Question When does Season 1 start?

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Daniel Osbourne

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Allow me to preface this post by saying that I started watching BUFFY last June and have since watched the first six seasons and am currently watching Season 7.

Anyway, one thing that continues to confuse me is when Season 1 is supposed to start.

First of all, we know that Buffy torched the gym at Hemery High at the end of her freshman year in 1996. She does not attend any other school between this event and arriving at Sunnydale High in WELCOME TO THE HELLMOUTH. Since school is obviously already in session for a while now, and Willow says that she heard "someone was transferring", this makes me think that Buffy starts school in Sunnydale a few weeks into the school year, still in 1996. It doesn't make sense that she would miss four months of school for no reason.

Episode 3, WITCH, complicates things. The sign in the gym says that this is the cheerleading tryouts for 1996, which confirms my theory. However, Buffy says that she's been the Slayer for over a year, making it seem as though this episode takes place in 1997. This is also confirmed by Cordelia (who should turn 16 in '97 with Buffy) taking her driving test, and I'm pretty sure you're not allowed to do that if you're below 16 (correct me if I'm wrong).

During the rest of the episodes I've seen, the characters state that Buffy attended Sunnydale High for 3 years. Willow says it once and Buffy says so again to Riley when she's explaining what a Hellmouth is.
Finally, Dawn tells Riley that she celebrated her 10th birthday shortly after moving to Sunnydale. Dawn's birthday is implied to happen in the summer, since she says she's 14 in REAL ME and the rest of Season 5, and she's 15 in BARGAINING.

Any thoughts on when Season 1 starts?
 
Nix
Nix
welcome to Buffy-Boards :)
U
Ulrich
Welcome to the board!
I've always seen it as starting in late autumn/early winter '96 ... on no foundation whatsoever. Sorry. It definitely starts later than the other seasons though.

Oh, and: Welcome to BB 🙂
 
Well, obviously you can't take a strict progression from the movie to the show (at the very least, Buffy is a Senior in the movie and a Sophomore at the beginning of the tv show).

Since it was Spring '96 when the show started, I always thought that coincided with the point in the school year on the show. Though, there's nothing to say that Buffy couldn't have been there at the beginning of the school year, maybe a few days in, and still be called a transfer.

🙂

---------- Post added at 02:55 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:41 PM ----------

Willow-Tree agrees: You mean '97, right?
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Yes .
 
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Willow-Tree
You mean '97, right?
Since we know Buffy's birthday is some time in January, and she's referred to as being sixteen from 'The Harvest' and all the way through S1, I always assumed that the show took place sometime around early spring of whatever year it was. ('97?)
 
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Willow-Tree
[No message]
Lyri said:
Since we know Buffy's birthday is some time in January, and she's referred to as being sixteen from 'The Harvest' and all the way through S1, I always assumed that the show took place sometime around early spring of whatever year it was. ('97?)
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True. I still don't see why Buffy would miss the first four months on school though.
 
Well, let's say she was only a Freshman at her LA high school (though do we know that the Senior Dance takes place at the end of the school year? They're playing basketball which is a winter season sport.) She burns down the gym (from their perspective). She's probably expelled lol. So maybe it a) took a while to find a school that would take her and b) took a while for Joyce to get them moved somewhere else where she had work

I think if I had to make this make sense in my mind (though I don't personally think there's continuity between the movie and season 1) I would say the Senior Dance was in February and Buffy started at Sunnydale in March.
 
Buffy Summers said:
Well, let's say she was only a Freshman at her LA high school (though do we know that the Senior Dance takes place at the end of the school year? They're playing basketball which is a winter season sport.) She burns down the gym (from their perspective). She's probably expelled lol. So maybe it a) took a while to find a school that would take her and b) took a while for Joyce to get them moved somewhere else where she had work

I think if I had to make this make sense in my mind (though I don't personally think there's continuity between the movie and season 1) I would say the Senior Dance was in February and Buffy started at Sunnydale in March.
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Well, we can't take the movie as completely cannon. I think we can discount the "senior dance". what we do know is she burned down the gym at Hemery, she was expelled, and they moved.

Season 1 takes place during Spring '97, when it aired. The whole cheerleading try-outs thing was an error. They filmed the whole season before the first episode even aired, if I can recall correctly, so the third episode was shot in 96, and they just messed up the timing.
 
Also, according to Slayer, Interrupted, which I believe Joss considers canon, Buffy spent sometime in a mental institution before she moves to Sunnydale. I can't remember if it mentions how long she was there, or when that happened, but that could account for the 'missing' months between leaving Hemery and starting at Sunnydale High.
 
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Willow-Tree
I never thought of that!
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InsaneMystic
ooh, excellent theory! it makes that dodgy retcon in Normal Again fit into the timeline after all!
B
Bungle Jerry
Good observation.
It was definitely 1997 for the characters too.

