Trivia
Previously on Buffy: It's been traditional for most episodes of Buffy to recap key plot moments that will be explored further in the current story.
To celebrate Buffy's 100th episode, however, Joss Whedon and his editor took this to the extreme and compiled a sequence comprising of at least one clip from each of the previous 99 instalments. Why not send your video recorder to an early grave by freeze-framing your way through all of them?
Hammer Time: We told you that troll hammer was important, didn't we? And what about that Dagon Sphere too?
Feeling fairly safe: Joss Whedon gave us his thoughts on this historic episode:
"The Gift was our 100th episode and just a monster shoot and had to be big. We had to kill Buffy.
"[As for Sarah's reaction to Buffy's death], they just sort of take the scripts, they go "Gulp" and learn the words. I did tell her somewhat beforehand , so she wasn’t like "Huh", but she had a 7 year contract, she knew she wasn’t going anywhere and she’d died once already, so I think she felt fairly safe."
Joss talks about The Gift on video.
High times: Buffy line producer Gareth Davies revealed that Glory's tower nearly became a hazard to Los Angeles traffic:
"We found a company which had what looked like a huge oil derrick in its front yard... The Art Department went down and covered this thing with the rubbish and stuff that [the crazies] were building this out of and then we had a platform at the end of it. [Dawn] has to be marooned on a diving board which comes right from the top of this thing, but we were down on the ground and we had to shoot up and so we made a model [of Dawn].
She had a long skirt on, and when we put it up there, we put it up there days before we had to shoot it. It sat up there for days and of course, when you’re on the ground and you just happen to look up, you see a plank with this girl marooned on the end of it. Because the wind was blowing her dress, she looked like, not only was she up there, [but] she was moving!
We called the local Vernon police department, who were quite casual about the whole thing and said "Look, if you get complaints about a lady…"
Also, we were concerned about traffic, [drivers] suddenly being distracted by seeing that thing up there, but they were quite casual about it. They said "Okay, fine, fine, fine" and they never told us they had any complaints or anything, but when I went out there, and was miles away, I looked up and I saw this poor woman up there billowing in the breeze and thought "We are so lucky it hasn’t caused accidents or something".
Find out more Buffy production secrets from Gareth in our recent Interview.
I'm not dead yet: Joss teased fans at the Nocturnal N3K Buffy convention by claiming that he'd planned to kill Anya during The Gift's climactic battle. The only reason she survived was that Emma Caulfiled kept moving in all the footage he shot of Nicholas Brendon holding her at the end!
Grave matters: The inscription on Buffy's grave stone reads:
"Buffy Anne Summers
1981 - 2001
Beloved Sister
Devoted Friend
She saved the world
A lot"
When you eventually come to season six, however, you might wonder why the Scoobies made such an obvious show of the Slayer's death.
