The End of Buffy

Buffy, the Vampire Slayer ends in the series finale on May 20. That is when the fans get to mourn, but the stars have already gone through their closure process. Having wrapped filming in April, they could already talk about letting the series go, where most viewers won’t be able to deal with it until the end of May. Alyson Hannigan shared her emotions about letting go.

“I’m going to miss everything,” Hannigan said. “It’s been the most amazing and significant job of my life obviously and I’ll always have it near and dear to my heart. I’m so grateful and appreciative that I worked with the best crew and the best writers and producers and cast and I love them all.”

Michelle Trachtenberg recalled the last day of filming. “It hadn’t really caught up to us until really the last couple days,” Trachtenberg said. “It was a love kind of feeling. We’re all happy to have worked so well for all these years and really just had a great time. I’m losing my voice from all the shooting, so there you go.”

Nicholas Brendon was serving double duty, filming the finale of Buffy while starting his own new sitcom. “I’ve been doing a sitcom for Fox that’ll come out next year on the Fox network, so I was very hectically coordinating Buffy and the emotions of that, and then starting this new show,” Brendon said. “So, saying goodbye to my old cast and saying hello to my new cast. It’s been a very strange week. I haven’t really had a second to really reflect. [On] the last day, I cried when I left, like a little baby whose pants were soiled. So yeah, it was very emotional, but I was very lucky to have booked this pilot, to have the work continue on. But it’s just been a really weird week for me and I’ve been very busy and I haven’t really had time to reflect.”

Tom Lenk, one of the newest cast members, explained what the final episode deals with. “I don’t want to give anything away, but it’s sort of all about what happens to a group and what happens to friends and how people cope with going to battle and what happens as far as relationships,” Lenk said. “I think it’s a look at how the show started and sort of going back to that. I definitely think it’s come full circle. I think the characters have gone back to where they started from as far as attitude and how they feel about each other. It gets in touch with these emotional ties that everybody has to each other and the close knit group of friends that they have their own language that they talk in. it’s just interesting to see how they look back at the years past and where they go to after that.”

Finale, series creator Joss Whedon, promised a complicated ending that would maintain the show’s tradition of complex relationships. “We don’t resolve every single subplot completely because that’s not the way life works,” Whedon said. “You also want to leave doors open for other things one day. But basically, it was my decision to end the show. It wasn’t like somebody told me, ‘You’re going to stop.’ I knew I was going to stop. So, we knew this season finale was going to be the most final.”

The remaining episodes of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer air Tuesday nights at 8 p.m. on UPN.