Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Twenty five years later (Part seven)By Matthew Martin| November 19, 2021 TV Blogs Previous Page After Buffy and Spike get closure on their relationship, there are basically no other pieces to set on the board. The final two episodes serve as the set-up and pay-off to the series finale. In the set-up, the episode “End of Days,” Buffy acquires the magic scythe needed to take Caleb out. It also leads to her learning the origin of the Slayer line, which began as some African shaman…or should I say sha-MEN, give demonic power to a girl to have her fight the forces of evil on their behalf. It’s a little rapey and the show points that out and doesn’t shy away from it, so good for them for not handwaving it all. The big finale, fittingly, takes place at Sunnydale High, where hordes of übervamps are preparing to burst out of the Hellmouth underneath and consume the world. Buffy’s plan? Go in there and stop them. It sounds like a suicide mission, especially since the dozen or so girls she has with her can barely fight a punching bag. That’s where Willow comes in. Her arc reaches its payoff as she unleashes all her power to become, not Dark Willow, but Light Willow, drawing from the power of the scythe to embue every potential Slayer with Buffy’s power, no longer limiting it to the “one-per person, deliverable upon the death of the former” loophole the Shamans imposed (probably because they didn’t want an army of superpowered girls conquering them). The army of slayers beat back the army of übervamps but more and more keep coming, leading to Spike saving the day at the cost of his life. The Hellmouth closes (though “there’s another one in Cleveland,” Giles reminds us helpfully), the world is saved, and everyone wonders what they will do next. The question goes to Buffy, who has no answer other than a relieved smile that, whatever she chooses, she knows she can make it without the weight of the world solely on her shoulders. It’s easy to compare season five’s finale with season seven. Joss himself noted, as he sat down to write the final episode of the series, that he felt more pressure than ever because, as he says, he had already written the perfect sendoff for the character and the show, and that was season five’s finale. Instead of trying to top that, which would have been impossible, and instead of just settling for a retread, which would have been a big misfire, Whedon simply pivoted and presented a different kind of finale, one that eschews poignancy for closure. I’ll have more to say in my episode-by-episode ranking, but while Chosen is not ranked in the top ten outings of the show, it does come close, and it is—under the circumstances, being so close to the sublime season five finale—a beautiful ending, sufficiently capping off the arc of the season, ably wrapping up the two-season coda that began with the move to UPN. And though it doesn’t hit the heights of being the “perfect finale to Buffy” that season five’s “The Gift” was, it is the actual finale, and as it is, “Chosen” was a fitting finale to a TV series about a single girl chosen to fight alone, who survived far longer than any Slayer should purely because she refused to fight alone; she broke the rules and included her friends along the way. And then, when the evil became so big and so overwhelming that “evil itself” was the big bad to stop, Buffy broke the rules again and empowered every girl everywhere with the ability and the strength to fight back, to take control, and as the show says, to “slay.” It’s beautiful. Meanwhile, as Buffy was saying goodbye, Angel was diving into its fourth season, and if you thought Buffy Season Seven could get messy, oh boy, you’re in for it here…
