The Body resides up there with Hush and Once More With Feeling in the Buffy canon but it's an entirely different episode. Where the other two episodes rely on a kind of gimmick to tell a story, The Body is deeply rooted in reality. Maybe that's the gimmick for a show about demons and vampires? I guess that can be argued but it does a fantastic job at presenting us with the many states of grief and the many ways in which we grieve. I always think that when my father dies, who I am very close to, I will lose it and go bat shit crazy. Like I'll jump in with the coffin crazy. That's just how I see it in my head but I may not behave like a wild animal. I may just go quiet and numb or start saying stupid and inappropriate things. You don't know until it happens, I guess.
The most significant death in my life happened 10 years ago when a very close family friend was killed by a drunk driver while he rode to a friend's house on his bike. And when I read about Whedon's ideas behind The Body, I just think about how very true it is. He didn't want to do an episode where someone dies and the ones left living become stronger or learn some warm and fuzzy life lesson that pay's off by the end of the episode. We've seen that kind of trite crap all through television and movies. Entertainment teaches that when people die, we're all supposed to find some kind of value in it. Or even worse, as in my own experience, a murder will be avenged or justice found and all is right in the world. I don't even know what happened to the drunk driver that killed our friend and there was no ghost bike left at his death site to teach other cyclists or drivers a lesson in safety. He died and I had to see him as a badly painted corpse whose bruises and scrapes still peeked through the funeral parlor tricks. And you know what my stupid thought was? I wondered if his severed leg was in the casket with him. Yes, that is what I thought about even weeks after the viewing. I never said it out loud though. That would be too Anya of me.
Whedon gave us an episode about death that is relatable. I'm sure any one of us can think about the grief, the funeral, or those moments when you found out your loved one passed and you can find yourself somewhere in The Body. The quiet of the episode and the tight camera shots add to the heightened state of awareness and grief. The viewer's attention is focused on the characters and nothing else. We are forced to deal with Joyce's death and we're not allowed to escape that reality. Death happens. There is no rhyme or reason and even the strongest of us, like a vampire slayer, can't do anything. Buffy is completely and utterly powerless. There is no demon she can slay or trinket she can save to restore the good in the world again. This is it. She came home and her mother was dead. She passed peacefully, is what the paramedic tells Buffy, but death is never peaceful for the living.
Within the serialized story, Joyce's death is also important because Buffy has to grow up. She is Dawn's sole guardian now and that makes it all the more important to watch for her sister and defeat Glory. Yes, there's the entire world at stake but even more important to Buffy is that Dawn is the only living link to normalcy and family left. She has to care for Dawn as if she were her own daughter and that means she is even prepared to give up her own life to save Dawn's. As we see at the beginning of season 6, Buffy's death is so much harder for her friends to deal with than it was for Buffy to give up. Sometimes I think that I want to die before anyone close to me dies because grief is ineffably agonizing that maybe dying is the easy part.
Buffy's own death a few episodes later wasn't treated with the same kind of honesty and reverence as Joyce's death. And I think that makes The Body a much stronger episode because while Buffy's sacrifice can be read as heroic and fantastic within the supernatural world of the series, Joyce's death is mundane in the sense that death happens every day all around us. It's not some plot in a TV show that can be fixed. It is just a fact of life and I just have to admire Joss so much for being gutsy enough to try this out on a TV show on the freaking WB of all places.
The Body is Buffy's own Hamlet and surely cements the series in the hall of fame of great television.
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