"Once More With Feeling" #surprisewin

As I mentioned in class, I find this episode horrifying. Yet, this response is strangely fitting given that “Once More With Feeling” is not simply a musical, but also a serious gothic representation. Tara’s line, “everything is turning out so dark,” embodies the sentiment from which my uneasiness derives. In truth, I was not expecting this episode to be fraught with so much tension and angst. When Janelle admonished us against “singing along,” I envisioned some campy silly songs about everyone smiling while people were dying. Clearly, I was wrong.

However, once I move past this visceral response and beyond the uncomfortable dearth of musical talent, I find that this episode is satisfyingly gothic because it functions like a cracked mirror through which the characters, and the viewers, can see how to deal with worldly struggles through supernatural occurrences. For example, Tara learns that she can’t function in a relationship without trust after she finds out that Willow has been casting memory spells on her. Thus, Xander’s desire to gain understanding through magical song and dance is fulfilled. However, along with this understanding, the characters also discover uncertainty and inner conflict.

The fact that the demon is not killed at the end of the episode amplifies this emotional turmoil because it shows how reality is worse than the devil himself. As Dawn so eloquently declares, “the hardest thing in this world is to live in it!” Moreover, this atypical Buffy ending also reveals the underpinnings of gothic convention because it emphasizes how the demon is merely a literary device; when the devil says, “big smiles everyone, you beat the bad guy,” he might as well sing, “look! I just subverted the heroic trajectory of the episode to show how the gothic is a self-aware mechanism that obfuscates genre clarity to highlight human dysfunction!” Therefore, the unconventionality of “Once More With Feeling” as a musical number and as a Buffy episode mimics the grey uncertainty present in actual humanity and the characters’ relationships with each other.

To my surprise, I actually think “Once More With Feeling” may be my favorite Buffy episode because it operates more like a self-sufficient gothic text than a brief chapter in a larger gothic series. Undoubtedly all Buffy episodes mix supernatural and worldly dilemmas, such as learning to live with a roommate and slaying demons, but this particular episode does this to a more pervasive and ambiguous extent.