In “Doublemeat Palace,” in the wake of her mother’s death and the Summers family’s depleted finances, Buffy has to get a job at a fast food restaurant, where she discovers there’s more going on than just “do you want fries with that?”
MARTI NOXON
“Doublemeat Palace” is one of the craziest episodes we’ve ever done. It’s just insane. The monster looks like a penis and we knew that. We had to paint it, because initially it was penis colored. It wasn’t even a metaphor: it was just a big giant penis. And then we had to paint it brown and . . . it looked like a brown penis, and we just kind of went with it, because the whole episode was so crazy. It was so weird, and I personally really liked it. I just think it’s just out there. It was let’s try to just have a little fun in a crazy season. And it just got baroque. We tried to go with the feeling of a Coen brothers movie. It was weird and to some degree it succeeded; others not so much. But we got the giant penis.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
I have very fond memories of season six. I know a lot of those are centered around that one episode, “Dead Things,” which in a side story is one of the fastest episodes. It was the week before Thanksgiving and it started out I was in the room with the writers and then one writer went back east. Then another writer peeled off. By the end of that week leading up to Thanksgiving, literally, I was sitting in a room by myself. Everybody had left. The story wasn’t broken. I went down the hallway and knocked on Joss’s door and he was in there with Marti talking about the season.
He pops it open and I go, “Uh, everybody’s gone. What do you want me to do?” He goes, “What do you mean everybody’s gone?” I go, “They all left for Thanksgiving.” He says, “All right, come in. Let’s talk about it.” We went in and talked about it for like a half hour and had a very loose break. He said, “OK, go off and write it. We need it by Monday.”
Literally, I spent I think it was like three and a half days, no sleep, just kind of feeling my way through this episode that it didn’t really have an outline on. Came back in Monday all ragged. Joss read it, and, in one of the best compliments he ever could have given me, he said, “You know what? I should have you locked up in a room and every now and then just slide food under the door for you.” It turned out to be my personal favorite episode that I wrote, in that kind of fever dream, Thanksgiving crucible. I had a blast on that season. I enjoyed working on it.
MARTI NOXON
“Dead Things” was one of our more chilling, frightening episodes of the season actually. To me, it had some classic Buffy good stuff, which was, you know, playing the whole joke of turning Katrina into a sex slave and then that turning out to be no joke at all and not funny. And not funny to make girls your sex slave. In the Buffy universe, that’s not a big joke. To play it for comedy and then just turn it on its head, I thought was really inspired. That was, again, a Joss pitch.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
It was just so complicated, heart-wrenching, dark, and emotional. I just thought it was a brilliant thing that Joss did, knowing that he took these three nerds from previous episodes.
MARTI NOXON
I was talking to a friend about how to write Andrew and one of the other writers on staff was just, like, “Go into Doug Petrie and Drew Greenberg’s office, because they love to talk about this kind of stuff.” I can talk about The Partridge Family and Three’s Company and Archie comics, so I’d have to wander down to their office and go, “What would you say here?” and they’d say something about Han Solo.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
The Trio were kind of goofy, kind of funny, but knowing they were going to do this really horrible thing and go really dark and bad. Knowing that eventually they were going to kill Tara and unleash dark Willow. If you look at that entire season, there’s a lot of light and fluffy and fun with the nerds. Then it just all turns sideways, which is something I always loved about the show.
MARTI NOXON
How many times could you go, “It’s the end of the world as we know it?” So we tried to do something a little different. We had to come up with a different way to create a threat. I wasn’t really party to that criticism. I wasn’t really hearing it. In retrospect, obviously, I have. I just was so into them; we just thought they were so funny. Maybe they amused us more than others. But we just thought they were so fun and their motivation was so interesting. You know, what I think people were objecting to was that there wasn’t that typical momentum of the season like, “Here it comes, here it comes, here it comes. Here comes the Big Bad.”
To be honest, maybe we were being a bit experimental. We were all tired of running that same scenario. You can only say, “It’s the worst thing ever!” so many times without feeling like you’re just the biggest liar in the world. We needed a break, so we just structured the whole season differently than anything we’d ever done. I just enjoyed that. It was like, oh God, we’re faking left and then it’s going to be Willow and people may intuit that. But even so, it’s just so refreshing not to have to keep saying, “Here comes the apocalypse. Fishes are going to fall from the sky and there’s gonna be blood in your bathtub, and boy, it’s never been worse than this.” It was very nice to not have to ramp up for a whole season.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
Joss had the idea of how it happened and he knew that that was going to incite Willow to go all Dark Phoenix. I’ll never forget. He said, “Listen, I’ve got this one scene in my mind. It’s kind of in the coda of the episode. She’s in her room; Tara’s talking to Willow. There’s a gunshot from outside, and Willow’s splattered with blood. Tara’s last words are, “Your shirt,” and then she dies.” I’m thinking, “Holy shit, that’s brilliant. That’s awful . . . and brilliant . . . and tragic. Joss would have those cornerstone ideas and a lot of great detail. Then he would rely on his writers to kick it around, flesh it out, pitch it to him. Then he would make adjustments. That’s really the way it worked. Joss almost always had the big idea.
