaim, and has since been ranked by several critics as one of the greatest television episodes ever broadcast.
Background
Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is assisted from season one by her close friends, who collectively refer to themselves as the Scooby Gang: Xander Harris (Nicholas Brendon), whose primary strength is his devotion to Buffy, and Willow Rosenberg (Alyson Hannigan), who begins dabbling in witchcraft and grows progressively more powerful. They are mentored by Rupert Giles (Anthony Stewart Head), Buffy's "Watcher", and joined by Xander's girlfriend Anya Jenkins (Emma Caulfield), who was a vengeance demon until her powers were taken away. Anya is often at a loss to know how to communicate with humans, and her speech is frequently abrupt. In the fourth season, Willow became romantically involved with Tara Maclay (Amber Benson), also a witch.Kaveney, pp. 13–31.
Each season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (often simplified as Buffy) presents an overall theme episodes tie into. Roz Kaveney identifies family and belonging as the overall theme of the fifth season. Buffy's mother Joyce (Kristine Sutherland) begins experiencing headaches at the beginning of the season, once collapsing and requiring hospitalization. She subsequently has a brain tumor removed. She has been recovering well. In the previous episode, "I Was Made to Love You", she receives flowers from a male suitor, which Buffy finds at the end of that episode. The fifth season also introduces Dawn (Michelle Trachtenberg), Buffy's 14-year-old sister. Each season has a primary antagonist called the Big Bad; in the fifth season this takes the form of a powerful goddess named Glory (Clare Kramer).
Plot Buffy arrives home and sees flowers sent by Joyce's suitor. She calls out to her mother but hears no answer. Buffy sees Joyce lying lifeless on the sofa, staring at the ceiling.
There is a flashback to a Christmas dinner where Joyce and all the Scoobies are present, having a typical lighthearted conversation. The scene snaps back to a hysterical Buffy in the living room, shaking Joyce and screaming at her. She calls for an ambulance and attempts CPR, but to no avail. As the paramedics arrive, Buffy briefly fantasizes about Joyce reviving and recovering in the hospital, only to return to reality where the paramedics are unable to revive Joyce and pronounce her dead. Giles arrives and Buffy tells him not to move the body, shocking herself by using that word. At school, Buffy pulls Dawn out of class into the hall. Through the windows of the art room, the class watches Buffy tell her that Joyce has died. Dawn collapses, wailing.
Xander and Anya arrive at Willow's dormitory room where Tara tries to help a panicked Willow find a shirt to wear, as Willow does not know how to appear for Buffy and Dawn. Anya asks Xander what she is supposed to do; he cannot answer. Xander expresses his desire to find Glory and exact justice, then complains about Joyce's negligent doctors. Anya asks if they will see the body, then if the body will be cut open, and Willow responds angrily. Anya tearfully says she does not understand how to behave, or why Joyce cannot go back into her own body, unable to understand human death. The group then leaves to visit Buffy, Dawn and Giles at the hospital.
In the waiting room outside the morgue, the doctor tells Buffy that Joyce died of an aneurysm suddenly and painlessly. Dawn goes alone to see Joyce's body. While she is there, one of the bodies, now a vampire, gets up. After noticing Dawn has not come back, Buffy goes to look for her. As Buffy kills the vampire, the sheet falls from Joyce's face. Looking at her mother's body, Dawn asks where she went, as she reaches out to touch her cheek.
Production and writing
From the start of writing the Buffy series, Joss Whedon asserted that it would never have a "very special episode" as in contemporary series Beverly Hills, 90210, The Wonder Years, or Party of Five, where the core cast of characters addresses a single issue (AIDS, drug abuse, or alcoholism, for example) and resolve all the problems at the end.Wilcox, pp. 17–18. Whedon was not interested in finding a life-affirming lesson for "The Body". Rather, he wanted to capture the isolation and boredom involved in the minutes and hours after finding a loved one has died,Whedon, Joss (2008). Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Complete Fifth Season; DVD commentary for the episode "The Body". [DVD]. 20th Century Fox. what he termed "the black ashes in your mouth numbness of death". He did not intend to resolve any religious or existential questions about the end of life, but wanted to examine the process in which a person becomes a mere body.Stevenson, p. 162. Whedon's mother, a teacher, also died of a cerebral aneurysm, and he drew on his own experiences, and those of friends and other writers, in constructing the episode. He tried to achieve an "unlovely physicality" in "The Body" to portray the upsetting minutiae involved in attempting to comprehend what is incomprehensible.
