Buffy Normal Again Finale Fan Theory

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Epitomize/BuffyTheVampireSlayerS6E17NormalAgain

"I know you're afraid. I know the world feels like a hard identify, sometimes. But you lot've got people who dearest you. Your dad and I, we take all the faith in the world in yous. Nosotros'll always be with yous. You have got a world of forcefulness in your heart. I know you practise. You just have to find it again. Believe in yourself."

—Joyce Summers

"For the last six years, she's been in an undifferentiated type of schizophrenia."

Directed past Rick Rosenthal

Written by Diego Gutierrez, Rebecca Kirshner, & Steven South De Knight

Buffy searches newly rented houses for the Trio'south hideout. The iii discover her on surveillance equipment but she gets too close. While they hibernate in the basement, Andrew calls on a demon which attacks Buffy and starts a fight. The demon grabs Buffy and stabs her with a needle-like part of its trunk.

In a mental hospital, Buffy cries out as she's held by ii orderlies and stabbed with a needle. Outside the Trio's house, Buffy wakes up confused and lone and walks domicile.

Willow prepares to talk to Tara but sees her give her female friend a quick kiss; Willow leaves, wounded. Tara notices her get out but it's too belatedly to grab her. At the Doublemeat Palace, Buffy works like a zombie whilst having brief flashes to the hospital where the dr. tells her information technology's time for the drugs. Willow and Buffy talk nearly Xander's disappearing act and Willow's endeavor to talk to Tara. Xander surprises the girls by showing up at the business firm. He wonders about Anya and how to rebuild his relationship with her. The girls tell him that Anya left boondocks a few days ago and that everything will be fine in time.

Buffy runs into Spike at the cemetery and they talk about the events at the wedding that didn't happen. A confrontation begins between Spike and Xander and as Willow tries to break it up, Buffy becomes weak and collapses. Xander manages a one punch to Spike who focuses on Buffy. At the mental hospital, a physician tells Buffy that she'due south been hallucincating for the past vi years and everything she knows near Sunnydale is fake. She's shaken and confused, particularly when both of her parents walk in before Buffy falls back into Sunnydale earth.

Willow and Xander get Buffy home and she tells them about the mental hospital and what the doctor said. While Willow organises a programme to research, Buffy returns to the infirmary where the doctor explains to her parents that she's been catatonic from schizophernia for the past six years and her life every bit a Slayer has been elaborately created.

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• Developed Fear: Losing your child to madness.
• All Just a Dream: It's suggested that the entire serial is Buffy's hallucination and she's living in a mental institution and has power fantasies of saving the earth with her imaginary friends. The catastrophe leaves room for interpretation as to which being (Buffy'due south life as a vampire slayer, or her life as a mental patient) is really All Simply a Dream. Joss Whedon has outright stated that either ane is a definite possibility.
• Alternating Reality Episode: Buffy, nether the effects of a demon'due south venom, flashes between the normal Buffyverse, and an alternate universe where she had spent the last seven years catatonic in an insane aviary in Los Angeles, where they have been trying to care for her for her insane delusions about fighting vampires. The episode makes no endeavour whatever to clarify which, if either, of Buffy's perceived realities are the real thing.
• Ambiguous Situation: Buffy is injected with a poisonous substance that makes her hallucinate... or is information technology the other manner around? According to a psychiatrist, who may or may not exist a real person, she is in fact getting meliorate — she has been sick all along, and now she'due south finally waking up from years of catatonic schizophrenia. So, the whole series is either This Is Reality or a mad All Just a Dream with a dash of The Schizophrenia Conspiracy. In the end, Buffy chooses her life in Sunnydale over her life in the mental institution, but the ending leaves information technology ambiguous whether or not the world she settled for is the existent one. Word of God doesn't help, either — executive producer and author Marti Noxon says the mental ward was a hallucination, but Joss Whedon has said that either interpretation is simply as legitimate as the other.
• And You lot Were There: Buffy imagines her managing director at the Doublemeat Palace is a dr. in the mental infirmary.

  Female person Physician: Come on, information technology's time for your drugs.
  [Flash back to the Double Meat Palace.]
  Buffy: (confused) What?
  Lorraine: I said, if I didn't know any meliorate, I'd think you were on drugs.
  Buffy: (dislocated) Okay. Good.

