Selfless

"Selfless" is the fifth episode of seventh season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and is the hundred and twenty-seventh episode altogether. It was directed by Drew Z. Greenberg and written by Michael Gershman. It originally broadcast on October 22, 2002.

Synopsis
Anya gets back into her old Vengeance demon ways by helping a girl get revenge on an entire fraternity by having a spider demon tear their hearts out. Willow, returning to college, discovers this and she, Buffy, and Xander fear the worst of Anya.

Summary
Dawn helps Willow move into her new room at the Summers' house while giving her advice on how to fit in with people at school. Buffy and Xander contribute to the effort as well while talking about Anya. Buffy wonders about Anya's evil intentions, but Xander thinks she's getting better and isn't a threat. At a fraternity house, dead male bodies litter the room, each one with his heart ripped out. Anya sits on the floor, covered in blood, apparently in shock from what she's done.

Flashback (in grainy archival footage style) to Sjornjost, Sweden, 880 A.D., a pre-demon Anya, named Aud, cares for her Viking mate Olaf after he returns home from what he claims has been a hard day of fighting trolls, although she doubts him. She waits on him, promising requested sex after he's eaten, and rhapsodizing about "the sense of accomplishment that stems from selflessly giving of yourself to others" and her plan to things give away to their fellow villagers. She worries obsessively about whether he's unfaithful.

In the present-day school basement, Spike talks to Buffy about his mental struggles and remembers Drusilla. Buffy is warm and reassuring, but this Buffy is shown to be an delusion when the real Buffy enters approaches Spike, who has not moved but is exasperated and clearly alone. She insists that Spike must get out of the basement and away from whatever is making him so crazy down there.

On the college campus, Willow talks an old professor into reinstating her in class and sees Anya leaving one of the fraternity houses in a trench coat. Anya's diffident and claims she's dating one of the fraternity boys before quickly rushing off. Willow spots a streak of blood on Anya wrist before she departs and goes to investigate the building. Willow finds the fraternity house full of blood and corpses. There is a young co-ed whimpering in the closet that she "takes it back." She tearfully explains how in response to a cruel fraternity stunt she made a rhetorical wish about "having their hearts ripped out," after which a giant spider demon appeared and did just that. The spider attacks Willow and the girl, but Willow uses magic to hold it at bay, actually making a harsh style comment (disturbingly evocative of "Dark Willow") to the girl before tossing the spider through a window and comforting the girl, her normal self again. In another flashback to Sjornjost, 880, Anya watches as Olaf, who she's magicked into a troll in punishment for cheating on her, runs from a mob of villagers seeking to kill him. D'Hoffryn approaches her and praises her magical skill and vengeful resolution. D'Hoffryn insists that Aud's true self is Anyanka, a natural born Vengeance demon and offers to make her one in reality, which she accepts.

At work, Buffy receives a call from Willow about the fraternity house and the spider demon. Meanwhile, Halfrek is in Anya's room praising her return to enthusiastic vengeance while Anya is ambivalent and somewhat regretful. Willow barges in and orders Halfrek out. Anya rejects her assistance and considers Willow poorly qualified to judge following her excesses in Season Six. Buffy and Xander search the woods for the spider demon and are surprised by it as they inspect another of its victims - the spider nearly kills Buffy before she tosses it and kills it with a handy but of axe-hurling.

Buffy and Xander return to the Summers house and find Willow waiting with an explanation about where the demon originated and the damage it caused. Xander blows up at Willow because she didn't tell them, but realizes she delayed because now Buffy will have to kill Anya.

In a flashback to 1905, Anyanka and Halfrek drink champagne in a banquet room full of massacred men as the city of St. Petersburg, Russia, burns outside the window. Anyanka accepts Halfrek's compliments for starting the Russian Revolution, but rejects her offer to go celebrate, as her work (wreaking vengeance) is all she is or wants (humorously she sees the success of revolutionary communism as inevitable and desirable).

Back in the Summers home, Xander furiously denounces Buffy's plan to kill Anya. He insists Buffy always protects demons she loves, but Buffy reminds him how she killed Angel ("Becoming, Part Two") because it was necessary, and asserts that as Slayer her judgements regarding demons are absolute: "I am the law." Xander insists there must be another way and rushes off when Buffy advises him to get busy finding it. She takes weapons from her cache and leaves to find Anya alone, Willow pleading that she can't bear to accompany or help.

