Bring back the dragon!

David Fury mentioned in his commentary for Grave that he wanted to bring back the dragon that came out of the portal in The Gift for Buffy to fight. However, the season’s budget had been blown on Once More, With Feeling and Gone. Because CGI dragons are expensive they had to settle with Buffy fighting zombies underground.

Marti on the end of season six

Marti Noxon had the following to say about the end of season six:

Marti had a great deal of influence on this season, as Joss was away a lot of the time, and many fans who were disgruntled with season six blamed her for it’s outcome. Marti said in an interview with the BBC:

Sarah’s tattoo

When Buffy and Dawn climb out of the hole in Grave, you can briefly see a tattoo on Sarah Michelle Gellar’s left hip. It is the Chinese symbol for integrity.

Start as you mean to go on

Like the season six opening two-parter Bargaining (Part 2), the episode Grave did not have any opening credits since it followed directly after Two to Go. The teaser for Two to Go was therefore extra long. Xander announces at the start, “This is what happened this year…”
In the UK, on its first broadcast, the season finale was split into its two parts and so Grave had opening credits, which named Anthony Stewart Head as a special guest star. In it’s original state, Anthony Stewart Head (Giles) was not credited in the guest cast list because Joss wanted the viewers to be surprised to see Giles back.

Brett Wagner

Brett Wagner, who played the truck driver who picks up Jonathan and Andrew in Grave, appeared in Angel as Nadrah Prince in ‘Provider‘ and as a Bong’dar demon in ‘Salvage‘.

Steven W. Bailey

Steven W. Bailey, who played the African demon in the cave at the end of season six, plays Steve in My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiance. He has also been in Mix Tape, Chestnut Hill, Will & Grace, Becker and Nash Bridges. Steven played Ryan in the Angel episode ‘Carpe Noctem‘.

Alpert tomb

The Alpert tomb is a memorable tomb which can often be spotted when the Scoobies are wandering through Sunnydale’s graveyard. The tomb is named after Buffy producer Marc David Alpert. The tomb can be seen in Becoming (Part 1) (Angel comes out from behind it to fight Buffy when the other Scoobies are being ambushed), Revelations, The Zeppo, Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered, Killed By Death, Something Blue (when Buffy wants her wedding photos taken there), Superstar, Real Me, and Grave.

Coma Again

In the Angel season four episode ‘Orpheus‘, Willow visits LA after getting a call from Fred so that she can re-ensoul Angel. She visits Cordelia and they have the following conversation:

This is a reference to both Dark Willow from season six of Buffy, and Faith’s coma after fighting Buffy in Graduation Day (Part 2).

Dark side erupting

In The Dark Age, Xander says, “No one can be wound as straight narrow as Giles without a dark side erupting.” This can also be applied to (early) Willow in a way. She is so shy, and up-tight, but evenutally tries to end the world in the episode Grave.

Earthquakes

In Doomed an earthquake in Sunnydale signals the end of the world (again). The last time there was an earthquake was in season one’s Prophecy Girl, when the Hellmouth opened and the Master drowned Buffy. Buffy says, “the last time we had an earthquake I died” referring to the events of that episode. We discovered in season one that it was an earthquake which had trapped the Master underground in 1937, and in Pangs the Scoobies found out that an earthquake in 1812 buried the Sunnydale mission. We learn in Grave that Prosepexa’s temple was sunken into the ground in the Sunnydale earthquake of 1932.

Feeling the pain

In To Shansu In LA, Cordelia has multiple visions of people who are in pain. When Angel and Wesley rescue her, she says that she needs to help everyone. In Grave, Willow also feels everyones’ pain, through a powerful spell, but her reaction is not to help, but to destroy the world - essentially getting rid of all the pain and suffering.

Filling Giles in

In Grave, Buffy fills Giles in with the events of this season, “Xander left Anya at the altar” (Hell’s Bells), “Anya’s a vengeance demon again” (Entropy), “Dawn’s a total klepto” (Older and Far Away), “money’s been so tight that I’ve been slinging burgers at the Doublemeat Palace” (Doublemeat Palace), “And I’ve been sleeping with Spike” (Smashed onwards), “I was just some nutcase in L.A.” (Normal Again).

Magic Box

Giles opened the new Magic Box shop in No Place Like Home and took on a new member of staff - Anya. He first eyed up the prospect of opening a magic shop in Real Me, after the previous owner was found dead. Giles dressed as a wizard for the grand opening but Buffy told him, without words, how very silly he looked.
The Magic Box is located at 5124 Maple Court in downtown Sunnydale. The phone number there is 803-555-8966. Their slogan is “Your one-stop spot to shop for all your occult needs. Let us make it easy”, which Tara says in Shadow is great in a hard-to-read way.
A sign at the Magic Box warns customers that “Shoplifters will be transfigured”.
The magic box was trashed by Olaf the Troll in Triangle, but miraculously restored by the next episode, Checkpoint. It was finally destroyed completely by Willow in Grave after she consumed dark magics and fought Giles there. We see in Same Time, Same Place that the Magic Box has an “Unsafe” sign on the outside, presumably because the building was structurally damaged.