• Anywhere but Their Lips: Willow is working herself upward to inquire ex-girlfriend Tara out for coffee and lesbian love when she sees her greet-and-kiss another daughter. From her viewpoint it'due south difficult to run into how intimate the kiss was, merely she runs off anyway.
• Badass Decay (In-Universe)

  Spike: It might explain some things, this all existence just in that brain of hers. Yeah, whips up some chip in my head, brand me soft, fall in love with her. Then, turn me into her soddin' Sex Slave.

• Basement-Dweller: The Trio, though this time information technology'southward because they're hiding from Buffy in an empty house.
• Bond One-Liner:

  Xander: I altered his reality!

• Bound and Duct-Taped: Willow and Dawn become this from a crazed Buffy.
• Break Them past Talking: Spike delivers this lecture to Buffy. Becomes a "Nice Job Breaking It, Anti-Hero" moment when it causes Buffy to pour away her antidote.
• Continuity Nod: Buffy looks at a family unit photograph of her parents with herself every bit a child — the same child actress used in Season 5'southward "The Weight of the World."
• Cuckoo Nest: A perfect instance. The episode ends leaving open up the possibility that the entire series was in fact the hallucination of an insane Buffy Summers.
  • Notably, instead of Buffy being encouraged to kill herself, she was encouraged to impale all her friends, and came very shut to doing so. They got over it astonishingly quickly, though. Stuff similar that happens in Sunnydale.
  • The description of the episode on the DVD case suggests that information technology was an alternate reality in which they really are hallucinations, just they're perfectly existent in their reality. Word of Joss, even so, seems to suggest that he finds it perfectly acceptable if fans conclude that the entire series was the fevered dream of a schizophrenic Buffy.
• Cutting Back to Reality: Several times during the episode, there's a cutting between Buffy'south hallucination and reality — but which cuts are that and which are the other style effectually are left to the audience to decide.
• Description Cut: Willow says that Xander has assistance finding the demon; cut to Xander and Fasten stalking through the woods. The doctor's clarification of this years Large Bad as "simply three pathetic little men who like playing with toys" to the Trio in their lair.
• Despair Speech:

  Buffy: (very quietly) I feel so lost.

  Willow: I know. Yous're confused. It's, it's that crazy juice inside you.

  Buffy: It's more than that. (Willow frowning) Even before the demon ... I've been and then detached.

  Willow: We've ... all been kind of slumming.

  Buffy: Every 24-hour interval I effort to ... snap out of it. Figure out why I'thousand like that.

• Discreet Beverage Disposal: Willow asks Spike to make certain Buffy drinks the mug of yummy antitoxin goodness, just Spike gets into an statement with Buffy and leaves, giving her a chance to pour information technology abroad.
• Downer Ending: Depends on which reality the viewer interprets to be real. In the Sunnydale universe, Buffy overcomes her delusions and saves her friends. Buffy in the aviary, however, goes into permanent catatonia, to the devastation of her parents.
• Dramatically Missing the Signal: Buffy tells Spike, "You're non function of my globe" considering vampires aren't existent. Bold she's referring to him no longer being her boyfriend, Spike goes off on a rant instead of ensuring Buffy takes her medicine.
• Easily Forgiven: Buffy nigh kills her friends and little sister considering the doctor in her (possible) hallucination says she needs to become rid of them to go back to normal. She changes her listen at the last 2d, kills the demon she was about to feed them to, and begs their forgiveness. They requite it almost immediately.
• Teaching Through Pyrotechnics: Willow mentions that her previous attempts at making the antidote "went nail twice" before she got it right.
• Elseworlds: If you believe the theory that the mental ward was really a Parallel Universe.
• The Catastrophe Changes Everything: The Trio tries to convince Buffy that her life every bit a vampire slayer is delusional, and she is actually a patient in a mental hospital. The episode ends on Buffy in the Mental Institution going catatonic. (Joss Whedon claimed this episode was ambiguous, and the show snaps back in the next episode.)
• Foreshadowing: For "Entropy" — Spike threatens to tell the Scoobies nearly their affair if Buffy doesn't do and then.
• Frying Pan of Doom: Buffy hits Xander with one, and then drags him to the basement where he and Willow and Dawn can be eaten by the Monster of the Calendar week.
• Group Hug: Xander gets a hug threesome when he returns home.
• Hell-Bent for Leather: Buffy changes into the Black Leather Jacket Of Ass-Kicking while searching for the Trio, simply not the Ruby Leather Pants of Decease — she'south not quite her old cocky still.
• Homoerotic Subtext:
  • The Belligerent Sexual Tension between Xander and Spike is lampshaded in a Deleted Scene where James Marsters gives Nicholas Brendon a mock osculation right after calling him a "pathetic poof" in their graveyard fight.
  • Buffy is once again fed up with work.

