For Dawn, Giles and Xander
There are three things I should have written already, and I couldn’t, because there was no site to write them on.
Michelle Trachtenberg died on February 26, 2025. She was 39. Nicholas Brendon died this past March. He was 54. Anthony Stewart Head died in June. He was 72. Hellmouth Central was sitting in its grave for all three of them, and of everything that went unsaid here in the dark years, those are the ones that bother me. So before we get back to arguing about episode rankings, this comes first.
Michelle
Fandom was hard on Dawn back then, and this site got its share of jokes in. “Dawn’s in trouble, must be Tuesday.” You know the ones.
She hits different now. I watch those seasons as an adult with a kid of my own, and I don’t see the annoying little sister anymore. I see a scared girl. She wants a family. She wants to belong somewhere. Then she finds out that her whole life was written in by some monks, that her memories aren’t hers, and that a god wants to bleed her to end the world. She didn’t ask for any of it and she sure didn’t deserve it. Of course she screams and slams doors and steals things. She’s fourteen and the ground keeps disappearing under her. What I used to hear as whining, I hear now as a kid asking the same question over and over: am I real, and are you going to keep me?
That’s what Michelle was playing the whole time. She was fourteen herself, dropped into the fifth year of a show with one of the most protective fan bases on television, and told to make us believe in a sister who had never existed before. And she did. By the time we got to “The Body,” nobody was asking where Dawn came from. Watch her in that art class hallway when Buffy tells her. You can’t hear a word of it and you don’t need to. As a parent, that scene is about all I can take.
She had a whole career on both sides of Sunnydale, too. She was Nona on Pete & Pete and she was Harriet the Spy before most of us had ever heard of a Hellmouth. After Buffy came EuroTrip, Ice Princess, and then Georgina Sparks on Gossip Girl, where she got to be the one causing the trouble for once and looked like she was having the time of her life doing it.
Thirty-nine is not an age. It’s not right and I’m not going to pretend there’s a lesson in it.
Tony
Rupert Giles was the grown-up. In a show where every other adult was clueless, evil, or about to be eaten, he was the one who showed up. He read the books, he cleaned his glasses, and he stayed. When I listed my favorite episodes on my staff page twenty-some years ago, “Once More, with Feeling” was the first thing out of my mouth, and you can’t tell me “Standing” isn’t a big piece of why. A man singing to a girl who can’t hear him about why he has to leave her. Come on.
And then there’s the end of “The Gift.” Everybody remembers the tower. I remember Giles kneeling next to Ben, calm as anything, explaining that Buffy is a hero and that she is not like us. Then he does the thing she couldn’t do, so she never has to. That’s the whole character in two minutes.
Our own people got to see him at the Oakland SlayerCon in 2004, and Kirsten’s notes from his Q&A are still here in the archive. Fiat asked him about that scene with Ben. He said he loved doing it, and that he loved that nothing in the Buffyverse ever happened without repercussions. He also told the room that his first thought on hearing the show was doing a musical was, and I quote, “Fuckin’ hell, we’re doing a musical.” That’s the guy. A proper actor who never once acted like he was too good for a vampire show, or for a ballroom full of us.
He was Frank N. Furter on the London stage and the coffee guy in those commercials before Giles. After, he was Uther on Merlin and then Rupert Mannion on Ted Lasso, the most hateable man on television, played by somebody that nobody who met him ever had a bad word about. His family said he went peacefully, with them around him. He lost his partner of more than forty years, Sarah, only months before. I hope that’s all I need to say about that.
Nick
Buffy had a Slayer, a witch, a Watcher, a vampire with a soul and eventually a vampire with a chip. And then it had Xander. No powers, no prophecy, no destiny. Just a guy from a bad house with a big mouth and a habit of showing up.
He was us. That was the whole job. Every time the show needed somebody to say what we were all thinking, it was Xander saying it, usually as a joke, and usually about a second before something tried to eat him. He was the joke and the punch line, and every so often the guy who took the hit for both. Put an ordinary guy in a room full of the extraordinary and he’s supposed to fade into the wallpaper. Nick never did. Plenty of shows have a funny best friend. They didn’t have him.
“The Zeppo” is the one. The gang is off fighting the apocalypse in the next room and we barely see it, because the show decided the real story was Xander, alone in a school basement with a bomb, saving everybody while nobody was watching. He never tells them. He doesn’t need to. When Kirsten heard him list his favorite episodes in 2004, it was “Hush,” “Once More, with Feeling,” and “The Zeppo.” Of course it was.
Then there’s “Grave.” Willow is about to end the world and everybody with powers has already lost. So the guy with no powers walks up to her with a story about a yellow crayon and just keeps telling her he loves her until she can’t fight it anymore. He saves the world by refusing to leave. If you want to know what that show thought a hero was, it’s right there.
He told that same room the hardest scene he ever shot was Xander’s father coming down the stairs in “Restless,” because it was too close to his own childhood. Knowing that, go back and watch how much light he put into a kid from that house. And when our people met him at the Nashville Vulkon, he told the crowd his mom was his favorite love scene partner because he’s from Kentucky, and asked a couple of our crew if they were raised on Wheaties. The quotes are still here. Some guys are funny on camera. He was funny everywhere.
He had a hard road after the show, and a lot of it happened in public. His family said he’d been sick for a while. I’m not going to pretend it didn’t happen, and I’m not going to let it be the last word either. The last word, as far as this site is concerned, is a guy with no powers standing in front of the end of the world because his friend needed him to.
What we’ve got left
I wrote something on this site back in 2004, the week Angel ended. I said these shows taught us that some things are worth fighting for, and that there are people out there who show up for you even when they don’t have to. I was a lot younger and probably taking a TV show too seriously. I’m a lot older now and I still think I was right.
Dawn was the thing worth fighting for. A kid who needed somebody to say she belonged, and a sister who said it with her life. Giles was the one who showed up. Xander was the guy with no powers who stood there anyway. The people who played them are gone, and the rest of us are still here quoting them.
My daughter was two and a half when I wrote that piece, asking where Spike was at every commercial break. She’s grown now. The shows are still here, every episode of them, and so is this site, again, somehow. So go watch “The Body,” and then go watch “Once More, with Feeling” so you can stand to be around people afterward.
The hardest thing in this world is to live in it. They all did. Thanks, Michelle. Thanks, Tony. Thanks, Nick.