A Very Special Episode: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Fear Itself

Growing up, one of my favorite parts of the Halloween season were the Halloween specials that would air more and more frequently towards the end of the month. Possibly I enjoyed this even more than the act of trick or treating, which was undeniably fun and rewarding in terms of acquiring piles of candy, but also sometimes a chore. Halloween night in Anchorage, Alaska was often not the most pleasant time to be wandering around outdoors. The temperatures would have dipped to the point where I would have to wear my costume over bulky snow gear, if I was lucky, and under the snow gear, if I was not, so that all that was visible of my costume would be my face. That is not to say I ever avoided trick or treating. Some nights I would make multiple trips, never to the same house twice, so that I could head home and warm up for a few minutes and empty my often stuffed-to-the-brim bag of candy. But still those nights are cold, in  a way that can cut through even the thickest jacket, and heading inside for the night would become more and more appealing as the night wore on. Once inside, with my pile of candy in front of me, after my mom had gone through and checked to make sure everything was factory sealed and had no tears or holes in the packaging (Providence Hospital provided free screenings of candy for parents nervous about poisoning or razorblades, but I grew up in a pretty nice neighborhood where we knew a large number of our neighbors personally, and so a cursory visual exam was usually all we needed to make sure things were safe), I would sit on the floor or couch and gorge myself on candy while watching whatever Halloween programming I could find.

Halloween specials started to fall out of fashion eventually, but when I was a kid it seemed every sitcom or procedural drama on the air would do a spooky Halloween themed episode. Sometimes the Halloween trappings would amount to nothing more than some costumes and decorations, though sometimes the showrunners would take the seasonal opportunity to indulge in a little supernatural hijinks, maybe explaining it away as a dream, maybe just letting it stay there, never to be remarked upon again. On one end of the spectrum is a show like Brooklyn Nine-Nine, which does a Halloween episode every year, but keeps it within the reality of the show as the characters indulge in some seasonal shenanigans. On the other end is something like the Simpsons Treehouse of Horror, in which all rules that normally govern the show are thrown out in favor of anthology horror tales where, often, some of the regular cast dies. These types of episodes are usually non-canonical, and take place in a sort of Elseworlds version of the show. The sweet spot for me lies somewhere in the middle; a show where the Halloween episode exists within the show's overall reality, but allows the supernatural to creep in in a way that would otherwise not be possible without, as they say, jumping the shark.

For this Halloween season, on top of my regular viewings of horror movies and my regular readings of horror books, I've decided to revisit some of my favorite Halloween specials. I'll be discussing five of them here this month, and though I'll be watching a lot more than that I think I've already narrowed it down to my desired list. But, of course, things may change. So now, without further ado, allow me to welcome you to the first entry in A Very Special Episode, charting some noteworthy, at least to me, Halloween specials from, (generally) my childhood.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Fear Itself (Season 4, episode 4)

Written by David Fury, Directed by Tucker Gates

Original Air Date: October 26, 1999

This episode is the most recent of the specials I've chosen to cover this year, and the only one that aired after I could be called, legally if not emotionally, an adult. It is also the only show in which the dark supernatural aspects present in the Halloween special are actually part of the normal makeup of the show. I almost saved this one for later, or bypassed it altogether because it slightly breaks the pattern of the rest of the shows I'll be talking about, but then I remembered how great Fear Itself is, and that watching it again would give me an opportunity to introduce my thirteen year old daughter to Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

I came late to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, mostly missing out on the first two seasons. This was owing mainly to the fact that in the pre-DVR era you were at the mercy of the television schedule, and if something conflicted with that schedule, of you weren't the only one in the house with an interest in the television, you were out of luck. I didn't actually start catching episodes regularly until the third season, when I was in college and my schedule meant that I frequently caught episodes while other students watched it in the common room. And it still wasn't until the fifth season, when I was living in an apartment on my own, that I began to actively watch Buffy every week as it aired. For the rest of its run I would not miss a single Buffy episode, and by the sixth season I was watching it semi-regularly with friends. Also, by the end of the sixth season, I was living with my future wife, who has had little patience for my Buffy fandom over the years. Now, twenty years after the series first premiered, I decided it was time to introduce my daughter to the show, and used this opportunity to start her off with one of my favorite episodes.

