Normal Again

"Normal Again" is the 17th episode of season 6 of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Warren, Jonathan and Andrew unleash a demon whose powers make Buffy believe that her friends are figments of her imagination. Eventually Buffy attacks her friends, locks them in her basement and unleashes the same demon on them. Tara eventually finds them and Buffy recovers from the Demon's poison by drinking the antidote.

Quotes and trivia

 * The episode is left open to interpretation; the actual cause of the delusions, either the poison or Buffy's return to "reality", is not made explicitly clear. Joss later said that this episode was merely a suggestion, and not to be taken seriously.


 * It is revealed in this episode that Buffy stayed at a mental institution. This gets more attention in a Buffy comic prequel, Slayer, Interrupted.


 * This episode is similar to the earlier aired Charmed episode "Brain Drain" in which Piper finds herself in an asylum and is told that the world she believes to be true is in fact a delusion. "Brain Drain" aired a year before "Normal Again".


 * There are also some similarities between this episode and the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Frame of Mind", where Commander Riker is unsure what is "real": his life on a starship, or in a mental institution.


 * This episode is also very similar to the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Far Beyond the Stars" in which Avery Brooks character Benjamin Sisko finds himself trapped between two realities: One in which he is the Captain in Star Fleet, and the other in which he is a black writer for a Science Fiction magazine in the 1950's named Benny Russell, who writes about a black captain on a star ship. At the end of that episode, the viewer was left with the question of which reality was real as we see Sisko looking into a reflection of himself and seeing instead Benny Russell.


 * The character of Hurley also experiences a delusion similar to Buffy, in Lost the episode "Dave", where he sees an imaginary person from a mental institution on the Island and begins to believe the entire world he has been living in for several years is false, due to things in his life getting better.


 * This episode has some similarilites to the Stargate Atlantis episode "The Real World". In that episode Dr. Elizabeth Weir is infected by Replicator nanites and is rendered comatose. While unconcious, she dreams that she is in a psychiatric hospital and that her entire experience in Atlantis was solely a figment of her imagination. The people on Atlantis are able to partially destroy the nanites within Weir's body, allowing her to overcome the delusion, and escape the dream.