DAVID FURY
Clearly people were upset about a beloved character, Tara, being killed. Absolutely. Especially when it’s a romantic character. If it had been Angel who had died during the height of the Buffy-Angel thing, that would have been a controversy. But the real controversy was that Joss had provided the world with this wonderful, sweet, and romantic lesbian relationship and killed one of the couple. It’s frustrating, because you should be able to kill whoever you want, but unfortunately people read so much into it. Or so much into the fact that, “Oh, you had to kill the lesbian.” I’m, like, “My God, we killed everybody.” We killed so many people on this show, why not the lesbian? Because that’s heartbreaking. It needs to happen so Willow can be sent to the dark side. It just made sense story-wise. People are very sensitive about it. They’re sensitive when a character of color dies. Well, no, anybody can die. And hopefully we’ll get to that point where people don’t get so bent out of shape, because we’re not looking for symbolism in everything; we’re just looking for characters we love, of different diverse races or genders or anything else, and we’re not going to make a political point of, “Oh, you killed the gay person.”
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
It’s a touchy thing when you kill a character, especially if it’s gay, lesbian, trans, or a prominent non-Caucasian character. It can cause a lot of pain, so you have to approach it very, very carefully. Even if you approach it carefully, and reflectively, and with love and understanding, there’s still going to be people that are upset. I remember in Spartacus, when we killed Oenomaus, played by Peter Mensah, a couple of people on Twitter said I was racist, because I killed the black character. I’m, like, “Wait a minute, to start with, Oenomaus historically died sooner than when I killed him and, historically, was white.”
DAVID FURY
Joss never apologized for anything. He says this is the story I’m telling. Tara doesn’t die because she’s a lesbian; Tara dies because it will break our hearts—and that’s what he’s looking to do. And so nobody should
apologize. The fact of the matter is, if that’s where the story needs to go, that’s where the story needs to go. Stop looking for these characters to be symbols of something. They’re just people. And never apologize for it.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
I loved that ultimately the Big Bad was from inside and not an external force. I loved the idea that it was Xander’s love and friendship for Willow that brought her back. It also spoke to all of us that grew up reading comics, the whole Dark Phoenix saga in the X-Men. I just really, really loved that whole thing and the fantastic way that he had hinted at this darkness in Willow when the vampire Willow came over in “The Wish.” It didn’t come out of the blue. You saw hints of it in other episodes that she had this capacity to be this very dark person.
SARAH LEMELMAN
The viewer gets a glimpse into Willow’s “evil” persona in the episodes “The Wish” and “Doppelgangland” when Willow is shown as a vampire from another reality. Vampire Willow is very telling, in that she is sure of herself and confident in her sexuality. She wears tight, black leather clothes, with a plunging neckline, and bright red lipstick. In “Doppelgangland,” the two Willows are contrasted to such an extreme. The lovable “real” Willow is forced by Principal Snyder to tutor a star basketball player and says to her, “I know how you enjoy teaching . . . I know you want to help your school out here. I just know.” As Willow is complaining to Buffy that the principle is a bully, Giles enters the room, declaring, “Willow. Get on the computer. I want you to take another pass at accessing the mayor’s files,” and with no objection, she follows Giles’s orders.
While Willow is shown as a doormat for other people to walk all over, vampire Willow is the exact opposite. When the basketball star mistakes the vampire Willow for the real Willow, he says to her, “You’re supposed to be at home doing my history report. I flunk that class, you’re in big trouble with Snyder. Till we graduate, I own your ass.” Not standing for his insolence, she grabs him by the neck and throws him across the room, causing the “stud” to run away in fear.
Not only is vampire Willow cool and collected, but she is also highly sexualized, prompting Willow to describe her as “horrible,” “evil,” “skanky,” and “kinda gay.” At this time in the show, she does not understand the implications of her double, but less than a year after their meeting, Willow begins her expedition of identification when she meets Tara.
JOSE MOLINA
Willow was pretty much unrecognizable by the end of the show. It’s interesting, because that arc really kicked into high gear when Marti took over. Marti had something to say about addiction that was important to her and she found a way of talking about addiction through Willow and also, you know, about abusive relationships with Buffy and Spike. So most of that I think is in season six and that’s more of a reflection of Marti really being given ownership over the show.
MARTI NOXON
When I first started, I was doing a lot more writing and a lot less producing. So I loved it when I got to write a script; that’s my first love. But because you do so much more, you’ve got to stop once in a while and say, “Wait a minute, I’m a writer.” I love all this other stuff, but that’s what I am first and foremost. That’s the thing—you don’t want to go too far from your primary purpose.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
There’s no way she ruined Buffy. I look at that season and there are great episodes. I love the arc of where it goes. Joss was in and out. I’ve got to be honest, even with Angel, it was run by somebody else because Joss couldn’t physically be there, but he’s always there. I remember when I was on Angel, literally going to the set of Serenity to talk to Joss about an episode and get notes. Even if he’s not there, he’s there to some extent.
