The worst season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is undeniably season 6. That’s not even up for debate. The nerds from high school are suddenly the main villains? Really? Not even mega-evil witch Willow in the finale can redeem that narrative choice.
And yet season 6 also features some of the best one-off Buffy episodes: the musical episode “Once More With Feeling,” Xander’s wedding, and “Normal Again,” arguably the scariest entry in a show with plenty of spooky moments.
In “Normal Again,” the nerd trio (Adam Busch, Danny Strong, and Tom Lenk) attempt to take Buffy down by enlisting a demon that infects her with a hallucinogenic poison, causing her to snap back and forth between the show’s reality and a twisted fantasy where she’s actually been in a psychiatric facility for years. In this world, Buffy’s mom is still alive, and her parents never divorced. Her life as the Slayer is a delusion, and the doctor says the only way to break free is to remove anything anchoring her to that world — by killing all her friends.
This premise alone makes “Normal Again” one of the scarier Buffy episodes, on par with the Emmy-winning “Hush.” But it’s Sarah Michelle Gellar as Buffy herself who really sells it. Usually the bubbly, wisecracking center of the show, Buffy becomes increasingly despondent and inward as the fantasy takes over. When she briefly becomes the villain, using her Slayer strength to overpower her friends, the series suddenly transforms into an entirely different type of horror movie, a twisted reflection of the series’ irrepressible heroine, and the story about friendship and adversity that fans had come to love.
Gellar’s dark turn as an actor is matched by “Normal Again”’s razor-sharp script. As the hallucinated doctor explains the flaws in her reality (like the little sister conjured out of pure energy a season earlier) it’s easy to wonder whether Buffy really could just be delusional. Maybe her entire life is just the fantasy of a very sick young woman. That sense of lingering doubt — reinforced by the episode’s disturbing final shot of a comatose Buffy in the hospital, with her mother weeping beside her — is the scariest thing of all.
Where to watch: Buffy the Vampire Slayer is streaming on Hulu.
Polygon’s annual Halloween Countdown is a 31-day run of short recommendations of the best horror movies, shows, TV episodes, and online specials to stream for the Halloween season. You can find the entire calendar here.
