Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “The Body”.
This semester, in my Television Fiction course, I spent several weeks teaching Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), not only through individual episodes such as “Who Are You?” (4.16), “The Body” (5.16), and “Conversations with Dead People” (7.07), but also as a privileged case study for thinking about aesthetic form and seriality in television series.
That sustained work in class has now led me back to one of the most extraordinary episodes of the series. I will be presenting a paper titled “‘Where did she go?’: Theological Silence and the Problem of the Soul in ‘The Body’” at Slayage Conference 11, hosted by Illinois State University and organized by The Association for the Study of Buffy+. I am very glad to return to Buffy in this context and to think further about “The Body”, an episode that continues to unsettle the relationship between death, embodiment, grief, and theological meaning. Here is the abstract for my paper:
Within Buffy studies, Gregory Stevenson’s “Televised Morality” argues that Buffy the Vampire Slayer constructs a morally coherent universe grounded in a stable spiritual ontology. Souls are not metaphorical but real: detachable, restorable, and ethically decisive. At the same time, as Deborah Thomas has shown, the series unsettles epistemological certainty, inviting viewers to question what can be known and how meaning is produced. “The Body” (5.16), written and directed by Joss Whedon, brings these tendencies into alignment.
This paper argues that the episode does not suspend Buffy’s theology of the soul but reveals a tension between ontological certainty and experiential ambiguity. Joyce Summers’ death unfolds without supernatural mediation; she is repeatedly named “the body”, and Dawn’s question — “Where did she go?” — remains unanswered. In a series that provides clear accounts of the soul, what emerges is not the absence of belief, but the impossibility of accessing it.
To articulate this tension, I draw on Owen Flanagan’s account of the “problem of the soul” as a conflict between a materialist understanding of human life and a need for continuity and meaning. BUFFY sustains both perspectives, but “The Body” marks where they fall out of alignment.
The episode’s formal organization is crucial. Long takes stretch time into duration; the absence of non-diegetic music withdraws interpretive cues; and its spare mise-en-scène — empty spaces, fixed framings, the inert presence of the corpse — keeps attention on what remains. Following Adrian Martin’s insistence that meaning emerges from the material arrangement of the image, these choices shape an experience of grief defined less by revelation than by withdrawal.
In this sense, “The Body” approaches an apophatic limit: it does not deny the soul, but renders it inaccessible. Buffy’s cosmology remains intact, but its theological promise is suspended.
