Buffy the Vampire Slayer:S6

Well, unlike 99% of television shows, BTVS always worked on three levels: spectacle, plot and metaphor. The first two levels made Buffy fun, but it's metaphor that vaulted the show past depth-free duds like Charmed and relentlessly literal procedurals like CSI. And BTVS never merged metaphor with spectacle and plot better than it did in Season Six.

Certainly, Buffy was lovable for its spectacle and plot alone. The show routinely threw everything including the kitchen sink at its audience-scary monsters, silly monsters, romance, rivalries, cool weapons, classic stock characters, a steady stream of one-liners, attractive but relatable teens, magic, slapstick, fashion, gothica, fights, chases, cliffhangers and apocalypses. Sometimes the show even shot through the roof purely on story power-the crashing heartbreak of Season Two and the noirish twists of Season Three were so good that many fans pick these seasons as Buffy's best.

But Buffy's writers (Joss Whedon, Jane Espenson, Marti Noxon, Rob Petrie, Drew Greenberg et.al.) were always after bigger game, smuggling in outsized themes and sly symbols beneath the phantasmagoric costumes and improbable plots. Metaphors, references, and subtexts deepened characters and charged storylines, and let Buffy run wild through well-worn genres, riffing on conventions from sitcoms, dramas, cartoons, scifi, mystery, horror, soaps, musicals, reality shows and even silent films and westerns, spoofing everything from 90210 and Kung Fu to X-Files, Kolchak the Night Stalker, Twin Peaks, Stephen King and Scooby Doo.

Buffy's subtexts changed and accumulated across time. In Season One, each Monster of the Week stood in for a real problem (a cruel social clique morphing into a pack of hyenas, etc.), all of them contributing to the season's central metaphoric joke (high school is Hell). Seasons Two through Five stretched troubling themes across entire seasons, relying on a Big Villain to set the agenda. In Season Two, it was good love gone bad, using the Angel/Angelus split as a metaphor to toe the line between true love and heartless psychological abuse. Season Three produced the show's first human monster, the treacherous Faith, one of the all-time best narcissistic females in fiction, right up there with Julie Christie in Darling, Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, and Great Expectations' Estella. Season Four's Adam was a murky metaphor for high tech, biotech and big government coming together in a Brave New World of unintended consequences; sadly, it didn't quite work. Season Five's Glory provided a kaleidoscopic glimpse into borderline, histrionic and schizophrenic personality disorders; Glory's mad goddess combo of conniving haughtiness and fickle rage was a terrific foil for Buffy, whose power is constrained by sanity and morality. This made for a hugely watchable rivalry, and generated some the series' finest quips and duels.

All of which built up to the real stunner of the series-Season Six. Finally, the gloves come off-the spectacle, story lines, jokes and genre riffing are still there, but the dark themes stop hiding behind monster masks and chop-socky fights, and not everything revolves around the vanquishing of the season's Big Villain.

Everywhere you look, Season Six inverts previously predictable characters. For the first time since Season Three, Buffy's a flawed heroine-she's openly depressed and directionless, still shaken by her mother's death, and incapable of giving or receiving love. Sure, it's a downer, but it also makes Buffy more interesting, because she's too unsettled to revert to her standard kick-ass-and-wrap-up-the-episode mode, and besides, half the time, Buffy's enemy is Buffy. Meanwhile, her sidekicks stumble through a Sunnydale turned upside down: Spike truly loves Buffy, who objectifies and brutalizes him. Icy Anya is decimated by empathetic Xander. Meek Willow gathers power, squanders love, and becomes monstrous. Even Dawn, the incarnation of innocence, quietly slips into petty crime. And all along the way, most of the show's metaphors really click, amplifying the struggles of the characters-disaffected Buffy fades into invisibility, jilted Anya returns to the demon fold, grief and rage warp and blacken Willow, and pretty much everyone in the cast battles tangible and illusory demons as they reluctantly enter the "real" world.

Last but not least, the year's Big Villain-the Trio-succeeds where Season Four's Adam failed. The Evil Dweebs are a pitch-perfect sendup of skillful but emotionally clueless nerds who know just enough to run the world into the ground-they're BTVS's slap at dotcom tycoons gone bust, and a cautionary tale about all those dangerously narrow whiz kids now trying to hit the biotech jackpot. The Trio are by turns ludicrously funny and amusingly crafty-right up until the moment they kill innocent people. From the cartoonish freeze ray to the creepy sensory dampener to the obviousness of the mystical brass balls, the puerile metaphors surrounding them deepen the joke while somehow still adding heft to the season's final tragedy, when everything ends with a gun.

So it says here that Season Six is the pick of the litter, that it preserves the fun of previous seasons while adding another level of dramatic depth, that it's the product of clever writers in top form, and that you should get these DVD's.