Why is it that their is only one slayer per generation? It would work with one slayer if it was only one location that had major forces of evil drawn to it, say the hellmouth, but the series indicates that it has problems all over the world. Why isn’t the world being overrun with supernatural forces? Say some evil force decides to cast one of the spells that juuust manages to be stopped by Buffy, in some far away locale like Russia or Antarctica?
Is it that their are more than one active slayers? I’ve never heard it impicitly stated.
And I recall that when Buffy died(but came back), another slayer was sent to the hellmouth. She was around the same age as Buffy, which sorta broke the “only one slayer per generation”. Are their multiple people with slayer genes out there, where one dies and the next gains her powers, thus a “generation” of slayers has passed?
There’re going to be some huge spoilers for the show in this post, so if you’re new to it, be warned.
There’s only one Slayer at a time, anywhere in the world. However, there are other forces for good at large in the world: the Slayer is just one soldier in the war.
At any given time, there are a few dozen “potential” Slayers in the world. These are normal girls with no superpowers. When the Slayer dies, one of these girls “activates” and becomes a Slayer. The girl is always somewhere between fourteen and eighteen. The Watchers Council has some ways of recognizing potentials, and trains as many as they can against the chance of them being called, but they miss a lot of them. Buffy, for example.
Kendra was a unique case: at the end of the first season, Buffy died but was revived via CPR. However, it was enough to “count,” so Kendra became a second Slayer. Later, she died and Faith was called. After the first season, there are (for the first time ever) two Slayers active in the world.
This next part is such a large spoiler, I’m gonna put it in a box. It regards the series finale, so you don’t need to know about it to understand anything else in the show, no matter what point you jump in:
In the last show of the series, Willow uses a major spell to unlock the Slayer power in all potentials world wide, apparently regardless of age. So as of now, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Slayers worldwide.
Buffy has basically three powers: super strength and reflexes, super fast healing, and limited psychic abilities in the form of prophetic dreams.
So, is what caused Willow to cast such a spell? Also I recall an episode where Willow is told that she will eventually kill her friends(or herself, whichever I’m recalling correctly)? What was the climax with that? And their was a girl in that episode that appeared to be quite powerful, what happend to her?
What other sort of figthers for good were their, other than the watchers?
I’m still wondering about the whole “evil erupting where buffy isn’t near” thing, because they seem to have a few world affecting crises every season.
On Buffy, there’ve been an order of medieval knights (The Knights of Byzantium, who were actually opposed to Buffy for very, well, byzantine reasons), the US government funded Iniative (turned out to be run by an evil scientist, but the survivors formed an elite military unit that stopped a few South American apocalypses), a very loose confederation of internet Wiccas who post lots of arcane information to the internet, a couple different black ops teams put together by the Watcher’s Council, the vigilante son of a dead Slayer, and the spirit of a 1940s private detective trapped in a ventriloquist’s dummy. Also, there’s a certain vampire with a soul who keeps an eye on Los Angeles. There are even more good guys on his show. (Angel: The Series, in case you don’t know what I’m talking about)
Also, because of the Hellmouth, Buffy gets more than her fair share of apocalypses. However, Sunnydale didn’t have the only Hellmouth: there’s also one in Cleaveland. I tend to assume that the one in Sunnydale was unusually active, though.
I’m not going to bother with spoiler boxes if you don’t care about getting spoiled. It’s your thread. Other readers should take warning, though.
I’m not sure which episode you mean. There was one this season, where Willow was visited by the spirit of a psychic girl who has died a few episodes previously. However, it wasn’t really her spirit, but a manifestation of The First Evil, who could take the form of anyone who had died. The entire encounted was just The First trying to mindfuck Willow. Earlier, Willow got into similar arguments with her girlfriend, Tara (another witch), during the unfortunate “magic as drug addiction” storyline, which ended with Willow freaking out and trying to destroy the world after Tara was killed. Basically, they dropped that whole idea after that season because, well, because the last season sucked in general and continuity went right out the window. Willow cast the spell to awaken all Slayers everywhere because Buffy was facing an army of ubervampires with only a bunch of whiny potential Slayers as back up, and they needed the power boost to save the world. Again.
In order for there to be a legitimate market for questions like this, and good questions they are, there has to be a writing staff that give a damn and pay attention to their own product, and an executive producer who doesn’t get easily distracted and just assume that he’s God and anything he does is automatically right, no matter how stupid it might be. You’re barking up the wrong tree here.
/me dismounts and removes tarnished armour, drops broken lance, and limps into the distance cursing the names of everyone involved in the last two seasons.
Aslan2, that is the episode that Miller was talking about. If you’re not extremely familiar with the show, it might not make a ton of sense. But that episode was called Conversations with Dead People. There was the demon thing in the house with Dawn, and her Mom was there too at some point, telling Dawn that Buffy would not choose her. The psychic girl (actually the First Evil/Big Bad in disguise) visited Willow in the school library and tried to convince her to give up magic because it knew that she would use it to be helpful eventually. And that scene was supposed to have Amber Benson as the First Evil pretending to be Tara, but Amber was unavailable so they had to make due with that other chick. Also that night, Buffy talked to a vampire that was a guy she knew in high school. It was a good episode in an otherwise middling season.
If you like comic books, go pick up back issues (there are 7 so far and the 8th should be out soon) of Fray. It’s the story of a slayer a few hundred years in the future. It’s written by Joss Wheadon, creator of Buffy, and it’s quite good. In it, Melaka Fray is the only slayer (I’m guessing all the ones Willow called have died by then). It explains a few things about this One Slayer deal.
Aslan2. The name of the episode is Conversations with ‘Dead People’ and first aired during fall of this last season. If you do a search on my username and some words from the title, you’ll find the long thread that goes into what actually happened there, or att least what we regular Buffy-posters thunk.
Taken out of context, it might not make much sense. But it was one of two or three stellar episodes during the final season.
