Buffy Normal Again Finale Fan Theory

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

"I know y'all're agape. I know the earth feels like a hard place, sometimes. Only you lot've got people who honey you. Your dad and I, we have all the faith in the world in you. We'll e'er be with you. You accept got a globe of strength in your heart. I know you lot do. You just accept to find information technology again. Believe in yourself."

—Joyce Summers

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

Directed by Rick Rosenthal

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

Buffy searches newly rented houses for the Trio's hideout. The three discover her on surveillance equipment just she gets likewise close. While they hide 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 function of its body.

In a mental hospital, Buffy cries out as she's held past 2 orderlies and stabbed with a needle. Outside the Trio'due south house, Buffy wakes up confused and alone and walks home.

Willow prepares to talk to Tara merely sees her give her female friend a quick buss; Willow leaves, wounded. Tara notices her leave just information technology's besides tardily to catch her. At the Doublemeat Palace, Buffy works like a zombie whilst having brief flashes to the hospital where the medico tells her it's time for the drugs. Willow and Buffy talk about Xander's disappearing deed and Willow's attempt to talk to Tara. Xander surprises the girls by showing up at the house. He wonders about Anya and how to rebuild his relationship with her. The girls tell him that Anya left town a few days ago and that everything will exist fine in time.

Buffy runs into Fasten at the cemetery and they talk near the events at the wedding that didn't happen. A confrontation begins betwixt Fasten and Xander and every bit 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 doctor tells Buffy that she'south been hallucincating for the past 6 years and everything she knows about Sunnydale is fake. She's shaken and confused, especially when both of her parents walk in earlier Buffy falls dorsum into Sunnydale world.

Willow and Xander get Buffy home and she tells them almost the mental hospital and what the doctor said. While Willow organises a plan to research, Buffy returns to the hospital where the doctor explains to her parents that she's been catatonic from schizophernia for the past half-dozen years and her life as a Slayer has been elaborately created.

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• All Just a Dream: It'due south suggested that the entire series is Buffy'due south hallucination and she's living in a mental establishment and has power fantasies of saving the earth with her imaginary friends. The ending leaves room for interpretation every bit to which being (Buffy'due south life as a vampire slayer, or her life as a mental patient) is really All Just a Dream. Joss Whedon has outright stated that either 1 is a definite possibility.
• Alternate Reality Episode: Buffy, under the effects of a demon's 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 treat her for her insane delusions about fighting vampires. The episode makes no attempt whatsoever to analyze which, if either, of Buffy'due south perceived realities are the real thing.
• Cryptic State of affairs: Buffy is injected with a poisonous substance that makes her hallucinate... or is it the other way effectually? According to a psychiatrist, who may or may not exist a real person, she is in fact getting ameliorate — she has been sick all along, and at present she'south finally waking up from years of catatonic schizophrenia. So, the whole series is either This Is Reality or a mad All Only a Dream with a dash of The Schizophrenia Conspiracy. In the finish, Buffy chooses her life in Sunnydale over her life in the mental institution, but the ending leaves information technology ambiguous whether or not the globe she settled for is the real ane. Word of God doesn't help, either — executive producer and writer Marti Noxon says the mental ward was a hallucination, merely Joss Whedon has said that either estimation is simply equally legitimate every bit the other.
• And Y'all Were There: Buffy imagines her director at the Doublemeat Palace is a dr. in the mental hospital.

  Female Doctor: Come up on, it's fourth dimension for your drugs.
  [Flash back to the Double Meat Palace.]
  Buffy: (confused) What?
  Lorraine: I said, if I didn't know whatsoever better, I'd call back you were on drugs.
  Buffy: (confused) Okay. Good.

• Anywhere but Their Lips: Willow is working herself up to enquire ex-girlfriend Tara out for java and lesbian dear when she sees her greet-and-kiss some other daughter. From her viewpoint information technology's difficult to run across how intimate the kiss was, just she runs off anyway.
• Badass Decay (In-Universe)

  Spike: It might explicate some things, this all being just in that encephalon of hers. Yeah, whips up some chip in my head, brand me soft, fall in love with her. And so, turn me into her soddin' Sexual practice Slave.

• Basement-Dweller: The Trio, though this time it'south because they're hiding from Buffy in an empty house.
• Bail One-Liner:

  Xander: I altered his reality!

• Bound and Duct-Taped: Willow and Dawn get this from a crazed Buffy.
• Intermission Them by Talking: Fasten delivers this lecture to Buffy. Becomes a "Overnice Job Breaking It, Anti-Hero" moment when information technology causes Buffy to pour abroad her antitoxin.
• Continuity Nod: Buffy looks at a family photo of her parents with herself as a child — the same child extra used in Season v's "The Weight of the World."
• Cuckoo Nest: A perfect example. The episode ends leaving open the possibility that the unabridged series was in fact the hallucination of an insane Buffy Summers.
  • Notably, instead of Buffy existence encouraged to kill herself, she was encouraged to kill all her friends, and came very shut to doing so. They got over information technology astonishingly quickly, though. Stuff like that happens in Sunnydale.
  • The clarification of the episode on the DVD case suggests that information technology was an alternating reality in which they really are hallucinations, but they're perfectly real in their reality. Give-and-take of Joss, however, seems to suggest that he finds information technology 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'southward a cutting between Buffy's hallucination and reality — but which cuts are that and which are the other way effectually are left to the audience to determine.
• Description Cut: Willow says that Xander has aid finding the demon; cut to Xander and Spike stalking through the woods. The doc'due south description of this years Big Bad equally "just three pathetic piffling men who like playing with toys" to the Trio in their lair.
• Despair Speech:

  Buffy: (very quietly) I experience so lost.

