Conversations with Dead People

"Conversations with Dead People" is the seventh episode of the seventh and final season of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Several separate encounters take place around Sunnydale on one night. What makes this particular episode unique is none of the major characters (Dawn, Buffy, Willow) interacts with each other during this show.

Quotes and trivia

 * This episode was awarded the 2003 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form.


 * Neither Emma Caulfield nor Nicholas Brendon appear in this episode. This is the only episode Brendon, and the character of Xander, does not appear in throughout the entire series. James Marsters appears but does not speak.


 * Amber Benson was initially going to appear as Tara, taunting Willow instead of Cassie, but she turned it down on the grounds that she thought having Tara as a villain would ruin her character. According to the commentary for this episode on the DVD, the writers said that Amber Benson simply wasn't available.


 * Other storylines considered were for Eric Balfour, who played Jesse in the pilot episode, to have conversed with Xander; and, according to Drew Goddard on the "Selfless" DVD commentary, for Kali Rocha (Halfrek) to return and haunt Anya, but she was unavailable.


 * Buffy learns that Scott Hope, her high school boyfriend in season three, came out as being gay in college. This may have been a nod to the fact that the actor that played Hope, Fab Fillippo had gone onto have a major role in the Showtime television series Queer as Folk as an openly gay gifted violinist at a private University.


 * Jonathan M. Woodward, who plays Holden Webster, also appeared in every Joss Whedon series: as Knox in the fifth season of Angel, and as Tracey in the Firefly episode "The Message". All three of these characters died violently.


 * Holden Webster pronounces "nemeses" correctly and Buffy replies "Is that how you say that?" This is an allusion to the Season 6 Episode "Gone" when both Warren and Buffy have trouble with the word.


 * In addition to the two credited writers, show runners Joss Whedon and Marti Noxon also made significant contributions to the script of this episode.  Each of the four plot strands were written by a different writer: Whedon wrote the Buffy-Holden scenes, Noxon wrote the Willow-Cassie scenes, Espenson wrote the Dawn scenes and Goddard wrote the Geek Trio scenes.