Mexico

In Grave, Jonathan and Andrew go to Mexico, which Andrew first suggested in Two To Go. We see footage of them in Mexico in Storyteller.

Rank and arrogant

In Grave, Willow mentions the argument in Flooded in which Giles called her a “rank, arrogant amateur”.

Scoffing at gravity

In Restless, Giles said in Xander’s dream that, “A Watcher scoffs at gravity.” Willow defies gravity in Grave by pinning Giles to the ceiling.

Season six timeline

From the episode Seeing Red until the end of this season’s finale Grave, all events occur within around 24 hours. According to Tara’s grave in Help, these episodes occur between May 7th and May 8th 2002.

Telepathy

Telepathy is the ability to communicate via the mind (telepathically). Buffy encountered some demons with no mouths that communicated telepathically in Earshot. She killed one and its blood infected her with its mind reading ability.
Willow’s magical power became so strong that she was able to communicate telepathically with her friends (Bargaining (Part 1), Grave, Showtime).

Willow’s jacket

In Help, Xander takes Willow to the cemetary to see Tara’s grave. While they’re there, Willow is wearing the same dark denim jacket she wore in Villians, Two To Go and Grave, after Tara died and she went evil.

Yellow crayons

In Same Time, Same Place, Xander writes his “Welcome Home, Willow” sign in yellow crayon, which is something that featured heavily in his speech to stop Willow destroying the world in Grave. Xander also refers to this speech in Same Time, Same Place and, from the looks it, has related the story to Buffy and Dawn many times.

Sarah McLachlan

The stunning song which plays as Buffy leaves Sunnydale in Becoming (Part 2) is by Sarah McLachlan and is called “Full of Grace”. It’s from her album Surfacing. The lyrics are:

Sarah’s song “The Prayer of St Francis” plays at the end of the season six finale, Grave. It appears on the bonus disc originally included with the limited edition double CD release of her ‘Surfacing’ album in 1997. The lyrics of “The Prayer of St. Francis” are:

Binding spell

Along with the handy ‘Locator spell’ the ‘Binding spell’ is one of the most commonly used plot devices spells in the Buffyverse. It is used in I Robot - You Jane (on Moloch the Corrupter), Faith, Hope and Trick (Giles pretends he needs to do one on Acathla), The Zeppo (on the hellmouth demon) and Grave (used on Evil Willow by Giles). The spell is seen in Buffy’s spin-off show Angel too. In ‘Over the Rainbow‘ Wesley has the idea of using a binding spell on himself, Angel and Gunn to get them into another dimension, Pylea, and in ‘Lineage‘, Wesley suggests that the pattern on a cyborg could be some kind of binding spell.

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore

In the episode Grave, Willow says “Willow doesn’t live here anymore”. This is probably a reference to Martin Scorsese’s movie Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974). The movie is about a recently widowed woman who decides to pursue a more glamourous lifestyle.

Dead Man Walking

In Spiral, Xander tells Spike, “Or you can be Undead Man Walking”, which is a reference to the book Dead Man Walking by Sister Helen Prejean, which was made into a film in 1995 starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn. The story centres on a nun, who befriends a convicted killer on death row. In Grave, Willow calls Jonathan and Andrew “Dead Men Walking”.

Jeeves and Wooster

Giles is called Jeeves by Buffy in The Wish, and by Willow in Grave. Jeeves was an intelligent English butler in P. G. Wodehouse’s fantastic series of Jeeves and Wooster novels.

Star Trek

There are many cast/crew links between Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the long-running cult sci-fi show Star Trek. Armin Shimerman (Principal Snyder) played Quark in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine for seven years. Dominic Keating, who played Blair in the episode Helpless, later went on to star in Star Trek: Enterprise as Lt. Reed. Jennifer Hetrick, who played the teacher Ms. Moran in Homecoming (whom Buffy asked for a reference) played the girlfriend of Jean Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Buffy writer Jane Espenson wrote an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine called ‘Accession’. Star Trek has also been referenced numerous times in Buffy the Vampire Slayer:

• In Prophecy Girl, Xander says, “Calm may work for Locutus of Borg here, but I’m freaked and I intend to stay that way.” Upset by Giles’ reserve, he is referencing Star Trek’s emotionless cyborgs from the episode ‘The Best of Both Worlds’. Locutus was the name given to Captain Pickard (Patrick Stewart) when he was captured, and ‘assimilated, by the Borg.
• In Homecoming, Cordelia woos the nerds at Sunnydale High by saying, “Are you kidding? I’ve been doing the Vulcan death grip since I was 4.”
• In Consequences, Cordy calls Wesley, “Giles the next generation” in a reference to Star Trek: The Next Generation.
• In Out of My Mind, Buffy says, “You’re like my fairy godmother and Santa Claus and Q all wrapped up into one… Q from Bond not Star Trek“.
• In The Replacement, the two Xanders say, “Kill us both Spock” - a reference to a Star Trek episode where Kirk is split two - one being good and one bad.
• In Flooded, the nerds vote with the Star Trek Vulcan salute, which is the same salute that Cordelia used to impress the ‘geeks’ in Homecoming.
• In Smashed, Spike tells the nerds, “You can play holodeck another time” - he means the virtual reality technology used in Star Trek.
• The nerds compare Buffy’s time loop in Life Serial with an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called ‘Cause and Effect’ (Andrew: “I just hope she solves it faster than Data did on the ep of TNG where the Enterprise kept blowing up.”)
• In As You Were, Buffy says. “they’re like really mean Tribbles”, referring to the popular, but quick breeding, pets on board the Starship Enterprise.
• After her visit to the nerds’ ‘lair’ in Doublemeat Palace, Willow says that they had numerous pictures of the “Vulcan women from Enterprise“. She’s referring to Jolene Blaylock, who played T’pol in UPN’s Star Trek show.
• The episode Normal Again is similar to the season five episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine called ‘Far Beyond the Stars’. In that episode, Captain Benjamin Sisko imagines that he is a science fiction writer living on 1950s Earth and writing about a station full of aliens called Deep Space Nine. He hallucinates that the people he knows in the 1950s are futuristic aliens and is thrown into an asylum.
• In Seeing Red, Andrew references Star Trek: The Next Generation when he discusses who’s boss of the nerds: “Warren’s the boss. He’s Picard, you’re Deanna Troi. Get used to the feeling, Betazoid.” In that episode, Xander realises that the nerds had love poems in their lair written in Klingon.
• In Grave, after the Magic Box has been destroyed, a William Shatner book can be seen on the floor.
• In Conversations with Dead People, we learn that Andrew learned Klingon (a language in Star Trek) from a dictionary in two and a half weeks.
• In Dirty Girls, Andrew hilariously confuses Faith’s murder of a Volcanologist with a Vulcan:
  

  Andrew: “Nobody was immune to her trail of destruction. Not friends, not family, not even the most pacifist and logical of races…”
  Amanda: “What the hell are you talking about? I thought Faith killed a volcanologist.”
  Andrew: “Silly, silly Amanda. Why would Faith kill a person who studies Vulcans?”

The Wizard of Oz

The movie The Wizard of Oz, made in 1939, in mentioned several times in Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
Buffy refers to the hyena-possessed bullies in The Pack as the “winged monkeys”. The phrase comes from the scene in The Wizard of Oz in which the Wicked Witch of the West sends her loyal winged monkeys to collect Dorothy and the ruby slippers. In Flooded, Andrew says he trained flying demon monkeys to disrupt the school play.
In Nightmares, Billy Palmer awakens from his coma and, seeing the Scoobies around his bed, says, “I had the strangest dream. And you were in it, and you”. This is a reference to when Dorothy wakes in her bed and sees her friends around her.
In What’s My Line? (Part 2), Xander says, “Welcome my little pretties”. In The Wizard of Oz, the Wicked Witch of the West called Dorothy her “pretty”.
In The Yoko Factor, Willow says, “If ever a whiz there was.” This is a line from the song in the film ‘Follow the Yellow Brick Road’ / ‘We’re Off To See the Wizard’.
The episode No Place Like Home takes it’s name from Dorothy clicking her heels together and repeating the phrase, “There’s no place like home” in order to get back to her Kansas home. A similar reference to this phrase is in the Angel episode There’s No Place Like Plrtz Glrb.
In Grave, Willow says, “Fly my pretty…fly!” when she sends her ball of fire to find Andrew and Jonathan. This is what the wicked witch says to her flying monkeys when she sends them off. In Empty Places, Rona says, “Ding, dong, the witch is dead.” This is from a song in The Wizard of Oz.
The title of the Angel episode Over the Rainbow is another reference to The Wizard of Oz, in which the land of Oz is said to be ‘over the rainbow’. In that episode, Cordelia clicks her heels three times (as Dorothy does in the film) and says, “Worth a shot.”

Seen at 01.24 minutes:

After Giles first knocks Willow down, her nose is bleeding. As the camera switches between the two of them the blood keeps disappearing and reappearing.

Seen at 25.00 minutes:

When Xander is looking down the hole where Buffy and Dawn are trapped in Grave, he slips a little and almost falls down himself. In the shot above Xander, you can see a hand grab Nick Brendon’s jeans, holding him so he can’t fall. Check out the photo for yourself.

Seen at 29.19 minutes:

You can see the cables holding up the temple, though you may need to zoom in on your DVD so see them clearly. The cables can be seen to the right of the temple.

Seen at 34.24 minutes:

When Xander is hugging Willow at the end of the episode, his knee changes position in different shots.