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

  Buffy: Information technology's more than that. (Willow frowning) Even before the demon ... I've been so discrete.

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

  Buffy: Every twenty-four hour period I try to ... snap out of it. Figure out why I'thousand like that.

• Unimposing Drink Disposal: Willow asks Spike to make sure Buffy drinks the mug of yummy antitoxin goodness, only Spike gets into an argument with Buffy and leaves, giving her a take a chance to pour it away.
• Downer Catastrophe: 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 asylum, however, goes into permanent catatonia, to the devastation of her parents.
• Dramatically Missing the Point: Buffy tells Spike, "You're not part of my earth" because vampires aren't real. Assuming she's referring to him no longer existence her beau, Spike goes off on a bluster instead of ensuring Buffy takes her medicine.
• Hands Forgiven: Buffy nearly kills her friends and trivial sister because the medico in her (possible) hallucination says she needs to get rid of them to go dorsum to normal. She changes her mind at the concluding second, kills the demon she was most to feed them to, and begs their forgiveness. They give it almost immediately.
• Education Through Pyrotechnics: Willow mentions that her previous attempts at making the antidote "went blast twice" before she got it correct.
• Elseworlds: If you believe the theory that the mental ward was actually a Parallel Universe.
• The Ending Changes Everything: The Trio tries to convince Buffy that her life as a vampire slayer is delusional, and she is really a patient in a mental hospital. The episode ends on Buffy in the Mental Institution going catatonic. (Joss Whedon claimed this episode was cryptic, and the bear witness snaps back in the next episode.)
• Foreshadowing: For "Entropy" — Spike threatens to tell the Scoobies about their matter if Buffy doesn't do so.
• Frying Pan of Doom: Buffy hits Xander with one, then drags him to the basement where he and Willow and Dawn can be eaten past the Monster of the Week.
• Group Hug: Xander gets a hug threesome when he returns home.
• Hell-Aptitude for Leather: Buffy changes into the Black Leather Jacket Of Ass-Kicking while searching for the Trio, but not the Red Leather Pants of Death — she'south not quite her erstwhile self yet.
• Homoerotic Subtext:
  • The Belligerent Sexual Tension betwixt Xander and Fasten is lampshaded in a Deleted Scene where James Marsters gives Nicholas Brendon a mock buss right after calling him a "pathetic poof" in their graveyard fight.
  • Buffy is one time once again fed up with work.

  Buffy: I could wrestle naked in grease for a living and withal exist cleaner than after a shift at the Doublemeat.

• A Firm Divided: The Trio are starting to fray.
• I Just Want to Be Normal: Part of the reason Buffy about chooses the other reality (if that's what information technology is); she'd go back to beingness a normal girl with no demons to fight, no trauma, and parents that are neither absent nor expressionless.
• "I Know Yous're in There Somewhere" Fight: Dawn tries this, but Buffy is too far gone by that stage.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Plenty of this.

