The Body

"The Body" is the sixteenth episode of the fifth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and is the ninety-fourth episode altogether. It was directed and written by series creator Joss Whedon. It originally broadcast on February 27th, 2001.

Synopsis
Buffy is shocked to find her mother dead after returning home, and has to learn how to cope with her loved one's death.

Summary
The episode opens with a rollback to the end of "I Was Made to Love You". Buffy returns home after a talk with Xander, and finds her mother sprawled across the couch, paled-skin, with opened eyes, and not breathing. Buffy calls out for her and flashes back to Christmas 2000, where Buffy, Xander, Willow, Anya, Tara, Dawn, Giles, and Joyce are having Christmas dinner in the Summers' home. Joyce and Buffy finds the pie had burnt, and just as Joyce curses the oven, we return to present day time.

Buffy quickly calls for the ambulance. The 911 operator asks her to perform CPR, while awaiting the arrival of the medical team. Buffy tries to do so, to no success, and tearfully claims, "she's cold". Buffy then hangs up and calmly calls Giles, asking him to come to her home. The paramedics soon arrive and attempts to resuscitate Joyce, but fails to do so. Joyce is then officially pronounced dead. Giles soon arrives and finds the deceased Joyce on the floor. Just as he approaches her, Buffy cries out, "We're not supposed to move the body!", and breaks down in horror after realizing what she had just said. As Joyce's body is placed in a body bag, the story moves to Dawn in her high school, where she is sobbing in the toilet because a student named Kevin Berman had called a freak, an outcome of the "misconceptions" spread by a girl named Kirstie. Her friend, Lisa, consoles her, rather poorly so, before they leave the toilet, headed for art class. Dawn awkwardly takes a seat next to Kevin. They talk, as her art teacher instructs them to draw the negative space around a statue.

Just then, Buffy arrives and leads Dawn outside her class, to tell her about Joyce's demise. Although the conversation remains muted, as we see the event from her friends' point of views, it is clear that Dawn incredulously breaks down crying, in front of Buffy, in front of Kirstie, in front of Kevin. The story now relocates to UC Sunnydale, where Willow and Tara stayed sorrowfully in their dorm room, while awaiting for Xander. Willow can't decide which clothes to wear to the hospital, while Tara tries staying calm and steady. Xander and Anya soon arrives, and Willow subsequently asks Tara to look for her blue shirt, which Joyce had really liked. When Tara leaves, a confused Anya asks the room if they're "going to cut the body open". Willow angrily tells her that it is not okay to ask such things, which prompts Anya to go to pieces, telling them that she doesn't understand the whole mortal coil.

The room goes silent, and Xander punches his fist through a hole frustratingly. He is soon freed, and Tara arrives, failing to find the blue shirt (which was found earlier by Anya under the cushions of a chair and placed in the drawers). After tending to Xander's wounds, the group leaves for the hospital. The Scooby gang meets up at the hospital, where Joyce's autopsy has just concluded. While waiting for Giles to sign the release forms, Xander, Anya and Willow go on a panicked food shopping spree. Dawn heads off to the lavatories, leaving Buffy and Tara to sit in awkward silence in the waiting room. Tara then reveals that her own mother had died when she was seventeen, and shares some helpful words for Buffy. In the meantime, Dawn finishes with the toilet, and decides to see her mother for the last time.

She heads into the morgue, and locks the door behind her. As she approaches Joyce's covered body, a vampire rises behind her, staring menacingly. Buffy finds something amiss and set out for the morgue, where she meets Dawn struggling with the eager vampire. A fight ensues, and Buffy manages to decapitate him with a surgical saw. Yet, the cloth concealing Joyce's soulless body was pulled down in the violent mix-up, and the two remaining Summers women stares woefully at the body which once houses their mother. Just as Dawn reaches toward the body's cheek, the screen smashes to black, and the episode concludes.

Quotes and trivia

 * Anya: "I don't understand. I don't understand how this all happens. How we go through this. I mean I knew her, and then she's, there's just a body, and I don't understand why she can't just get back in it and not be dead anymore. It's stupid. It's mortal and stupid, and, and Xander crying and not talking, and I was having fruit punch and I thought, well, Joyce will never have any more fruit punch, ever. And she'll never have eggs, or yawn, or brush her hair, not ever and no one will explain to me why."


 * Buffy: "We're not supposed to move the body!"


 * : Dawn:Um, guys, hello, puberty? Sort of figured out the whole no-Santa thing.
 * Anya: That's a myth.
 * Dawn: Yeah.
 * Anya: No, I mean, it's a myth *that* it's a myth. There is a Santa Claus.
 * Xander: The advantage of having a thousand-year-old girlfriend. Inside scoop.
 * Tara: There's a Santa Claus?
 * Anya: Mm-hmm. Been around since, like, the 1500s. He wasn't always called Santa... but you know, Christmas night, flying, coming down the chimney, all true."
 * Dawn: "All true?"
 * Anya: "Well he doesn't traditionally bring presents so much as you know, disembowel children, but otherwise...."
 * Tara: "The reindeer part was nice.


 * Willow's line "Strong like an Amazon?" refers to the song "Amazons" by Phranc, the "all-American Jewish lesbian folksinger" and record-holding Tupperware Lady. Willow is quoting the line of the chorus. Whedon reveals this in the DVD commentary, but insists he didn't choose this song because of Willow's, Tara's and Phranc's sexual orientation. This is odd, since Phranc's success has mostly been with her gay audience. It makes sense that Willow and Tara would know this song, but it would make sense mostly because they're lesbians.


 * Xander says, "We do morgue time with the Scooby Gang", referring to their visits to the morgue in the episodes "Never Kill a Boy on the First Date" and "Beauty and the Beasts".


