Buffy The Vampire Slayer

WITHOUT bothering to come up with alternative endings to keep fans guessing, "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" finished taping its final episode late last week. "I gave up about a year ago trying to keep anything off the Internet," Joss Whedon, the show’s creator and executive producer said yesterday.

"Even if we had alternate endings, eventually you have to put together the one with the real ending and somebody sees it," he says.

"The one, real downside of [the Internet] is the destruction of the surprise. However a lot people don’t go on it or deliberately avoid spoilers, so they’re the people I’m talking to the most - the ones that want to see it pure. For the rest of them, I’ve given up the fight," he says.

The finale airs May 20.

Meanwhile, as the series has been building to a violent, all-or-nothing war between spirit forces at the end, some critics have pointed out that the characters on "Buffy" are going through much the same turmoil people in the real world have experienced with war with Iraq.

"The last thing I ever wanted in the world was for any of ’Buffy’s’ rhetoric to be compared to anything [President Bush] was saying," Whedon says.

"Yet he goes to war and ostensibly we have a war on ’Buffy,’ " Whedon said.

"So I think it was very much a concern to the writers and myself that we try and stress the pain and the uncertainty and the emotion of it as opposed to the gung-ho ’let’s-go-get-’em’ of it.

"None of us advocates the idea of war and I certainly didn’t support the decision to go in during this particular action [in Iraq]," he said.

Whedon said he pitched the series-ending storyline to his writing staff last summer but wouldn’t have returned to "Buffy" even if it’s star, Sarah Michelle Gellar, decided to stay on for another season.

Whedon, also said the characters may live on after the series finale in a future movie or spin-off.

"We do not destroy the entire fabric of the universe at the end of the last episode and some people even live," Whedon said.

"So there’s definitely an open door for more series or a movie, you name it."