Left on her own, Willow rushes to her room and uses the summoning talisman that D'Hoffryn had given her three years earlier. D'Hoffryn is happy that Willow has called him as he'd been impressed with her flaying of Warren Mears and her surrender to hatred as Dark Willow (which he'd sensed her returning to that afternoon). He assumes Willow has called to accept the role of a Vengeance demon, but Willow insists she's called him to discuss Anya's recent actions, which he resignedly agrees to do.

Xander finds Anya at the fraternity house but Anya rejects his help, reminding him of his breach of promise of marriage, which he insists isn't a good excuse anymore. Buffy arrives. Anya switches to her scary, veiny demon face, throws Xander aside, and attacks her. They seem matched until Buffy impales Anya through the chest with a sword. In a sudden, wistful flashback, we are shown a moment that would have to have occurred a year earlier during Sweet's enchantment of Sunnydale ("Once More, With Feeling"). Anya sings a solo number about how her future role as Xander's 'missus' and the centrality of that role in defining who she is now. In the present, Anya comes to and, impervious to such apparently mortal injuries, rips the sword out. Buffy fights the sword away from her and gets another shot at using it when Xander tackles her away from Anya.

Suddenly D'Hoffryn appears, interrupting the battle. He first approvingly inspects Anya's scene of carnage in the other room, then reminds Buffy that attacking him is futile (she desists). D'Hoffryn compliments Xander's gallantry and Willow's solicitousness, and notes Buffy's bloody-minded resolution, but concludes by asking Anya what she wants to do. Anya asks to undo her act of vengeance, which is possible as her victims died "mystical deaths." Anya insists on it despite D'Hoffryn's warnings that the price would be the life and soul of a Vengeance demon and over Xander's impassioned protests. D'Hoffryn surprises all by rapidly summoning and annihilating Anya's vengeance demon friend Halfrek, explaining that he wants Anya to suffer in guilt as punishment for betraying him: "Never go for the kill when you can go for the pain!" Assuring them that the coming threat will kill them all anyway (reminding them that "from beneath you, it devours"), D'Hoffryn teleports away, having restored Anya's victims to life and Anya herself to human status.

Hurt and scared, Anya walks out alone, but Xander follows. She voices her dread at now facing life for the first time without a role to lose herself in, as Vengeance demon or girlfriend or wife or even buisnessperson, claiming she's always been without a self of her own. Xander argues with this and tries to comfort her, but backs regretfully away so that Anya, walking off tearfully in the opposite direction, can face her future, as she insists on doing, herself.

Quotes and trivia

 * Olaf: "You speak your mind, and are annoying." Olaf explains to Anya why he loves her.


 * Olaf: "Bah! I've told you a thousand times; I have no interest in this Rannveig. Her hips are large and load bearing, like a Baltic woman. Your hips are narrow, like a Baltic woman from a slightly more arid region."


 * D'Hoffryn: "Oh, breathtaking! It's like somebody slaughtered an Abercrombie and Fitch catalog." ''D'Hoffryn admires Anyanka's work in the fraternity house.


 * Xander's big lie from "Becoming, Part Two" is finally brought up, clearly the first time Willow has been made aware that he misrepresented her words.


 * This episode contains a flashback to November, 2001 when the episode "Once More, with Feeling" took place. Anya sings a song, "I'll Be Mrs.", which would have taken place the same evening Buffy sang "Going Through The Motions" in the actual musical episode. There are coconuts on the kitchen counter which Xander and Anya mention at the meeting in the Magic Box.


 * Kali Rocha was performing in the play Noises Off when Season Seven was shooting. She was flown in for one day and filmed all herSeason Seven scenes ("Lessons" and this episode) on that one day. She filmed her "death scene" before a green screen for later super-imposition into the scene.


 * Joss Whedon wrote Anya's song in one evening while working on his science fiction / western series Firefly.


 * Willow insists that she didn't finish her classes and finals using magic and she wasn't lying. She was 'on the wagon' from "Gone" until "Seeing Red" where she had to catch up on her classes and finish her finals since she couldn't have done the finals after Tara's death.