The first thing I noticed when watching Fear Itself for the first time in at least a decade, compounded by the fact that I was watching it with someone who had no prior information about the world of the show, was how integral the serialized elements of the show were to what I mostly remembered as a standalone episode. A lot of time is spent in the first half of the episodes following the characters as they navigate their daily lives and the problems, mostly romantic in nature, that plague them. Buffy is in a funk brought on by the fact that the boy she was falling for turned out to only be interested in a one night stand, while she also steadily falls behind in her college course work. Willow is experiencing her own romantic strife with her werewolf boyfriend Oz, who expresses concern that Willow is diving too quickly into witchcraft. Xander is still trying to figure out where he stands with ex-vengeance demon Anya, who at this point he has been kinda-sorta dating for a short time, while also fending off strong bouts of insecurity brought about by the fact that he's the only member of the gang not going to college, and without any supernatural abilities. Also lurking around the edges are future Buffy boyfriend Riley, subtle intimations of the health troubles that will plague Buffy's mother in the next season, and the shadowy government agency that's been stirring up trouble in Sunnydale.

All the personal drama takes up almost half of this episode, and there aren't even any intimations of the threat the gang will be facing until 15 minutes in, when Oz accidentally bleeds onto a decorative occult symbol that some frat boys are painting on the floor as part of their Halloween preparations. Unseen by anyone else in the room, a plastic spider within the magical circle becomes a real spider and crawls away. Cut to commercial. And still it takes another ten minutes of interpersonal drama before the gang arrives at the haunted house party (a metaphorical haunted house, the house itself is not normally haunted) and discovers the threat inside. Cut to another commerical. This is an awful lot of screentime to devote when you've only got 43 minutes, minus opening and closing credits, to tell your story, and yet it's integral to not only why the episode works, but why Buffy as a television series was so successful.

A lot of people claim season three to be their favorite season of Buffy, owing to the introduction of some fan-favorite characters and, in the Mayor, the best season villain (or Big Bad in the show's parliance, a term coined by the show that has since entered the common lexicon) the show would ever have. Season three is when Buffy really began to fire on all cylinders. The first two seasons are still great, but season three is when the show came into its own and the humor, scares, drama, and general writing quality all began to work in harmony. For my money, however, season four beats season three in all but one aspect: the villain. It's true, the Mayor is an incredibly charismatic, engaging, and entertaining villain, a man who's aw-shucks Boy Scout demeanor belies a ruthless devotion to the dark arts that has kept him alive for over a century, a perfect foil for Buffy. No other Big Bad quite matches his appeal, but season four suffers for placing perhaps the show's weakest villain so closely to its best. 

Adam also looks fairly silly.

The main villain of season four is, for much of the season, The Initiative, the shadowy government agency listed above. It's a bit of an odd addition to Buffy's mythology, bringing a dash of X-Files conspiracy to a series that had primarily been interested in myth and magic. They don't mesh with the rest of the show, and fail to become very interesting. Eventually the threat of The Initiative leads into the threat of Adam, a Frankenstein's Monster style reanimated corpse being trained as a super soldier. I actually enjoy the performance of the actor portraying Adam, but the character himself is dull by design and lacks the dynamic personality of the Mayor. 

If you look at the season beyond merely its villain, season four shines in every other category. Season four contains some of the series' sharpest comedic writing and its most successful blending of serialization and standalone episodes. The trend in dramatic television these days is towards tighter seasons and an emphasis on serialization, where every episode needs to be about the show itself, and needs to be focused on moving the story forward. This has led to some great television, without a doubt, but I do miss the days of 22 episode seasons, where every once in awhile you would get an episode that was just the characters hanging out together, dealing with one specific threat, without it having to be about only moving the story forward (for the record, I think Breaking Bad is maybe the best-case example of the current trend towards hyper-serialization, as each episode pushed the storyline forward but also kept its focus solely on character). Buffy in its fourth season had the best handle on this balancing act, as even the throwaway episodes that have no bearing on the overarching plot include some incremental movement forward. There's even an episode that hinges on a magical wish changing reality, that ends with everything back the way it began and the episode's events more or less erased from existence, and it still features one major development that sets the course of events for the finale. This has always been my go-to explanation for Buffy's greatness: the show knew when to switch gears and allow the fans to just enjoy these characters being their charming likable selves, but also knew how to weave in more long-form storytelling. 