Joyce says that Buffy is 16 in Welcome to the Hellmouth. Buffy says in The Witch that she has been fighting vampires for over a year and since we know she was 15 when she was Called she would have to be 16 by The Witch.

We could retcon the cheerleading tryout board so that it said 1996 because it is the 1996/1997 school year.

If we go by the pre-Sunnydale graphic novels Buffy was kicked out of school, spent several days or maybe a week in Las Vegas with Pike, spent several weeks in a mental institution, and then later had to attend a Disciplinary Hearing to find out whether or not she was allowed to ever retun to Hemery High. Joyce says in S1 that they had to move to Sunnydale because no other school in the Los Angeles school district would accept Buffy. In A Stake to the Heart Joyce finds four cities that they could move to (each has a career opportunity for Joyce involving galleries) and allows Buffy to pick which one. It probably took Joyce awhile to apply and get hired for a job in another city and to get a bank loan to start paying mortgage on the Revello Drive house.

I think that Buffy was in the psych ward for three weeks. In Normal Again she says she was there for "a couple of weeks".

I always thought that it made A LOT of sense that Buffy was in a mental institution. In Killed by Death she is riding the medication high until she finds out she has to spend the night at the hospital and then she freaks out. She begs her mother to let her come home and starts raving about how vampires are real and she has to fight them, desperate for Giles to believe her. I bet one of the things that made being in the psych ward even more unbearable was what happened when Buffy was 8 with her cousin Cecily and Darkindestod. By KBD she has two horrendous experiences involving hospitals. In Ted, he threatens to tell her mother about her journal and hidden weapons and I always saw part of her anger there as half her spidey sense knowing there was something supernatural about him and half fear of her mother wanting to put her back in the psych ward. In Becoming #2 Buffy stakes a vampire two feet in front of her mother and yet Joyce doesn't believe that Buffy is the Slayer and says that she is "sick" and obviously wants to get her professional help which has Buffy shout angrily "I'm not crazy!" It hurt Buffy a lot that most all of S1 & S2 Joyce thought Buffy was a troublemaking violent gangbanger. It makes sense that Buffy would allow her to keep thinking that if the alternative was Joyce believing Buffy was mentally ill.
 
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MergedLoki
good point, except only issue is that a 96/97 school year means it's '96 in the fall and '97 in the winter/spring. and since they clearly are in the fall @ S1 start it has to be '96 fall leading to '97 (or '97 fall leading into '98)
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InsaneMystic
whoa, excellent point with KBD there, never thought of it that way!
Okay, I guess Season 1 starts in 1997 because Buffy is already sixteen in elcome to the Hellmouth. The progression of events should go like;

1) Hemery High's gym is torched at the end of the '95-'96 school year.
2) As Joyce and Hank have marital troubles, Buffy and Pike spend a week in Vegas hunting vamps, as seen in The Origin and Viva Las Buffy! It's the summer by now, and Kimberly is telling her friends about Buffy's refusal to go to the Bahamas.
3) Buffy comes home and spends a few weeks in a mental institution. Normal Again mentioned this and Slayer, Interrupted confirms this.
4) While this is happening, Angel is getting his act together and monitoring Buffy. He needs to be in Sunnydale at the same time she gets there.
5) The Watcher's Council arranges for Joyce to get transferred to Sunnydale and set up Giles as librarian.
6) By fall, Joyce and Hank have divorced. Joyce, Buffy and Dawn move to Sunnydale in time for Dawn's birthday. It takes a few weeks for Buffy to get set up at SDH, and in that time Angel learns about the upcoming Harvest.
7) Welcome to the Hellmouth takes place shortly after Buffy's sixteenth birthday in January.
 
E
Eleftheria
nice presentation of events!
G
Goldilocks
nice one!
Daniel Osbourne said:
Episode 3, WITCH, complicates things. The sign in the gym says that this is the cheerleading tryouts for 1996, which confirms my theory. However, Buffy says that she's been the Slayer for over a year, making it seem as though this episode takes place in 1997. This is also confirmed by Cordelia (who should turn 16 in '97 with Buffy) taking her driving test, and I'm pretty sure you're not allowed to do that if you're below 16 (correct me if I'm wrong).



Any thoughts on when Season 1 starts?
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just wanted to say that cordy wasn't exactly taking her drivers license test in "Witch" I think it was more like a drivers education class in school, which when supervised by an adult and with a permit, driving is perfectly legal at age 15....oO (I think that came out right lol)
 
Someone here was wondering why Buffy waited four months before starting to attend Sunndydale High, and, weel I think it took a while to Joyce for finding new job, even if "helped" by the Council of Watchers.
And anyway Cordy might be already sixteen at the middle of the first term, because even if she was born in June, she couldn't attend an year before, because for doing it you have to be born before May. However we're sure she's got a car in the last episode, when she and Ms. Calendar run away from Zombies.
 
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