In Nightmares, Willow says, “Why is she so Evita-like?” Evita was the nickname of María Eva Duarte de Peron (1919-1952), an Argentinean actress who married political leader Juan Peron. She gained a massive political following as an outspoken champion of women and the poor. Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote a musical …

The unrehearsed opera in Willow’s dream in Nightmares is a duet from Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. Willow plays Cio-Cio-San.

In Nightmares, the Master says, “A dream is a wish your heart makes.” This is a line from Disney’s 1950 movie Cinderella.

In Nightmares, Buffy has a nightmare of being buried and crawling out of her grave, which actually happens to her in season six’s Bargaining.

Buffy’s nightmare that the Master attacks and kills her in Nightmares is a foreshadowing of their meeting in Prophecy Girl when he, er, attacks and kills her.

We see in Nightmares that Willow has a Nerf Herder bumper sticker on her locker door. Nerf Herder wrote and performed the Buffy theme tune. Alyson Hannigan is a big fan of the band and was the person who persuaded Joss Whedon to get them to write the theme.

Giles, we discover in Nightmares, can speak five languages - on a “normal day”.

In The Puppet Show, Xander says “Does anybody else feel like they’ve been Keyser Söze’d?” This is a reference to the movie The Usual Suspects where the main character Kevin Spacey tells a story to the police to make them feel sorry for him and divert attention away from him …

In The Puppet Show, Sid the Dummy reveals to Buffy that he previously worked with a Korean Slayer in the 1930s.

Sid was a ventriloquist’s dummy which was possessed since the 1940s by the soul of a demon hunter. His aim was to kill all of the Brotherhood of Seven to allow his soul to finally come to rest. He killed Marc, who turned out to be a demon, and his …

In The Puppet Show, Buffy says, “OK, everyone look at me like I’m in a bunny suit ‘cos I feel so stupid saying this”. In season four’s Fear, Itself, Anya wears a bunny suit to a Halloween party.

In The Puppet Show, Principal Snyder mentioned the fate of his predecessor Principal Flutie in The Pack (”That’s the kind of woolly-headed liberal thinking that leads to being eaten.”) and said it was “wild dogs” who got Flutie (in The Pack). He also mentioned the cheerleader who went up in …

The title of the episode I Robot, You Jane comes from both a line from the Tarzan movie (”Me Tarzan. You Jane”) and I, Robot, which was a collection of sci-fi short stories written by Isaac Asimov, published in 1940. The theme of I, Robot is of moral interaction between …

Buffy and Xander comfort Willow at the end of I Robot, You Jane over her choice of boyfriend by pointing out their failures in previous episodes. Buffy fancies Angel, a vampire, and Xander’s love turned out to be a giant praying mantis. They have no luck in the future either …

In I Robot, You Jane, Buffy’s assertion that Xander is jealous of Willow’s new “boyfriend” (”Yeah, but you got used to being the belle of the ball”) implies that Xander is aware of Willow’s unrequited crush on him, and that his awareness is common knowledge among his friends. Yet in …