Fear Itself is written by David Fury, and it's his fourth script for the series overall, but his first after being hired on as a regular writer and producer. David Fury would become one of the most reliable names in the Buffy credits, alongside Jane Espensen, Marti Noxon, Douglas Petrie, and Whedon himself. He would also go on to become an important voice in the spinoff series Angel, helping that show find its footing and grow out of its awkward phase into more than just a Buffy clone. Fury's episodes tended to hit the sweet spot between funny and scary, and showed a deft hand at serving the individual characters as well as the genuine schocks, which is evident in Fear Itself when the gang arrives at the frat party (filmed, coincidentally, in the same house as season one of American Horror Story) to discover that something is making everybody's fears manifest: rubber spiders become real, decorative skeletons become rotted zombies, peeled grapes actually do become slimy eyeballs. Good stuff. All of the personal drama in the front half of this episode may seem in the broad strokes to be a perfunctory attempt to keep all of these running storylines moving before going on to the good stuff, but the two are actually so closely intertwined that it would be impossible to have either section of this episode work without the other. 

Oz's fear that he won't be able to control his lycanthropic tendencies and will eventually hurt someone he cares about manifests itself when he begins to change into a werewolf despite it not being a full moon. Willow's insecurity over being always stuck in the sidekick role causes her conjuring of a spirit guide to split off into dozens of separate guides, one for each course of action she can't decide on. Xander feels that he is being left behind by his friends both socially and mentally, and he becomes invisible to them, lost in the house unable to communicate (in a callback to season one episode Out of Mind, Out of Sight). Buffy's fear is the least remarked upon in the episode itself, but also perhaps the most complicated. She finds herself alone as the house separates the group, and it underlines the fear she has that she will never be anything but the Slayer, that no matter how she tries she will only ever be defined by this one aspect of her life, and will never have a normal existence.

If all of this sounds a bit too involved, or possibly even dull, for a series about a bubbly blonde teenager fighting back the forces of darkness, it should be noted that Fear Itself is a legitimately scary hour of television, punctuated by some great bits of humor (Giles' continuing descent into Dad On Vacation mode with his garish Halloween decorations and giant sombrero; Anya's revelation that there is nothing scarier to this ex-demon than bunnies; Giles responding to the mystical forces creating a maze of the frat house by simply using a chainsaw to cut a path through the building). Buffy The Vampire Slayer did two other Halloween-specific episodes over the course of its seven seasons, and while both of them are good fun, Fear Itself is a true classic, aided in large part by its abrupt and somewhat unexpected ending. 

As should surprise no one watching this show, the occult symbol painted on the floor turned out to be part of a summoning ritual, in this case a ritual to summon a fear demon called Gachnar. Gachnar, in the woodcut drawing we see of him, resembles a more feral cousin of Clive Barker's Cenobites from the Hellraiser series, all sharp teeth and long claws and tight leather straps. He appears to be an opponent worth fearing, and in Buffy's rush to avoid a fight she inadvertently completes the summoning spell and unleashes Gachnar on the world. I'm not going to actually spell out the ending of this episode, on the off chance that anyone reading this has not actually seen the episode in question and yet still plans to do so, but it does involve a fantastic visual gag and a terrific punchline of a closing line. 

There was a point about a decade ago where I thought Buffy would eventually join the pantheon of great television shows, shows that illustrate what the medium is capable of while also pushing forward the standards to which a television show should be held. That hasn't quite turned out to be the case, as Buffy's reputation has slightly fallen over the years. To be sure, the fandom behind Buffy, and also Joss Whedon, remains fervent and supportive, but the public conversation has also died down a bit. Gone are the days when fans would organize singalong screenings of the Buffy musical episode from season six, and even Whedon's own longrunning and very popular fansite was recently shuttered. Part of that probably has more to do with certain revelations regarding Whedon's personal life than it does with the quality of his work, but it also coincides with a general lack of interest in his style. Despite creating two of the cornerstones of modern nerd culture (Buffy and his short-lived space opera Firefly), and despite being one of the architect's of Marvel's current cinematic dominance, Joss Whedon's star has fallen somewhat, and the cultural discussion seems to be in the process of passing him by.

For myself, I'm still a fan. He's done too much intriguing and entertaining work for me to ever write him off, and I'll probably continue to check out whatever new projects he has. If it's a little dated, that is unfortunately unavoidable, and something you'll just have to get over if you expect to appreciate anything made more than a decade ago. As an example, I will say that this episode intrigued my daughter enough that she asked if we could watch the rest of the series. We are currently midway through season one, which is not the high point of the show, and she loves it. She wasn't even born yet when the series went off the air, and she's finding herself drawn into the world of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Not for a minute is she put off by the incredibly dated fashions or odd Whedonesque slang. Beneath all of the cool-in-1999 trappings, beyond the vampires and demons and monsters, Buffy's themes remain universal.

Next on A Very Special Episode: Quantum Leap; The Boogieman