“And Every Single Verse Can Make It That Much Worse”: Private Anxiety and Singing Through Depression in “Once More, With Feeling”

Almost every Buffy fan, if asked, would probably say that “Once More, With Feeling” is their favorite episode of the show. There are a lot of reasons for that. More than any other episode, it feels like a film. It’s a huge production for a television show. Even for as risky a show as Buffy had been, it’s astonishing to see it take huge risks into the sixth season and this absolutely outdid anything they’d done before in terms of breaking the standard TV format. It’s amazing that it even happened. It probably shouldn’t have happened. Huge, central players, Sarah Michelle Gellar in particular, were not professional singers by any stretch. The episode does the unthinkable, though, by playing to people’s particular strengths in a way that felt completely organic, so that certain characters have songs because those actors happened to be talented singers, yet you can’t imagine the episode without those songs or the spotlight given to certain characters.

It sounds obvious to say that “Once More With Feeling” is the best TV musical of all time, but it shouldn’t. TV musical episodes have been around forever. The history of them spans decades and while some of them certainly aren’t terrible, a very large chunk of them are. Such a huge portion of them are just throwaway gags, often with the characters singing well known songs rather than anything written specifically for the show. As problematic (to say the least) a figure as series creator Joss Whedon has proven to be, “Once More, With Feeling” was a personal passion project for him, which is something that can’t be ignored and is something that every fan needs to grapple with. Even still, the beauty of this episode is largely that it showcases everyone’s strengths. Whedon had noted in interviews that he had wanted to do a musical episode basically since the show began, but it was so much work that it took him years to finally do the prep work to put it together. And honestly, thank God for that. Because I think there are a lot of reasons why the musical happened exactly when it needed to and why it could not have existed in any other season.

Before getting into that, though, we have to look at the function of musical storytelling in the first place, because there are some things that make them unique. What are things that musicals do differently and why do certain things translate to musicals better than others? Part of that always comes down to talent and creativity, granted. Some requirements are obvious, namely the ensemble cast. More than anything, though, musicals are about expressing personal struggles and desires and fears, things that Buffy naturally had no shortage of at any point. But musicals stand out in that these things are almost always bottled up. It works in the same way that fourth wall breaking narration can, to some degree, with the main character expressing something to the audience that they cannot express to the other characters, even those that are often in the scene with them. It defies traditional narrative and is a very stylistically fluid form of storytelling.

Buffy could not have come out of the gate with a musical because those characters identities were still being established. By the time things headed into the second, third, fourth and fifth seasons, there were absolutely some extremely poignant points of conflict among the characters, but they were often expressed with one another, even the things that were by and large private. There was nowhere in there that felt like the perfect spot for a musical, but these are exactly the reasons why “Once More With Feeling” needed to happen in season six. In this season, every single character is hiding something from the people around them, everyone has a deeply private and personal conflict that they are trying — and often failing — to handle on their own. And it’s all stuff that they absolutely do not want the others to know about.

It could almost have worked in season four, because that season was also about characters hiding a lot of their own personal fears and insecurities from one another. But the fears of that season were so small in comparison — largely stemming from whether they would stay friends through college — that it’s hard to imagine if it would work. Plus, the basic goal of “Once More With Feeling,” namely forcing people to communicate with one another when they feel like they can’t, was expertly expressed twice in season four with “Fear Itself” and “Hush.” That season had its own way of dealing with these things. In season six, though, the conflicts are huge. Buffy doesn’t want to tell her friends that they pulled her out of Heaven when they think they pulled her out of Hell. She is trying so hard to be in the moment and force a smile and hope that they think she’s just distracted when she is actually depressed.

Depression is a huge theme for both this episode and the season as a whole. Even though she had expressed some of this to Spike, this is where the other characters learn what Buffy is going through, despite the fact that telling them is the last thing on the planet that she wants to do. Buffy would do anything to keep her friends from finding out that she is struggling to hang on through every single second of every single day, because she is the one they turn to to help them get through things. She’s their true north, she’s their compass, their leader, and she always has been. Bringing her back and having her deal with this really examines the selfishness of resurrection and the notion of bringing someone back into the world just because you, personally, cannot live without them. The whole episode so perfectly comments on the traditional musical structure because everyone is singing their heart out and it’s all information that they do not want anyone else to know. Which also makes “Once More With Feeling” the most important episode of the season, because it’s the one that puts all the cards down on the table and gets the ball rolling for the direction that the rest of the year would take.

