Mother Claire's Sermons

  At the end of the fifth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer , Buffy sacrifices herself in place of her sister. Buffy jumps from a tower, causing a portal to another dimension to close, and while her sister lives, she dies. Notably, that episode is not called “The Sacrifice”, it’s called “The Gift”. But in the beginning of the next season, Buffy’s friends decide to magic her back to life. They go to her grave and do a spell and, when nothing visibly happens, they assume they’ve failed and leave. But they haven’t failed, they just didn’t dig her up, and Buffy, with her superhuman strength, digs her own way out. But Buffy wasn’t resurrected. She was simply resuscitated; forced back into her old body and thrown back into the fight. And through the following episodes, Buffy tries to figure out why she feels so wrong, so off, so empty. And finally, in the best musical episode in all of television, Buffy is forced to honestly sing her discovery to her friends. She sings: “there was no pain /