25 Best Whedonverse Episodes

25. ''YOU'RE WELCOME''
Angel, Season 5

Although Angel's fifth (and, regrettably, final) season is one of its strongest, we still seriously missed the presence of Charisma Carpenter's Cordelia, who was left in a coma at the end of the fourth season when Carpenter left the show. Cordy's return — revived, she says, by the Powers That Be to help a wayward Angel (David Boreanaz) rediscover his inner hero — proved a perfect farewell to the character, with a killer final scene that served as a bittersweet grace note to the show's 100th episode.

24. ''CONVERSATIONS WITH DEAD PEOPLE''
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 7

In separate sequences that never overlap, Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar), Willow (Alyson Hannigan), Dawn (Michelle Trachtenberg), and Andrew (Tom Lenk) are visited by dead people from their past, each with an uncanny knack for knowing how best to press their psychological buttons. The heady break from Buffy's usual format (for one, no Xander!) proved a thrilling booster shot for the show's seventh season momentum, and boasts a most incisive take on its heroine, via a Sunnydale-High-alum-cum-psych-major-cum-vampire: She has an inferiority complex about her superiority complex. Naturally.

23. ''THE ZEPPO''
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 3

The perfect Xander (Nicholas Brendon) episode. Feeling like a useless liability to the Scoobies as they battle back yet another apocalypse, the Xan man stumbles into his own adventure when he runs afoul of an un-dead jock, gets his cherry popped by a hot-to-trot Faith (Eliza Dushku), and finally finds his mojo in time to, yep, save the world. Best of all, the rest of the gang are never the wiser — well, except for the whole getting-groiny-with-Faith thing.

21. ''SMILE TIME''
Angel, Season 5

Yeah, yeah, some fans absolutely loathe this episode, but, come on: Angel gets turned into a felt-faced puppet. He fights other evil puppets. He fights Spike (James Marsters) and wins. It's brilliant. Get over it.

20. ''RESTLESS''
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 4

Instead of the usual epic, apocalypse-averting season finale, Whedon chose to end the uneven fourth season with a phantasmagoric peek into the dream states of Willow, Xander, Giles (Anthony Stewart Head), and Buffy, whose sleep is haunted by the First Slayer they conjured in the epic, apocalypse-averting, penultimate episode of the season. Visually lush and trippy, it reestablished that this genre show was really and truly a deeply affecting character drama with a delightfully bent sense of humor. Watch out for the cheese man!

19. ''THE WISH''
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 3

Buffy meets The Twilight Zone, with a dash of Psycho. When Cordelia wishes that Buffy had never come to Sunnydale, vengeance demon Anya (Emma Caulfield) — in her Buffy debut! — makes it so, plunging Ms. Chase into an alternative universe in which über-villain the Master still lives, Xander and Willow are vamps, and Angel is their simpering torture toy. And just when you think it can't get any more deliciously dark, Willow kills Cordy halfway through the episode. Then Buffy shows up, and it gets even darker. Awesome.

16. ''SEEING RED''/''VILLAINS''
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 6

We are who we are in the fullest when we're experiencing either absolute joy or abject misery. For Willow — who'd gone down the rabbit-hole of magic addiction and found her anchor in Tara (Amber Benson) — the death of her beloved thanks to a stray bullet revealed the raging fury at her core. Dark Willow became the Big Bad of the sixth season, and her path of wanton destruction was both cathartic and devastating.

15. ''PASSION''
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 2

Until this episode, Buffy viewers operated under the assumption that the show would behave like every other genre show before it: No matter how bad things got, no one ''important'' would actually die. That all changed when the newly evil Angel snapped the neck of Giles' budding girlfriend Jenny Calendar (Robia LaMorte), and then placed her body on Giles' bed, surrounded by rose petals and candlelight. Suddenly, all bets were off, and fans were shocked, grief-stricken, and completely riveted.

14. ''I WILL REMEMBER YOU''
Angel, Season 1

Thanks to the blood of a Mohra demon that makes Angel a human again, Buffy and Angel finally get to experience a day of true happiness. Well, until said demon makes quick work of the newly mortal Angel, and our hero makes the beautifully agonizing choice to turn back time to the way things were rather than watch Buffy ultimately kill herself saving him. In a way, the episode exposed the problem that dogged the show from the start: Without his beloved, Angel and Angel were never quite completely whole.

