Buffy The Vampire Slayer

May 21, 2003 | "This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends this is the way the world ends not with a bang but a …"

— T.S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men"

Hole.

As of the last 10 minutes of the last-ever episode of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," a show that has challenged, energized and sometimes confounded audiences for seven seasons, the town of Sunnydale — an entryway to the gates of Hell itself — no longer exists. It is a hole, a large dusty hole, a hole that has swallowed, supposedly forever, the forces of evil that had been gathering to destroy the world. The core characters of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" — Buffy, Willow, Xander and Giles (played by Sarah Michelle Gellar, Alyson Hannigan, Nicholas Brendon and Anthony Stewart Head) — the ones who have always meant the most to people who love the show, survived the battle. Anya and Spike (Emma Caulfield and James Marsters), characters most of us also grew to love, did not.

But every one of them, dead or alive, leaves a hole.

Until the very last two episodes, I had believed that "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" had reached its true and natural end last season, at which point Willow had come within a hair’s breadth of destroying the world and Spike had crawled off to God-knows-where to get all sweaty and naked and re-emerge with a soul. The Spike and Buffy romance of last season had made perfect and devastating sense: Theirs was a connection born of carnal desire, desperation, mutual outsider status and a little healthy, old-fashioned self-loathing. It made us uncomfortable, and it turned us on. Were we meant to fully understand it? I hope not. What does anyone ever truly understand about sex anyway?

Most of this season felt vaguely anticlimactic. It rolled off to a slow start as the characters, particularly Willow, came to terms with having pulled back from the edge. Series creator Joss Whedon and his writers did their best to build a sense of dread about what was coming, dread that was sustained for a few episodes at least. Remember the First Evil’s withering warning, "From beneath you it devours"? As we now know, the First just meant there were a lot of bad guys lurking underneath the surface of the city, an army of bony, bald, bloodthirsty goblins whose throngs evoked the menace of the advancing enemy army in "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers." They were terrifying in their sheer numbers, but somehow they didn’t exactly fulfill the potential horror that that warning represented. Still, until we actually met that army, we didn’t know exactly what the First meant. Whatever it had in mind sounded vaguely sexual, almost titillating in its sense of sinister promise.

Then came the potential slayers, summoned to Sunnydale to help fight the First’s mounting threat, and the series’ sense of dread wobbled uncertainly in that pajama party-boot camp setting. Buffy, intent on getting the girls ready to face the horror she knew was coming, became self-serious and tiresome, carrying a heavier load on her shoulders than ever before. She gets a good St. Crispian’s day speech in there somewhere, but we feel her authority hissing out of her — that was precisely the point, but Buffy’s tireless sense of self-righteous selfhood dragging on the show’s momentum. Then the truly terrifying misogynist "priest" Caleb shows up, and the show gets a jolt. And then a misfire: Xander gets an eye poked out and, while we always need to expect that bad things will happen to people we love in the "Buffy" universe, there’s something about the act that feels forced and false.

For much of this past season, the single biggest thing we’ve always held dear about the chief characters in "Buffy" had been held away from us: Their wit. Too exhausted and scared to be funny, the characters concentrated on battling the coming, faceless evil with grim determination — not a good look on any gal or guy. They were humorless and glum, with the exception of reformed bad-guy nerd Andrew (Tom Lenk), the also-ran who ended up being the saving grace of the season, getting most of the sporty asides the other characters were no longer allowed. (The phone rings, and he answers with obvious excitement: It’s the comic-book store, telling him that the latest "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" has come in. Xander, caught up momentarily by Andrew’s enthusiasm, pipes up: "Can they get two?")

And then suddenly, or perhaps gradually, in the last week or so leading up to the finale, Whedon began to restore the characters to us. Instead of snapping at one another, they fell into their old patterns of working together, patterns that until recently had always (or almost always) worked without a hitch: Buffy asks Xander for an important favor, which he, in his unswerving faithfulness, doesn’t hesitate to carry out. Giles and Willow hit the books, sifting through information that will, with any luck, help them beat the devil. Gearing up for battle, the bunches of people who have gathered at the Summers household to destroy the coming evil (among them Eliza Dushku’s Faith and D.B. Woodside’s Principal Wood) make jokes — and make love. What have they got to lose?