“Where do we go from here…
Why is the path unclear…?”
I’ve had the lyrics from the song Where do We Go from Here in my head the last few days. Fans of Buffy will know it from the musical episode “Once More, With Feeling.” It’s been a rough, sad week for the Buffy cast and fandom. Nicholas Brendon’s sudden death at only 54 came right on top of Hulu staking the hotly anticipated Buffy: New Sunnydale revival.
Where do we go from here, indeed?
Fans are understandably grieving. It feels like we’ve been robbed, especially after SMG’s Instagram post that a Hulu executive who wasn’t a fan of the original axed the revival. The Internet did its thing and identified him immediately. Rightly or not, he’s now the Big Bad in the fandom’s eyes. But maybe, just maybe, fellow Buffy fans, we dodged a bullet. Plenty of popular shows that were contemporaries of Buffy, like The X-Files, Charmed,and Heroes, were revived and fell flat.
Yeah, it was amazing to see Scully and Mulder again, but did Season 11 do anything besides make The X-File’s super convoluted alien mythology even foggier? And worse, when Gillian Anderson declined to continue, the revival was dead in the water. Meanwhile, Heroes Reborn was a travesty – they retconned established mythology, killed Claire, the indestructible girl, and left half the original characters worse off. The Charmed revival rode on the original’s popularity, but was essentially reduced to the Power of point-three.
I loved all these shows. But I didn’t love any of their revivals. So maybe it’s a blessing that Buffy didn’t suffer the same fate. And we don’t even have to look at other shows to know that Buffy herself probably wouldn’t have wanted to come back. The series is plenty clear about what happens when people try to revive what should remain at rest.
Since New Sunnydale’s cancellation, I’ve been thinking about the Season 5 episode “Forever,” when Buffy’s younger sister, Dawn, tries to raise their mother from the dead. Dawn was convinced that having a zombie mother was better than having none. But Buffy, with wisdom beyond her years, tells Dawn that they can’t do that; “Not to mum.” Sometimes, the best thing we can do for what we love is to leave it be.
Buffy herself knows the pain of being forced to return. After Buffy sacrificed her life in the Season 5 finale, Willow brought her back from the dead. She was sure Buffy would be grateful and happy to live again. Nobody could understand why she seemed so changed, so depressed. Spike even said that “She came back wrong.” It was only later that they understood: Buffy believed she had been in heaven – “wherever I was…I was happy.”
Am I a bad fan for not wanting the revival? That’s been troubling me. Everyone else seems so universally upset about the cancellation. There was a time when I was desperate for the series to continue, convinced that seven seasons weren’t enough, that there were more phenomenal stories left to tell. See, Buffy wasn’t just entertainment – it was a work of art, deeply profound and philosophical. Even academia agrees – there’s actually something called Buffy Studies.
Sure, it was a 90s WB show about a teen girl killing vampires. But the genius of Buffy was how it used the supernatural as a metaphor to explore the horrors and hardships of growing up: loneliness, heartbreak, friendship, sexuality, addiction, depression, loss, even suicide. The writers treated these heavy topics with such humanity and humour. The original was both ahead of its time and also such a part of its time’s zeitgeist. It gave people hope, comfort and strength.
Even in the capable hands of Chloe Zhao, there was no guarantee New Sunnydale would’ve succeeded in capturing all this. Plus, Buffy was brilliant because the writers could develop its season-long arc across 22 episodes. Would that work in today’s streaming age? Would an eight-episode season have afforded them that depth? I seriously doubt it.
I love Buffy, both the slayer and the series, so much that I can’t bear for it to come back as anything lesser. Remember how the Scoobies tried replacing Buffy with the Buffybot after her death? It mimicked the original, but her essence was missing. Would New Sunnydale have felt like that? We’ll never know. And Buffy deserves better than to be brought back to life (again). I hope wherever she is, she’s happy.
