Ten years ago today, Buffy the Vampire Slayer premiered on The WB. Seven years after it began, it ended in one of the few series finales in American television ever to have actually paid off.
“It’s about power,” proclaims The First Evil in the seventh season’s premier episode. By the time the season, and the series along with it, comes to an end, Buffy proclaims to a room full of girls denied such power by long-dead men who were afraid to fight their own battles: “I say my power should be our power.”
And suddenly, the series breaks open its long-standing metaphor, of Buffy representing any girl or woman working her way to her own particular power, and shows the point of it all more blatantly and unapologetically than it ever had before.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer always was about one character saying to girls and women in her audience, “My power is your power.” Fitting, then, that in the end the series found a way, within its own mythology, to dramatize for us what that meant. To make her power their power.
(Meanwhile, during those seven years, the shows imagery of high school existing above the Hellmouth became a pop-culture reference in a post-Columbine column on “geeks, nerds, non-conformists and the alienated”. At the time — and still now, to me anyway — the very choice of making such a reference in the context of a serious attempt at listening to high school kids itself seemed a recognition that Buffy never was just another television show.)
Ten years on from its premier, Buffy the Vamptire Slayer’s legacy (and that of its creator, Joss Whedon) continues to effect television today. She’s everywhere.
Buffy matters. She always did.
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