Buffy The Vampire Slayer - S06x17|♡Uncut Reaction &Review♡
Normal Again
A demon's venom causes Buffy to hallucinate, convincing the slayer that she's a normal girl in a mental ward, that her parents are alive, Dawn never existed, and her slayer life is a delusion.
Link to the reaction:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/rgzjvp15cxa8h0z/Buffy%206x17.mp4?dl=0
Comments (35)
“Is she saying that the show’s ridiculous. That we’re all ridiculous for watching it?” My new favorite line. “The whole six seasons are not real?” “Imagine two realities exist.” We won’t accept the institutionalized Buffy as the “real” Buffy because we will continue to live in the Slayerworld. But the question can yield great understanding. Whether she is institutionalized Buffy or Slayer Buffy, she is still a hero (just in a different form), one is as protector of the world, the other is as protector of her heart. It is what Buffy suffers, either way, that makes her a hero. One of my favorite reactions to anything, ever. This is my second favorite episode, after OMWF.
I appreciate your reactions, Sofie. I am way late... but I really dislike this episode. It would be better without the ending scene, I think. It is such a slap in the face. This incredible female hero, the warrior of the people, is just some crazy girl who thinks she's special. Um, no. Just no. I watched Buffy when it aired and later shared it with my daughter. I love this show. We don't have enough female heroes as it is. Buffy is not some crazy girl she is the Slayer. I agree with others that her being in the institution before was part of her hallucination. It doesn't fit with earlier seasons.
It’s not a slap in the face. If you need to ask the question as Sofie does, “Imagine two realities exist”, then that works. But the question is actually a deep psychological one. It isn’t that Buffy is one or the other, it is a question of both possibilities. No matter which you might decide (and, of course, most of us will decide on the side of Slayer Buffy), she is still a hero. “Some crazy girl” would actually be a slap in the face to those who deal with mental health issues. (I know you don’t mean it that way.) But, no matter how you look at it, Buffy is a hero. If one did decide to take her as an institutionalized young woman, she could actually yield great insight into mental health, and how strong those who suffer constant mental pain are called to be. Believe me, I know. The show is so often accused of slapping its fans in the face, because this thing or that thing is not to their liking (the problem is that nobody agrees on which things are the slaps, and which aren’t), but it never does any such thing. It is always expanding our understanding of what it is to be human and what great drama and tragedy can look like. As to whether Buffy was really in a mental institution, earlier, I see no reason not to believe it based on the original timeline, nonetheless, when Dawn appeared, the timeline was written over. Obviously, Joyce found out earlier than in the timeline we watched (at the end of season two) because in “Real Me” Buffy says that Dawn grew up knowing the rules about vampires.
I love this episode so much. My favorite part is that in the hospital reality it's tied in with her being in "heaven" (the reality where she was safe and loved) by the doctor's statement that she was there last summer. I like that's is open ended. I tend to believe that the non slayer reality is the "real" one and it still doesn't subtract from her slayer reality and story to me. If she thinks that's the real reality then all her choices there and all her joys and pains are just as real as anywhere else.
Feel like people either really hate this one or love it. I love it personally
I'm catching up on watching your full reactions, so I'm a bit behind, but honestly, I think I'd like to skip this one, because I can't handle watching the episode again. I really hated this episode, on a visceral level, when it first aired, and never rewatched it. It did its job too well, and left me wondering if the last six seasons were a complete waste of time ("It was all a dream.")
Even if the mental hospital reality is the "real one" it's not a waste of time. If Buffy is living in a false reality that's still the one she is living in so everything that happens to her there and everything she does is still her life. Most TV shows are fiction and never actually happened. I would argue watching great TV shows aren't a waste of time even if they aren't "real."
This is one of my fave episodes and your reaction was the best I've seen!
