Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Best Episode Aired 25 Years Ago Today & the Show Was Never the Same After It

Buffy the Vampire Slayer has several iconic episodes, but only one that is truly the best. What that is, of course, will inevitably vary from person to person, and there are a few contenders, which highlight the full breadth of the series’ qualities. There’s the silent, nightmarish “Hush,” the surprising musical of “Once More With Feeling,” or shocking, stunning season finales such as “Becoming – Part 2” and “The Gift.”

For me, the greatest episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and just an all-time great hour of TV, period) is Season 5, Episode 16, “The Body,” which first aired on February 27th, 2001. Picking up where the previous installment left off, this sees Buffy finding the body of her mother, Joyce, on the couch in their home, and it eventually being confirmed that she has died. While there’d been plenty of deaths on Buffy before “The Body,” there’d been nothing quite like this: no demon or vampire or hellgod to blame, but a natural, human death.

Why “The Body” Is Buffy The Vampire Slayer’s Best Episode

The greatness of “The Body” lies in its differences from Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘s other episodes, because it strips everything back to such a raw, emotional level. If there’s a monster-of-the-week here (the vamp in the hospital at the very end aside), it’s grief. And that’s something that not even the Slayer knows how to fight.

The installment puts its focus on several of the major characters, exploring how each of them reacts to Joyce’s death. Alongside the gut-wrenching moment that Buffy tells Dawn, one of the biggest and best of these is Anya’s response. As a former demon, she has no idea how to comprehend the idea of a life just ending like that. It’s perfectly in character, but also plays as quite a profound, beautiful reckoning with just how sudden death can be, and how hard it is to understand.

At the very center of it all is Sarah Michelle Gellar, who gives quite possibly the strongest performance of her entire career in this episode. We’re used to seeing Buffy be strong, determined, always ready to fight, but here she’s met with the one opponent she cannot defeat. The way her voice cracks – that “Mom? Mom? Mommy?” line will haunt me forever – and how her expressions convey so much shock and sadness is the most poignant, human performance in a series that is so often about the supernatural.

There are some great filmmaking tricks at play here, too. Like in “Hush,” this is an episode elevated by its use of sound – or lack thereof. The installment plays entirely without a musical score, and that gives it a sense of stillness, an absence of something that feels chilling, which pairs perfectly with the loss being suffered. Likewise, it plays around with perception of reality as Buffy imagines happy scenarios where her mother is still alive, and these are shot in a disorientating fashion, again replicating the effects of grief.

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This was one of the real pivot points in the series. The show had a few of these throughout its run, where it transcended its current form. One such example was when Angel became Angelus, and Joyce’s death is another. While Buffy had already left school, this would force her to grow up in a way she wasn’t ready for. She’s already been burdened with the responsibility of being the Slayer, but now would come the responsibility of looking after herself, Dawn, and the household.

This isn’t just about fighting the undead, it’s dealing with hospitals and funerals and bills and so much more, making vampires seem like a breeze in comparison. Buffy has spent years fighting death, but it’s here she truly learns about and comes to understand it, and what it takes to go on. It’s no surprise that, just a few episodes later, she makes the ultimate sacrifice for Dawn, with one of the show’s greatest ever lines: “The hardest thing in this world, is to live in it.”

Seasons 6 and 7 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer weren’t the show’s strongest, though they were still entertaining, interesting, and challenging, with some of the heaviest themes of the series, a point that could only happen after the death of Joyce. “The Body” was never bettered, and remains the peak of the Buffyverse.

All seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer are available to stream on Hulu.

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