An era has ended. Buffy was a great show. It was clever and it was a master of metaphor. Sure it was funny, with humor that was spot-on and always fresh but the show was so much more than that. It was not a show about fighting monsters or preventing the apocalypse so much as it was a show about growing up and having to struggle just to keep on going. It was about finding inner strength and perseverance.
Besides being spun-off into its own comic series and Joss Whedon writing a few issues of both the Buffy comic as well as creating the mini-series Fray, a series about a Slayer in the future, the television series owed a lot to comics in a roundabout way. Buffy was a Spider-Man figure type of figure, strong and agile with a strong sense of duty and obligation. And no one could deny the comparisons between Angel and Batman, both are dark and broody with pathos to spare. Not these characters were carbon copies, they were just tapping into the same sort of archetypes of heroes. That was the true brillaince of the show. It was archetypical but it rarely lost it's human side (I can't say it never did, but it kept it real more often than not).
The show also did something that is ballsy in this television age of sitcom and perpertuity where the same thing seems to happen week after week. It aged and matured. Both the characters and the story matter got deeper as the show continued. It pushed the envelope of what could be done in a science-fiction/fantasy show. With its demise, the genre loses another of its greats, such as Star Trek: The Next Generation and the X-Files.
Bye Buffy. You'll be sorely missed.
I can think of no better way to end this article than with her own epithet: Buffy Anne Summers. "She saved the world. A lot."
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