I've got a theory (that it's... ahem, let's not digress) about this one, but it's extremely dark. Let's consider here that the real Buffy is the institutionalized one. What provoked the crisis? Something I only recently noticed is Joyce telling her daughter she's "a survivor". A survivor of what? Well, we all know what vampires are a metaphor of. Buffy, the NA reality one, was a rape victim. She created this whole universe in order to cope with the assault. Now, the two reasons why this is even crueller : first, in-universe, two episodes later, it's "Seeing Red". Even in her delusion, she still ends up being the victim. Second, in real life, it's very possible that there's somebody who went through a real attack and created her own universe in which they're a Buffy-like character. Re: the retcon issue, I wouldn't overthink it. The first four seasons didn't exactly happen the way we watched them. And then again, if the NA reality is "true", it's all in the mind of a person who's gone tragically insane...
I never thought Vampires represented rapers?? Where does that came from? .. also why would Buffy - the victim of a rape- fall in love with a raper (Angel) and have feelings for/Sleep with the other in her delusion where she isbsupposed to be coping with her trauma?!!
This is mainly a bunch of bored writers trying to be clever, imho. I think fandom works waaaaayyyyyy too hard trying to explain it. I don’t bother.
I really like the concept of this episode, and I thought it had a great deal of potential, but it ultimately felt like it was rewriting a very significant part of Buffy's past with her saying she'd been committed before Sunnydale... We know Buffy slipped up in front of Joyce at least once- once in The Witch when she was spell drunk, referring to herself as a vampire slayer, which Joyce shrugged off with little concern as Buffy being weird and silly. If Buffy had been institutionalized because of that prior to her saying this, her mother definitely would have had more of a reaction than that... But besides that, it also wouldn't make sense based on how Joyce reacted when Buffy told her she was the slayer in the season 2 finale. She was utterly completely floored and shocked. If Buffy had been committed for doing the same thing before, why wasn't it brought up by her (Joyce) when Buffy told her? And wouldn't that have played a huge role in Buffy's fear in telling her (again in this scenario) and been mentioned by her at some point.. The fear of being committed again... So yeah, unfortunately it's a retcon to me
This is, in my opinion, one of the best BtVS episodes not written by Joss, or one of the other core writers. BtVS is a Hero's Journey tale, and one of the standard tropes of that sort of story is Death and Resurrection. Buffy died (twice), and was physically resurrected in Bargaining, but throughout this season she has suffered with depression and PTSD. This episode represents her Spiritual Resurrection. Joyce's encouragement gives Buffy the strength to decide to be Normal Again, which for her means being a Hero.
The scene where Buffy tells Willow that she was institionalized is clearly a Monk-Memory, or a hallucinatory memory to make Buffy more likely to believe the hallucinations could be real. If Joyce had institionalized Buffy at 14, there is absolutely no way that Joyce would have reacted the way she did in Bad Eggs, or Becoming 2. Institionalizing your child is NOT something a parent forgets about.
I don't like this episode. Not just because of the "is Sunnydale really real...? (Nudge, nudge, wink, wink)" ending, which never works on an established show; the retcon of Buffy saying she had actually told her parents she as Slayer before coming to Sunnydale and was committed is completely asinine. The episode itself, like much of this season, has a lot of potential, but doesn't live up to it. When you have DS9's "Far Beyond the Stars," and TNG's "Frame of Mind," or Batman TAS "Perchance to Dream," among others, this one just doesn't do the premise justice.
Buffy hadn't taken the remedy even at the end, so she was still pumping in and out of her hallucination. A Genious Ending that pushes the audience to question everything for at least a week. Comparing this to The Sisko vision given to him by the prophets or Riker's subconscious fighting off a mind probe. Where in the end, it's business as usual, all tied up with a bow and NOT questioning everything that has been presented up to that point. You haven't been paying attention. If you want to complain about bad writing, then watch Angel. There are plenty of silly things to complain about there.
The wish Cordy made created a different version of the same reality. Only one where Buffy had never went to Sunnydale. But if that reality didn't have existence beyond the wish, then Anya couldn't have been able to pull vamp Willow out of it. There couldn't have been two Willows in Buffy's reality. She had to come from somewhere. If there can be two Willows there can be two Buffys. Perhaps something did happen in that clinic long ago that created that split. But she was the Slayer before that, so we know that is her real path.