 * "As long as you two stay away from the band candy." Buffy is obviously referring to events in the episode "Band Candy", in which enchanted candies cause Sunnydale adults to act like teenagers.


 * Tara mentions her mother's death. We first found out that her mother was dead in "Family".


 * This is the only episode, after he becomes a regular in Season Four, in which James Marsters does not appear.


 * Kristine Sutherland has said in interviews that Joss Whedon told her at the end of season three that her character would die in season five.


 * Joyce Summers' and Cassie Newton's ("Help") are the only deaths in the show's huge body-count that are due to natural causes.


 * There was no "Previously on Buffy" recap at the beginning of this episode. However, the entire teaser is lifted from the final scene of the previous episode.


 * Willow's dorm room is number 213. She shared a dorm with Buffy last year which was number 214, so this is probably next door or across the hall or in another dorm.


 * The 911 Operator asks Buffy if she is “alone in the house”. Sarah Michelle Gellar appeared in Scream 2, in which she was asked the exact same question by the killer on the phone.


 * It is said that if you have a dream of an open grave, while it is raining, someone you know will die within a year. Faith awoke from a dream such as this almost exactly in "This Year's Girl".


 * Although Alyson Hannigan and Amber Benson are heterosexual, they apparently filmed Willow and Tara's first on-screen kiss a few more takes than was strictly necessary. Benson recalls, "We must have kissed a hundred times. It was very nice."


 * Alyson Hannigan was allergic to the plaster dust from the scene when Xander punches his hand through the wall. Her right eye and face swelled up during the filming of that scene and she had to be taken to hospital. As a result, only her left eye was seen in the episode.


 * This episode features on diegetic sound (sound whose source is visible on the screen or whose source is implied to be present by the action of the film -- doors closing, footsteps, etc.). That makes it somewhat the opposite of the season four episode "Hush" in which there are few spoken words and more music. Joss Whedon explained that music comforts the audience, and he wanted this episode to be touching and horrifying at the same time.


 * Joss Whedon has said that in this episode, Kristine Sutherland blinked a couple of times when in the body bag. Those blinks were taken out using CGI.


 * According to Joss's DVD commentarry he wishes that he had included Joyce in the scene at the table, and not have her separated from the Scoobies in the kitchen.


 * Willow is portrayed as obsessing over what to wear to meet Buffy in the hospital; according to Whedon, this was based on his friend's funeral, where he was frantically obsessed with finding a proper tie.


 * According to Joss Whedon's DVD commentary, the episode begins with the flashback of the gang's Christmas dinner because Joss didn't want the cast and crew credits to appear over the main scene of Buffy finding her mom.


 * Joss wanted Willow and Tara's kiss to be natural, and not to be the main focus of the episode so he included it in this episode. This said kiss also brings an end to the WB's apparent policy about contact between same-sex partners.


 * Emma Caulfield was asked what emotions she was feeling when she filmed her monologue on why she doesn't understand death in Willow's dorm room, and admitted that they had been filming all day without a break and the only thing she was thinking was that she really had to pee.


 * The image we see on Dawn's canvas when she leaves the room is completely different than the image we see when the camera does the close up of it at the end of the scene.


 * Paramedics in the state of California are not allowed to pronounce death. Joyce would have been taken to the hospital where it is likely she would have been pronounced DOA. Also, once paramedics begin CPR, it is usually not allowed to be stopped until someone with a higher degree of medical training takes over.


 * When Dawn enters the morgue to look at Joyce's body, she is wearing canvas tennis shoes, yet the sound effect of footsteps is dubbed in, making it sound like she's wearing hard-soled shoes. Her tennis shoes wouldn't make any noise except maybe a squeak. It is possible that Joss included the sound of footsteps to further emphasize the episode's silence.


 * Xander says, "The The Avengers gotta get with the assembling". The Avengers are a Marvel Comics group of superheroes, whose catch-phrase is "Avengers Assemble!"


 * The name of the odd-looking toy that Anya holds as she sits down at Willow's dorm room is Kogepan, a Japanese character of whom Joss Whedon and his wife, Kai Cole, are big fans.


 * The side-effects of the brain surgery which removed Joyce's tumor in "Shadow", "Listening to Fear", and "Into the Woods" are seen here.


 * The Christmas flashback scene shown right after the opening credits would logically take place sometime between "Into the Woods" and "Checkpoint".


 * When Xander blindly accuses Glory for Joyce's death, he mentions the threat Glory had made about killing Buffy's family and friends in "Checkpoint".


 * Dawn has a hard time at school, after her supposedly attempted suicide in "Blood Ties" has ignited a fuel of rumors that spread across the school.


 * This episode picks up a few moments before "I Was Made to Love You" left off.


 * When Buffy finds her mother dead, she says, "Mom? Mom? Mommy?" Dawn repeats this phrase in "Conversations with Dead People" when she thinks Joyce is trying to communicate with her. In the same episode, when Cassie's ghost appears to Willow at the library, she mentions that Willow is strong like an Amazon, referring to Tara and Willow's exchange in this episode.


 * Sarah Michelle Gellar, Alyson Hannigan, and Tom Lenk cite this episode as their favorite, or at least one of their favorites. In a Season 7 featurette, series creator Joss Whedon lists this episode as his fourth favorite episode in the featurette The Last Sundown, which is included in the Season 7 DVD. Likewise, in a featurette featured in the Chosen DVD Collection bonus disc, many stars and makers of the TV show lists this is as one of their favorite Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes.

Slayer Stats

 * Buffy slays one vampire.

Additional Info

 * To read the full transcript of The Body, click here.
 * To read the final, shooting script of The Body, click here.
 * To watch the promotional trailer of The Body, click here.
 * To view screen captures of The Body, click here or here.