  Buffy: I could wrestle naked in grease for a living and still be cleaner than subsequently a shift at the Doublemeat.

• A Firm Divided: The Trio are starting to fray.
• I Simply Want to Be Normal: Office of the reason Buffy well-nigh chooses the other reality (if that'southward what it is); she'd get back to being a normal girl with no demons to fight, no trauma, and parents that are neither absent-minded nor dead.
• "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight: Dawn tries this, merely Buffy is too far gone by that stage.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Plenty of this.

  Doctor: Buffy, you used to create these k villains to boxing against, and at present what is it? Merely ordinary students you went to high school with. No gods or monsters ... merely three pathetic little men who like playing with toys.

• "Leave Your Quest" Test: Buffy gets poisoned by a demon, and of a sudden finds herself in a mental establishment, with her worried parents (both alive and together) hoping that she might come out of her prolonged psychosis. She's told that being a Slayer and everything that's been involved (including all her friends) was merely a prolonged hallucination, and all she has to exercise to come dorsum to reality is let go of it...by killing her friends in the hallucination. In the end, she decided to be an unhappy hero who MIGHT exist in a hallucination, versus being a happy person of no upshot in what also might be a hallucination.
• Lotus-Eater Machine: Played With. Ordinarily, finding oneself in a mental institution is not anyone's idea of "paradise" — just it might likewise be, in contrast to what all Buffy had to contend with at that point in the serial. Dawn even accuses Buffy of non caring about her — when it's revealed that Buffy'due south parents are withal together and alive, simply Dawn doesn't exist. To be certain, the institution seems like a decent enough place — admitting with the doctors beingness a flake amoral and unprofessional (They practically encourage Buffy to kill her friends).
• Maybe Magic, Perchance Mundane: For well-nigh of the episode, it seems as if the mental institution is a hallucination brought on past the demon'due south venom...until the concluding scene, where institutionalized Buffy lapses into permanent catatonia. It's ambiguous whether or not Sunnydale or the mental hospital are the real world, and Joss Whedon deliberately designed the episode and then that it could be ane or the other.
• Heed Screw: Buffy is poisoned by a hallucinogen-producing demon and is torn betwixt two realities: existence a Slayer and being an insane girl in an asylum, with parents who honey her and are trying to make her sane over again with the aid of a psychiatrist. But then, when the episode ends, information technology does so with an paradigm of Buffy in her normal-crazy-girl reality, not as Slayer Girl, leaving y'all with the impression that the entire bear witness, including the later seasons, are all a product of an insane daughter's overactive imagination unless you comport in listen that Buffy hasn't taken the antidote yet as of the final scene and this moment could just represent her choosing not to respond to the hallucinations. Joss Whedon said he considers the series to be actually happening, but put that in just for fun, and if people desire they can consider the whole series to be the delusions of Buffy. Which would also brand the entire Angel series function of that hallucination, too.
• The Nicknamer: Xander calls Spike "Willie Wannabite", and Buffy "Sane Girl" — correct before she clonks him with a frying pan.
• No Mere Windmill: Buffy reveals that her parents had her sent to a mental clinic for two weeks afterward she first told them nigh seeing vampires.
• OOC Is Serious Business: When Anya doesn't open The Magic Box for a long time after Xander left her, he is genuinely scared.
• Or Was Information technology a Dream?: Since the last thing nosotros see is the insane asylum where Buffy had spent much of the episode "hallucinating" that she was a patient, accompanied by a doctor pronouncing that she'southward lapsed dorsum into catatonia, it's left to the viewer whether the previous vi seasons were real, or a psychotic hallucination. Bear in mind, yet, that Buffy has yet not yet taken the antidote as of this last scene. And that no existent-life psychiatrist would recollect it was a good idea to encourage a mental patient to kill their imaginary friends. Joss Whedon personally believes that the events of the serial are existent.
• Out-of-Genre Feel: The scene where Psycho!Buffy stalks her sister through their abode is reminiscent of a Slasher Movie.
• Person as Verb: Jonathan says he's "going Jack Torrence" cooped upwards in the basement.
• Psycho Psychologist: A competent therapist in real life would most certainly not encourage a patient to kill their imaginary friends, which serves every bit a big indication that the asylum reality is a hallucination caused past the demon's venom.
• Retcon: Buffy is revealed to have been briefly institutionalized when she first learned about vampires, which makes Joyce'southward Weirdness Censor in the outset couple of seasons rather implausible. The common fan caption is that this is role of the timeline that was contradistinct by Dawn's creation. Some other possibility is that it's but a side consequence of the demon's venom, since it's never referenced once more later this episode and Dawn never confirmed in the story. The non-canon (just canonically plausible) comic interquels that cover the time between The Moving picture and Season one evidence she really was institutionalized.
• Rousing Voice communication: Joyce gives one to Buffy, that ironically has the contrary effect of what she intended. The fact that her Sunnydale being is then full of emotional traumas and issues for her and her friends, compared to the aviary where she has no Slayer responsibilities, Joyce is notwithstanding alive and her parents are even so together, convinces Buffy that Sunnydale must be the existent world and she needs to summon the forcefulness to face information technology once again.
• Proverb Likewise Much: Spike vents nigh how his Badass Decay led to Buffy using him as a sex toy. Fortunately Xander thinks it's just some stupid Fasten fantasy. Betwixt this and what he walked in on in "Gone", Xander may be in denial.
• Schrödinger's Butterfly: Is Buffy the Slayer dreaming she's insane? Is she insane dreaming she'due south the Slayer? Are both truthful? GOD DAMN Yous JOSS.
• Shout-Out: When the Trio are planning a heist Andrew says, "I nevertheless call up we need eight more guys" and Warren replies, "I should never accept let you see that movie."
• Shout-Out to Shakespeare: Xander quotes Marker Antony'southward eulogy in Julius Caesar.
• Smash Cut: From the demon injecting Buffy to Buffy being injected in the mental hospital.
• Staircase Tumble: Tara'southward Large Damn Heroes moment is stopped by Buffy tripping her up from below the staircase.
• Summon Magic: How Andrew summons the demon — by playing some kind of big flute.
• Surrogate Soliloquy: Willow rehearsing asking Tara out.

