Buffy Question

I know I’ve probably missed a pertinent episode which would answer this question, but why didn’t Willow bring Tara back from the dead as she did Buffy?

Willow certainly tried, but she wasn’t allowed to. She summoned the spirit of Osiris (I believe) to help her as she did with Buffy, but the spirit said that Buffy was resurrectable only b/c she was killed by mystical means. Tara’s was a “natural” death, in the sense that gods and interdimensional holes were not involved. It was her time to go, and Willow’s magic could not undo that. Willow did NOT take that news well.

Yep. We’d known that Willow was pretty powerful, but we didn’t realize how uber-wicca she was until she made Osiris scream.

I think it was a lesser manifestation or avatar of Osiris. I mean come on if Osiris has to deal with requests to return the dead, and there are probably a lot, he isn’t going to go argue each point. Especially not with angry hyper powerful witches. Instead he sends the smokey face thing to get ragged on.

I shall endeavour not to enter Pit territory in my response.

In order to have Dark Magic Willow freak out and provide the wonderful and deeply fulfilling three episode arc that ended Season Six, there were two options.

One was to have Willow’s insecurities and issues with power, perfectionism and control, well documented through the first five seasons and played up quite nicely through to “Wrecked” lead to her becoming increasingly aware of her power and unwilling to return to being a sidekick once Buffy was (yet again) returned from the realms of the dead. Willow’s growing confidence and power could have become an arrogance based on her thinking that she was smarter than the rest of the Scoobs. When Buffy returned, she could have refused to yield her new position as “Boss of Us”, which could have meant disagreements about how to approach things and eventually resulted in a rift between her and the rest of the gang. She could have made a decision that resulted in her being contaminated by evil because as far as she could see it was the right thing to do and the only way to stop the Big Bad. Having faced down an evil thing that would have dropped Buffy like a good habit, she would have become increasingly sure that whatever she did was right just because she did it, and the rest of the crew would have had to confront her and take her down for the good of all humanity, because absolute power corrupts absolutely.

That’s one way to do it.

On the other hand, you could decide all of a sudden that magic is addictive, despite failing to mention that ever, show Spike not wearing a shirt alot, toss in some filler episodes, and then re-use a plot device that features heavily in all Chuck Norris movies from the '80’s and just whack the girlfriend and have her go nuts behind that.

It’s much better that way, especially if you can deal with the whole “addictive magic” thing by having Giles say it never happened.

To be fair, Giles didn’t say it didn’t happen. What he said was that it’s not magic that’s addictive. It’s power.

Or 2trew you can just do what I do. Shrug and say Marti Noxon is one stupid bitch and then put the last half of S6 behind you.

Actually, the even better arc would be Willow taking over the world to go good things – make people not hurt each other, vanquish demons, etc. That would lead to a very fascinating moral problem – if you’re forcing people to do good, and conquering the world to do it, are you doing good or evil? If Willow is still good underneath, but ruling the world as a dictator to accomplish this, should she be taken down?

Absolute power corrupting would have been even more cliched than what they ended up doing.

I’ve wondered about this myself. There are, after all, other ways to bring people back from the dead than screaming for Osiris. Even Dawn managed to bring something back from the dead after her mother died. And Joyce certainly died of natural means. You’d think there would have been some failed efforts on the part of Willow to bring Tara back after the initial plea to Osiris, But, as other posters have mentioned, Season Six did not have the careful and tight writing of previous seasons.

Yeah, but what Dawn brought back was implied to be more like a Pet Sematary zombie-type “thing.” I, for one, was immensely relieved that no one answered the door when zombie-Joyce knocked. Brrrrrr! Gave me the heebie-jeebies.

I agree with you, Eats_Crayons, that if Dawn hadn’t torn the picture it would have been totally Monkey’s Paw.
However, I was merely looking for the most memorable episode where people were brought back from the dead. Vampires are (in some ways) animate corpses. There was also Adam’s use of Walsh’s animate corpse, although I think that was mechanical rather than magical resurrection.
I was just surprised that Willow didn’t explore other avenues of resurrecting Tara before trying to destroy the world.

Namely, she could have wished that Warren died the day before. Then he wouldn’t be around to kill Tara or shoot Buffy. Anya was right there and I’m sure, willing to help.

They also brought back whatsername on Angel, the chick that made him a vampire originally.

Heh. Cool idea. However, as we’ve discussed before, the wishes granted by Vengeance Demons never seem to improve reality or the situation of the wisher. I’m guessing Tara would have just died by other means (or something worse) if Anya had granted a wish of that nature.

Wolfram and Hart brought back Darla as a human. Did they ever explain that little trick either?

Well, Darla died by being turned into a vampire, which sounds like a pretty supernatural way to check out to me. So bringing her back via magic works. The magic also failed to cure her syphilis, so that all sounds like its in line with the standard continuity about ressurection.

But the guys in The Zeppo didn’t die by supernatural forces, and all it took to bring them back (evidently much the same as they had been) was a little voodoo chanting, which I’m sure Willow could have managed.

Yeah, but did you see the way they came back? They were still disgusting, dead bodies. I’m sure Tara would have enjoyed walking around with a large gaping hole in her body.
Also, IIRC, the stars had to allign a certain way.