Buffy The Vampire Slayer

7 Spike

Quite a rare kind of resurrection, this: it’s not often that a character will die on one show, only to turn up on another series afterwards. That’s precisely what happened to James Marsters’ almost embarrassingly popular Spike when Buffy hit the end of the road. One minute he was Sunnydale’s finest vampire; the next he was sharing screen time with Los Angeles’ broodiest vampire and his cronies in the offices of Wolfram & Hart on Angel. As far as afterlifes go, we’d say he landed on his feet, even if he couldn’t touch anyone or anything for a fair while, being a ghost ’n’ all.

What’s a bit sad about this particular back-from-the-dead tale is that Spike was given a wonderfully emotional and hugely redemptive death that helped to save the world, thus bringing his character arc to a massively satisfying resolution. But because viewers already knew he was going to be a regular on Angel’s next season, his death was robbed of much of its poignancy – it wasn’t a death, just a TTFN. Magical reanimating amulets have a lot to answer for…

2 Buffy Summers

When you have a show named after you and you die at the end of a season, it’s a fair bet that you’ll be coming back after you’ve had a nice summer break. What keeps fans’ attention, however, is the manner of your return – and, after hurling herself to her death at the end of the show’s fifth year, Buffy’s comeback didn’t disappoint*.

A woman who made a career out of sitting in graveyards waiting for the dead to crawl out of their coffins got to do so herself in “Bargaining”, the two-part episode at the start of season six. How’s that for irony? It was ghoulishly done, too: there can’t be many people who didn’t shudder at the thought of waking up six feet under and having to claw your way up to daylight, and let’s not even mention the horrors the morticians had performed on her hair and makeup before burial, too.

Buffy’s subsequent confused wanderings around Sunnydale were chilling and horrible to watch: this wasn’t a nice, clean resurrection full of hugs and flowers, but a reawakening that Buffy looked as though she wasn’t too happy about.

Later on, of course, we discovered that she’d actually been yanked out of Heaven by Willow’s spell, and that living on Earth again was like Hell. Ouch, our hearts. Sometimes, the dead should just stay dead. Although then we wouldn’t have had the musical episode, so… whatevs.

* Technically, this wasn’t the first time she died, but her drowning at the hands of The Master at the end of the first season was more a near-death experience, to be honest.

Read more : http://www.sfx.co.uk/2011/05/24/top-10-resurrections/