Joss Whedon: Season 6... okay, she's come back from the dead, so you have to deal with that in a big way. Season 6 was basically about, "Okay, now we're grown-ups". Now we take away Giles, because Tony wanted to go back to England. You see, a recurring theme is, whenever the actors are unavailable, we work around it. But it made sense. We have no mentor, we have no mother, we have no parental figures, we're dealing with marriage and alcoholism and a really abusive relationship, we're dealing with someone who is practically suicidally depressed -- which, weird, people didn't respond to that so much! But we're dealing with... what was metaphoric sex has become very graphically real sex, what was mystical demons has become three nerds with guns. Very real death, very mundane. House payments -- we're doing an episode about house payments! It's like... the idea was to break down the mythic feeling of the show because there is a moment at childhood's end where you no longer get that, you no longer... Everything isn't bigger than life, suddenly everything's actual-sized, it's a real loss. And at the same time, the darker, dark, dark, dark side of power, and Buffy's guilt about her power, and her feeling about having come back to the world and getting into a genuinely sort of unhealthy relationship that was all about dominance, control, and, ultimately, deep deep misogyny. And how lost did we get? Well, our villain turned out to be Willow.