12. ''CHOSEN''
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 7

And so it comes to an end, with perhaps the biggest bang in Buffy history. Sunnydale itself buys it as Buffy and her army of slayers save the day, one last time. Not as emotional as ''The Gift'' or as brazen as Angel's ''Not Fade Away,'' ''Chosen'' still gives you the warm-and-fuzzy-and-tearies you want from a finale.

10. ''THE GIFT''
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 5

Sacrifice is an essential part of the hero's journey — the very act of placing one's own well-being on the line to protect someone else's. For all of Buffy's dangerous exploits over the years, we're never led to believe she walked knowingly to her death. But that's exactly what she did when Glory (Clare Kramer) and her minions planned to sacrifice Dawn to hasten the apocalypse. If Buffy hadn't been picked up by UPN when things soured with The WB, this would've been the series finale. And it would've been a fitting send-off to the girl who saved the world...a lot.

8. ''GRADUATION DAY, PARTS 1 & 2''
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 3

In which a demonic mayor is kept from ascending, Faith is rocked to her core, Angel leaves Sunnydale for good, and Buffy leads the Scoobies, and her entire senior class, to victory. It's also the season finale that marked a turning point for the show itself: with high school in the rear-view mirror, Buffy became a more serious, adult venture. Here is where the show put away childish things and grew up.

7. ''NOT FADE AWAY''
Angel, Season 5

Emotional goodbyes, prodigious arse-kickings, beloved-character demises, Spike throwing down at a poetry slam — the Angel finale does a perfect job of distilling the show down to its very essence. When the walls come tumbling down, when the Biggest of Big Bads sends troll armies and giants and dragons, our stalwarts stand fast. As Angel says, ''they're not there to be beat...they're there to be fought.'' And that is what makes a hero.

6. ''ONCE MORE, WITH FEELING''
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 6

A dancing demon unleashes a hilarious hex upon Sunnydale: Everyone sings out their innermost fears and desires as if they're in a hit Broadway show — and shazam, we've got ourselves a Buffy musical. From throwaway ditties about dry cleaning to Anya's lyrical worry that she'll ''get so worn and wrinkly that I look like David Brinkley,'' it's an hour (and change) of melodious television so massively satisfying that we still can't quite believe Whedon was able to get away with it. But we're thrilled to pieces that he pulled it off.

4. ''A HOLE IN THE WORLD''
Angel, Season 5

Death comes often in the Whedonverse — but even when that death is devastating, it's usually quick. When Winifred Burkle (Amy Acker) was chosen to be the corporeal host of a god older than time, her demise was long, painful, and lingering. (And Acker astonishes as the girl who walks with heroes and still can't be saved by them.) As Spike stares, hopeless, at what should've been salvation, he sums it all up: ''There's a hole in the world. Feels like we ought to have known.''

3. ''HUSH''
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 4

Much like ''Once More, with Feeling,'' Whedon uses what could've been a gimmick (a mostly dialogue-free episode) to explore how we communicate — in this case, how talking only gets in the way. A band of eerie floaty ''gentlemen'' come to town and robs everyone of their voices, prompting both romance (Buffy and Marc Blucas' Riley, Willow and Tara) and revelation (the secrets of the Initiative and Slayerdom come out).

2. ''INNOCENCE''
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 2

Whedon has said this is his favorite-ever Buffy episode, and it's not hard to see why: After Buffy and Angel make love for the first time, the dreamy vampire with the gypsy curse literally loses his soul, and becomes a true demon once again. It's as primal a metaphor for the terrors of sex as one could imagine, and it showed the audience, the cast, and Whedon himself just how high his little show about dusting vampires could climb. They've never looked back since.

1. ''THE BODY''
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 5

If there's any argument to be made for the short-sighted irrelevance of the Emmy Awards — which marginalized Buffy for the entirety of its run — this episode should be exhibit A. Expertly written and directed by Whedon, ''The Body'' is all about the emotional devastation caused by the sudden, tragically natural death of Buffy's mother, Joyce (Kristine Sutherland). Deft and heartbreaking, ''The Body'' isn't just the best episode in the Whedonverse: It might be the best hour of television we've ever seen.