DAVID FURY
Season six was a tricky season and it’s the one Joss envisioned that if Buffy did come back, she would not be the same. She will have been lifted out of heaven. That’s what he had come to early on so that she would be in this horrible teenage funk. That’s kind of what we did and people got very turned off of the show. They said it lost all the fun; they blamed Marti for it, which was incredibly unfair. Marti does like to go to the angst part. She brings the emotional end to the stories that make them so great as well. But when that’s all we were doing virtually, it wasn’t all hijinks with some emotion. It was just very heavy with ennui and Marti took the brunt of it. To her credit, she embraced it. She fell on her sword and said, “Yep it’s me. I ruined Buffy.”
JAMES MARSTERS
Oh my God, no! Joss needed someone with as much courage as he had and found that person in Marti Noxon. She is fearless as a storyteller. She can take you to those dark places and then she can make it pay off. She didn’t destroy Buffy at all . . . at all. You know, when you affect people, when you touch them in places that they didn’t plan to get touched, it can get a bit touchy [laughs]. They can get a little bit defensive. I often think when fans react that way, it may mean that they’re actually doing it very well. Joss once said, “I’m not here to please the audience. I just give them something I think that they need and that’s not always about wrapping everything up with a bow.”
DAVID FURY
Joss hadn’t intended on coming back in season six as he eventually did. As far as I recall, he turned the show over to Marti. He really did not want to come back as a show runner per se, but eventually he wound up doing it because we all knew it was his show; it’s his vision. That doesn’t take away from what Marti brought to the show and was able to do. She manned the ship fantastically. But ultimately Joss just needed the break. And, of course, his break was to go write a musical Buffy.
Regardless of how anyone ultimately felt about the season, there’s one episode that is clearly a towering achievement for the series that continues to be feted and discussed to this day and is a contemporary television classic. That episode, of course, is the beloved musical episode, “Once More, with Feeling.” Brilliantly written (songs as well as script) and directed by Whedon, the episode features the cast breaking into tunes while telling the pivotal and tragic story of Buffy’s being ripped out of heaven when Willow’s spell resurrected her—all in the guise of a candy-colored MGM musical . . . with singing demons, vampires, and slayers, along with an unhealthy fear of bunnies.
SARAH LEMELMAN
This episode brings a demon to Sunnydale, who causes its citizens to break out into song about their inner troubles and anxieties. It comes at a time when the Scoobies are transitioning to adulthood and highlights this fact, as the audience is able to hear all the characters’ secrets. The episode itself was originally broadcast for 68 minutes—breaking from the series’ normal 60-minute time slot. Once again, Whedon took a stab at something he had never done before, and may not have gotten the recognition the episode deserved, but his work nevertheless left its mark, as television in the later 2000s saw a rise in musical episodes, including in the popular Grey’s Anatomy and Scrubs.
DAVID FURY
We knew he was writing the musical and I remember we were probably into the third episode when he came back with the DVD of him and his wife Kai singing on a demo of all the music from the musical and he had the script and we all sat around in a circle reading the script out loud, and then when we’d get to a song we’d put on the DVD and put the song on. We were just blown away. We could not believe that Joss had only taught himself piano a year or so earlier and that he’d written these great songs and we were just staring at each other. Joss was anxious to get into preproduction on the musical and that sort of took over.
JAMES MARSTERS
We used to have these great parties after Joss’s Shakespeare readings at his house and we got to know each other really well.
AMY ACKER
(actress, Fred, Angel)
The Shakespeare readings were a blast. Everybody had a part. Joss would always have a huge, amazingly beautiful, delicious spread of food and he would do readings. A lot of time he had his brother or someone over who also did
the music. They’d thrown some little songs together that would accompany the play. Afterward, it evolved to these little dance parties. It was the most wonderful way to spend a Sunday. I’ve never heard of another show runner doing it. I guess it helps we were all a little nerdy.
JAMES MARSTERS
I brought my guitar and started playing, because if you’re at a party and play guitar, you know, you might as well bring it. After a couple times doing that, Joss started playing piano and other people started bringing their instruments and it became a party/music-making event. At one point Joss said that’s where he thought up the idea for a musical, because he realized enough people in the cast could sing.
JOSS WHEDON
Before my dad wrote television, he wrote off-Broadway musicals. My mom had a framed telegram from Moss Hart saying he had a new show coming up and he wanted her to audition for it. And that was a beautiful, perfect little thing for her, and in a way it was like her way of telling us, “I had you three so I don’t get to do that!” At Radcliffe, everybody was acting and doing little theatricals, and she directed stuff and starred in it at school or at summer stock or at the Dennis Playhouse, which is one of my earliest memories in Cape Cod for my whole childhood.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
Joss is incredibly funny and quick-witted. I have seldom met anyone that had such a quick wit. Really, I can’t even describe how funny Joss is and all of the ideas that just pour out. I’m sure everybody has a “Joss Whedon is brilliant” story, but when I first came in, I know he was learning how to play the piano. I heard rumors, “Oh, yeah, he’s learning how to play the piano because he wants to do a musical episode. Then the next year he disappeared to the East Coast for a week or two. After a couple of weeks, we all get a package that’s a script and a CD. He had written a musical script in that period of time along with the songs and recorded them with his wife.
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