'The Body' is Joss Whedon showing, once again, what he can do with an hour of TV time. An intense episode that keeps hitting you in the gut and doesn't let you out until the end and doesn't even give you an ending, as Dawn never does touch her mother's body.
I've mentioned this before, but Anya's speech about not understanding death always makes me cry, but the episode is full of great moments.
*Buffy's decent into childhood right at the begining ('Mom? Mom? Mommy?').
*The pause the 911 operator makes when Buffy says Joyce is cold.
*Willow trying at act like a grown-up and falling to pieces and Tara comforting her.
*Willow's 'put up your dukes' routine when she realizes that Xander needs someone to blame/fight cause he feels so helpless.
*Xander putting his fist through the wall, enabling them to be the Scoobies by having a crisis to solve, if only for a moment.
*The bonding moment between Buffy and Tara.
*The final scene with Dawn reaching out to touch her mother.
The thing about this episode was I never saw it when it first aired. Shortly before I bought the DVD, my father had passed away and my mother had died two years before that. The episode affected me because I understood everything the characters were going through. When my mother passed away, I was Dawn, determined to see my mom, because it wouldn't be real until I did. I was Buffy, going through everything in a kind of numb haze. By having Joyce die a ordinary, almost mundane death, Joss Whedon touched something that is in all of us, the fear of losing a loved one. And it is a fear that is inevitable because people die everyday and some of them might be our own loved ones.