As said in response the other post, if the Wish didn't rewrite reality, there's really no imperative. Destroying the power center would do nothing; and there was never any actual threat; as the audience is taken on a casual stroll through what-if land. Presumably the "temporal fold" Anya wanted to create didn't reach through to another existing dimension, but into the past when the Wishverse briefly (but finitely) existed.
They've made it clear that the Buffyverse is a multiverse many times. So to me both scenarios are real and the poison let her slip back and forth between the two realities.
Actually, yeah. Like the world with shrimp only, or world without shrimps.
When I first watched it, it was too much for me and I don't rewatch it. But love seeing reactions to it ahaha. I wonder if the writers gone too much with the self awareness/meta look into the show that it made it worse for some viewers. Like you said, Buffy saying the show is "ridiculous".
Buffy chose to not drink the antidote bc Spike just told her to "stop with the bloody hero trip" or something, during the speech where you were agreeing with him 😅 It's very telling that Spike, who has been trying to pull her towards darkness all season, is the main push to her totally giving in her delusion.
I was so focused on the ''Addicted to misery part''😂
Great episode! I don't mind the ending at all. Buffy had made the personal choice that the Sunnydale world was real by the end but hadn't taken the antidote yet. So it does make sense that the hallucinations would still be running, but adjusted to her new rejection of them. Hence, that was the last scene we saw.
This! It's not hard to understand.
Many years passed since I watched this episode for the first time, but i still have a doubt about wich reality is the real one.
Doesn't the existence of Angel as a series pretty well tell you that it's the Sunnydale one? :P
Re Joyce’s obliviousness in S1, S2 - this doesn’t effect that. The retcon isn’t Buffy having been briefly institutionalized for talking about vampires, it’s the monks altering everyone’s memories to accommodate Dawn. Everything we saw in S1-4 is different from how the characters now remember them because of that.
I don't buy that. That level of discontinuity would have been a serious flaw in identifying the Key. By all rights, the changes made to incorporate Dawn were negligible; and everything played effectively the same, or at least to within a reasonable degree, as it did without Dawn, just now with Dawn mixed in.
Hiiii! I love your uploads. However, you may want to edit out the part about your dream before you post on YouTube because some people (at least in USA) may find those terms offensive, and I know you'd never wanna do that! <3 Look forward to the end of the season! It's my favorite arc!
The term “retarded” is an offensive term in the USA, yes, if used as a synonym for something we don’t like or find disagreeable. SoFie however, used the term in its original medical sense, before it was corrupted by non-medical, insult culture. I understand where your concern is coming from, but It’s clear from Sofie’s usage of the term “mentally retarded” she wasn’t using it in its corrupted form. The USA also isn’t the center of the universe, and most of the (medical/psychiatric) world outside of the USA still uses that term in without offense.
Wow. I hadn't watched this episode since it originally aired. I remember HATING this episode then, and I must say I am still made very uncomfortable by it today. The open-ended ending I do not appreciate either. I think it degrades the narrative of the show more than it adds any mystery. I'm still not happy about this episode and how it ends. I suppose that the writers/Joss succeed in not only confusing BUffy but also the audience. We are granted complex conversations from the doctors and Buffy's parents while Buffy phases in and out of catatonic states. We slowly become convinced in our doubt for what is real and what is not. The audience is left to wonder if Sunnydale really DOES exist - which world is real?
This reaction was a pure delight to watch. This episode is one of my favorite episodes to watch reactions to, and you did not disappoint. *Chef's kiss*
❤️
I thought you would like this one, I really enjoy this episode too, it works on so many levels. Much of the dialogue can perfectly be applied to either reality, including Spike's speech and Joyce's speech at the end. Xander and Willow talk about Buffy "getting better" by drinking the antidote to stop the demon's hallucinations, but Buffy knows there is something more wrong with her life than that. Does she not feel herself because she's suffering from depression, or because she's in a mental institution suffering massive delusions? Whichever reality Buffy picks it still doesn't feel quite right. She would like to pick the world where she is "well" and feels like herself, but there isn't really an easy option for that, which for me serves as a great metaphor for suffering from depression or other mental health issues.