  Doctor: Buffy, you used to create these grand villains to boxing against, and now what is it? Only ordinary students you went to loftier school with. No gods or monsters ... just 3 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 institution, with her worried parents (both alive and together) hoping that she might come out of her prolonged psychosis. She'southward told that being a Slayer and everything that'southward been involved (including all her friends) was only a prolonged hallucination, and all she has to practise to come back to reality is let become of it...by killing her friends in the hallucination. In the end, she decided to be an unhappy hero who MIGHT be in a hallucination, versus being a happy person of no consequence 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 equally well be, in dissimilarity to what all Buffy had to argue with at that betoken in the series. Dawn even accuses Buffy of not caring about her — when information technology's revealed that Buffy's parents are still together and alive, but Dawn doesn't be. To be sure, the institution seems like a decent enough place — albeit with the doctors being a chip amoral and unprofessional (They practically encourage Buffy to kill her friends).
• Maybe Magic, Perchance Mundane: For most of the episode, information technology seems equally if the mental institution is a hallucination brought on by the demon'south venom...until the final scene, where institutionalized Buffy lapses into permanent catatonia. It's cryptic whether or not Sunnydale or the mental hospital are the real world, and Joss Whedon deliberately designed the episode so that it could exist one or the other.
• Heed Screw: Buffy is poisoned by a hallucinogen-producing demon and is torn betwixt two realities: being a Slayer and being an insane daughter in an asylum, with parents who love her and are trying to make her sane again with the assist of a psychiatrist. Just then, when the episode ends, information technology does so with an epitome of Buffy in her normal-crazy-daughter reality, not equally Slayer Girl, leaving you with the impression that the entire show, including the later seasons, are all a production of an insane daughter's overactive imagination unless you lot bear in listen that Buffy hasn't taken the antitoxin yet as of the terminal scene and this moment could just represent her choosing not to respond to the hallucinations. Joss Whedon said he considers the series to exist actually happening, but put that in merely for fun, and if people want they can consider the whole series to be the delusions of Buffy. Which would likewise make the unabridged Angel series part of that hallucination, too.
• The Nicknamer: Xander calls Spike "Willie Wannabite", and Buffy "Sane Girl" — right before she clonks him with a frying pan.
• No Mere Windmill: Buffy reveals that her parents had her sent to a mental dispensary for two weeks after she kickoff told them nigh seeing vampires.
• OOC Is Serious Business: When Anya doesn't open The Magic Box for a long fourth dimension after Xander left her, he is genuinely scared.
• Or Was It a Dream?: Since the final thing we 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's lapsed back into catatonia, it's left to the viewer whether the previous 6 seasons were existent, or a psychotic hallucination. Bear in heed, all the same, that Buffy has still not yet taken the antidote as of this concluding scene. And that no real-life psychiatrist would think it was a skillful idea to encourage a mental patient to kill their imaginary friends. Joss Whedon personally believes that the events of the series are real.
• Out-of-Genre Feel: The scene where Psycho!Buffy stalks her sister through their domicile is reminiscent of a Slasher Moving picture.
• Person as Verb: Jonathan says he's "going Jack Torrence" cooped up in the basement.
• Psycho Psychologist: A competent therapist in existent life would near certainly non encourage a patient to impale their imaginary friends, which serves as a large indication that the asylum reality is a hallucination caused by the demon's venom.
• Retcon: Buffy is revealed to take been briefly institutionalized when she start learned virtually vampires, which makes Joyce'due south Weirdness Censor in the first couple of seasons rather implausible. The mutual fan explanation is that this is part of the timeline that was altered by Dawn's cosmos. Some other possibility is that information technology'southward merely a side effect of the demon's venom, since it's never referenced again afterwards this episode and Dawn never confirmed in the story. The non-canon (but canonically plausible) comic interquels that cover the time betwixt The Movie and Season one evidence she actually was institutionalized.
• Rousing Voice communication: Joyce gives ane to Buffy, that ironically has the opposite effect of what she intended. The fact that her Sunnydale existence is so full of emotional traumas and problems for her and her friends, compared to the asylum where she has no Slayer responsibilities, Joyce is yet alive and her parents are however together, convinces Buffy that Sunnydale must be the existent earth and she needs to summon the strength to face it again.
• Saying Too Much: Spike vents near how his Badass Decay led to Buffy using him equally a sexual practice toy. Fortunately Xander thinks it's just some stupid Spike fantasy. Betwixt this and what he walked in on in "Gone", Xander may be in denial.
• Schrödinger'southward Butterfly: Is Buffy the Slayer dreaming she'southward insane? Is she insane dreaming she's the Slayer? Are both true? GOD DAMN Yous JOSS.
• Shout-Out: When the Trio are planning a heist Andrew says, "I still think nosotros need eight more guys" and Warren replies, "I should never have let you see that movie."
• Shout-Out to Shakespeare: Xander quotes Mark Antony's eulogy in Julius Caesar.
• Boom Cut: From the demon injecting Buffy to Buffy being injected in the mental hospital.
• Staircase Tumble: Tara's Big Damn Heroes moment is stopped by Buffy tripping her upward from beneath the staircase.
• Summon Magic: How Andrew summons the demon — by playing some kind of large flute.
• Surrogate Soliloquy: Willow rehearsing asking Tara out.

  Willow: "How-do-you-do, Tara. Would yous like to go out with me for coffee, food, kisses and gay love?"

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

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

  Xander: And when y'all say poke...

  Buffy: In the arm.

• Thousand-Yard Stare

  Buffy: (vacantly) I'm 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 part of it. Said weapon is too poisonous and causes vivid hallucination. Buffy believes she is in an asylum being treated for her mirage that she is the Slayer. Subsequently 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 i final "hallucination" that she's gone catatonic to bandage doubt in the viewer's mind.
• Tranquillizer Sprint: The anti-Oz rifle makes a reappearance. Instant Sedation is averted — the Glarghk Guhl Kashma'nik demon takes several darts, plus Xander and Spike bashing abroad at it, before it's subdued.
• Twisted Echo Cutting

  Willow: Dawnie, you can help me research. Nosotros'll hop on-line, bank check all the—

  [Smash Cut to Buffy in the aviary. A dr. is talking to Buffy's parents.]

  Physician: —possibilities for a total recovery, only we have to proceed cautiously.

• The Unpronounceable

  Spike: 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 starting time of the episode. The others reply she took off after the wedding.

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

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