  Willow: "Hullo, Tara. Would y'all similar to become out with me for coffee, nutrient, kisses and gay beloved?"

• Teens Are Short: Buffy notes that she should be taller than her 'piddling' sis.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Fasten and Xander capturing the demon.
• Testosterone Poisoning: Fasten and Xander work out their frustrations over their recent relationship cock-ups on each other.
• That Came Out Incorrect:

  Buffy: Some kind of gross, waxy demon-thing poked me.

  Xander: And when you say poke...

  Buffy: In the arm.

• G-K Stare

  Buffy: (vacantly) I'thou okay, Dawn.
  Dawn: The, uh, thousand-yard stare really helps sell that.

• Through the Eyes of Madness: A demon stabs Buffy with a weapon that is a function of it. Said weapon is also poisonous and causes vivid hallucination. Buffy believes she is in an asylum being treated for her delusion that she is the Slayer. Afterward 6 years of watching the show, we the audience automatically assume that the Sunnydale scenes are real and the aviary scenes are delusion until the final reveal, which has one final "hallucination" that she'south gone catatonic to cast doubt in the viewer's mind.
• Tranquillizer Dart: The anti-Oz rifle makes a reappearance. Instant Sedation is averted — the Glarghk Guhl Kashma'nik demon takes several darts, plus Xander and Fasten bashing away at it, earlier information technology's subdued.
• Twisted Echo Cut

  Willow: Dawnie, you can aid me research. We'll hop on-line, cheque all the—

  [Smash Cut to Buffy in the asylum. A doctor is talking to Buffy's parents.]

  Doc: —possibilities for a full recovery, but nosotros have to proceed cautiously.

• The Unpronounceable

  Fasten: Oh, balls! You didn't say the thing was a Glarghk Guhl Kashma'nik.

  Xander: That's 'cause I can't say Glarma— (demon hits him).

• Written-In Absence: Xander asks if anyone has seen Anya at the commencement of the episode. The others reply she took off afterwards the wedding.

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Source: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Recap/BuffyTheVampireSlayerS6E17NormalAgain

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