Buffy’s pain — or, really, her numbness to the world around her — is definitely the focal point of the episode. If there’s a singular focus, it’s that. She is trying so hard to put on a classic “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” face, almost adopting her “standard self” if there is such a thing, as a persona. She’s wearing a mask of herself and it’s slipping away little by little until it all comes pouring out on stage in front of her friends. It all starts right there in the opening song, though. “Going Through the Motions” is largely about Buffy singing about doing just that, while expressing that she’d obviously much rather feel anything else, but she can’t and she doesn’t know how to get to that place. That’s also part of the gut punch of the episode. Just in terms of traditional story structure, right there in the beginning we’re establishing “What does Buffy want?” And what she wants is to feel like her old self, to feel normal, and it’s all completely intangible stuff. So by the time we hit the end of the episode and everyone feels so much worse, it’s absolutely devastating.

While Buffy’s depression is definitely the central focus, every single character has something they’re singing through that they don’t want anyone else to know about. Some stuff is stuff they don’t want to admit or express, period. With other characters, it’s stuff they’re not ready to say, and that’s almost as brutal because they’re robbed of finding the right moment. One of the best happy accidents going into “Once More With Feeling” is Alyson Hannigan’s inability to sing, seriously, because it gave Amber Benson so much to do. Tara had a tendency to get sidelined through seasons four and five and while season six was generally better for her (until the end, naturally) that all mostly starts right here.

It makes so much sense for Tara to sing as much as she does in “Once More With Feeling,” because she’s the quiet one in the room all the time. Partially because she feels like she doesn’t belong, partially because of her stutter, partially because she’s just more introverted than the other characters by nature. With the way this musical works, expressing those inner thoughts in show-stopping fashion, it’s so logical that Tara would be such a force in a way she didn’t always get to be. But like everything else in the episode, it’s bittersweet. After all, Tara’s heartwarming “Under Your Spell,” a Disney-esque declaration of her love for Willow, is so sweet but hindered by the fact that she literally is under Willow’s spell following an argument that Willow erased from her memory. The whole song is about how great their relationship is because she had the knowledge that it isn’t so great plucked directly out of her brain. This leads to her duet with Giles, even though neither of them is singing to the other, about her decision to leave Willow while Giles sings about how he’s going to tell Buffy that he is permanently returning to England.

Both of these characters are hiding something, but it’s something they want to keep to themselves so that they can tell everyone at the right moment, but now someone else in the group knows about it, so that need to hold onto this until they can say it properly is robbed somewhat. Both of them also follow through on their plans (to leave Willow and the United States, respectively) in the very next episode. It’s not that either Giles or Tara wouldn’t trust the other to keep their secret, but once something is said or sung rather than thought, it’s out there now, no matter who hears it. So it’s up to them to follow through and as the two most mature characters on the show, easily, they do.

Xander and Anya are another pair that deal with all of this differently from the rest of the group. Their fears are largely the same, but they don’t know that, because they aren’t communicating. Through the early episodes of the season, Xander didn’t want to announce their engagement because it didn’t feel like the right time. Even in this episode, everyone else has only just found out. Both of them have a wealth of bottled up anxiety over getting married and unlike the others, their duet is a shared argument while also being a sweet way to calm the other and let them know that things are going to be fine. Even though, as we eventually see when we get to the wedding, they clearly aren’t.

Spike, yet again, deals with things in a different and very Spike way. Prescient as always, he tries to hurry Buffy out the door when she comes to talk to him because he knows full well that he’s going to sing and that it is going to be embarrassing. So he wants her out of there as quickly as possible and it doesn’t go his way. What’s really interesting about “Rest in Peace,” though, is that Spike is for the most part saying stuff that Buffy already knows and he still doesn’t want her to hear any of it. She’s known that he is in love with her for awhile at this point. But Spike always puts up a bit of a persona, a little bit confrontational and a lot sarcastic. It’s something he definitely leans into in his interactions with other characters, and the song strips him of his ability to do that, so that everything he’s singing to Buffy is completely genuine and from the heart. Which of course is not at all what he wants her to hear.

That’s the beauty of “Once More With Feeling,” in essence. It’s devastating for every character and yet it’s a different kind of devastation for each of them individually. Everyone is affected and more or less heartbroken by the end of the episode, but no two of them are processing it in exactly the same way. Even in Buffy, where victories can often be losses, the villain is almost always defeated at the end of the episode. But that doesn’t happen with Sweet. The only victory, which certainly isn’t small, is that he doesn’t take Dawn to the underworld to be his child bride. Still, Sweet is alive and kicking at the end, free to go off and do this again, even if his amulet is destroyed. It’s important, I think, for this musical to have no clean victories, given how heavy it is. Part of the brilliance of it is that it even is so fun, because everything that happens in it tears the heart out of nearly every single character. But that’s why it’s one of if not the best episode of the show. It’s heart-wrenching in the wittiest, most fun, bombastic way possible. It’s a heartache that feels like a ride, a show, a kick in the teeth I’ll always buy a ticket for. More than anything, though, it is an emotionally honest way to deal with things that people don’t often deal with. It centers on fears and anxieties and things like depression that so many people feel, but that they don’t always see reflected honestly on TV. And if it manages to do that through singing and dancing, all the better.