Small details became significant: to protect her dignity, Buffy pulls the hem of Joyce's skirt down after it rode up when she attempted CPR; the camera focuses on a breeze through wind chimes while Buffy vomits; to emphasize Buffy's isolation, the scene has no exterior establishing shots of the house.
The opening sequence of "The Body" was also the closing scene of the previous episode, "I Was Made to Love You"; this is the only episode in the series that was first aired without a "Previously on Buffy" lead-in. The Christmas dinner scene was used both to contrast the stark reality of the rest of the episode and to avoid having the credits appear over the beginning scenes where Buffy is trying to revive her mother.
The episode is presented in four acts, each beginning in total silence and with a close-up shot of Joyce's pale, staring face. Shooting the first act was difficult for Gellar (Buffy). Whedon shot the scene where she finds her mother as one long take, showing her move through the house and calling the paramedics, about seven times. The rest of the scenes in the act were shot in sequence. At the end, Giles arrives and also attempts to revive Joyce, but Buffy blurts, "We're not supposed to move the body!" Both Gellar and Trachtenberg (Dawn) were raised by single women, and Gellar later spoke about the experience of acting something that was very real and close to her, stating, "you try to separate it as best you can and at the same time it adds that extra layer".Sullivan, Brian Ford (March 21, 2008). Live at the Paley Festival: Buffy the Vampire Slayer Reunion, The Futon Critic. Retrieved on June 14, 2010. As soon as the scene was finished with Gellar "at a fever pitch", they restarted it where she comes in the door happily, which Whedon regretted for the emotional range Gellar was required to endure.
Kristine Sutherland (Joyce) was informed during the third season that her character would be killed off, which she accepted because she intended to spend time in Europe. She is absent from most of the fourth season because she was traveling.Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Complete Fifth Season; "Season Overview" Featurette. (2008) [DVD]. 20th Century Fox. She reported that the atmosphere on the set of "The Body" was strange and tense because she had been a regular character throughout the series and she was suddenly playing a corpse. She found the part difficult to play, not only for the stillness, but getting into the make-up, and lying on the morgue table with other bodies.Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Complete Fifth Season; "Natural Causes" Featurette. (2008) [DVD]. 20th Century Fox.
The most difficult scene for Whedon to film was Willow panicking in her dormitory room. Her obsession about what to wear to visit Buffy was inspired by Whedon's own experiences when he was at a loss for what tie to wear for a friend's funeral. He praised Alyson Hannigan's acting, saying that she was able to be consistently emotional in every take and make him and the crew cry every time. Whedon acknowledged his difficulty speaking on the DVD commentary while watching Hannigan in the scene.
Whedon's rejection of the "very special episode" format impelled him to address the physicality of Willow and Tara's relationship within "The Body". Before this episode, they had held hands and danced on screen, but they had not kissed. A genre of television specials dealing with female homosexuality developed as the "lesbian kiss episode" in the 1990s, where a female character kissed another female but no relationship is further explored. Whedon set out to acknowledge Willow's and Tara's affection without making it the primary focus of the show. For attempting this, he received resistance from the airing network, the WB. Whedon informed them that the kiss between Willow and Tara was "not negotiable".Kaveney, pp. 78–79. According to Whedon, the conversation about the kiss was approached by the network executives, who were concerned with the number of gay relationships on the network. Whedon countered that the kiss was "true to character" and said he would quit the show if the network forbade it. It was the only time during the series he threatened to do so.