SEASON FOUR

The fourth season introduces significant changes into the show. Angel and Cordelia have disappeared from Sunnydale, and Oz follows soon after. Buffy and Willow start college, Xander starts living in his parents’ basement, and Giles starts a new life as an unemployed ex-watcher, ex-librarian—spending most of his time hanging around his apartment, watching quiz shows, and waiting for the next evil to surface. Spike reappears in Sunnydale, and this time he has come to stay. No longer just an occasional menace, he moves into place as a regular character on the show—a position he fills for the rest of the series.

The season focuses on change and transition—with Willow and Spike frequently taking center stage. Spike is captured by a group called The Initiative—a secret military organization that captures demons and performs experiments on them. The Initiative puts a chip in Spike’s head which prevents him from harming any human being. Because of the chip, Spike is forced to seek Buffy’s help and ends up becoming an unwilling member of the Scooby Gang. Starting in this season, Spike begins a slow transitional process that will continue on through the rest of the series.

Willow begins a transitional process as well. The most significant change in her character involves her breakup with Oz and subsequent move into a relationship with shy, mousy Tara. Willow and Tara continue as a couple for two more seasons, and their growth together adds significant depth to Willow’s character.

Buffy and Xander both become involved in new relationships as well. Buffy starts dating an Initiative member, Riley Finn, and Xander starts dating Anya, a plain-speaking ex-demon who was introduced as a guest character in Season Three and becomes a regular cast member for this season and the rest of the series. Unlike Willow, whose relationship with Tara focuses on the romantic, Xander and Buffy’s relationships are both highly sexual in nature—beginning a shift towards more sexually serious and explicit content which continued on throughout the rest of the series.

Season four focuses on the conflict and insecurity produced by change. The characters fall away from each other as the year progresses—lying, keeping secrets, and holding grudges—until they are forced back together at the end of the season. Buffy must fight Adam—a Frankensteinian monster created from demon and human parts spliced together inside the Initiative—and in order to do so, she must use magic to join with her friends and use their powers, as well as her own strength, to defeat the villain. The final episodes reestablish the friendship and mutual dependence of the central group—Buffy, Willow, Xander, and Giles—but they also indicate that these characters are still plagued with fierce self-doubt and insecurity. These feelings become central to the second part of the series, as the Scooby Gang moves away from high school and into the adult world.

--Jonathan Edwards