Joyce Summers – Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a show that faces death head on. People die in pretty much every single episode of the show’s seven year run, so in a way, we were starting to get desensitized to it. Think about it. On most shows, a teenager getting gruesomely murdered would be a big deal. On Buffy though, that’s exactly what happened during the pre-credits sequence. But somehow, the fact that these were supernatural deaths helped us to distance ourselves from them. When Buffy found Joyce dead on the couch, though…that felt shockingly real. Joss put us through 45 minutes of hell on earth, a barrage on our emotions that left us a weeping emotional wreck huddled in the corner (metaphorically speaking).
Joyce was the mother figure of the Scooby Gang, a comforting presence even when she sometimes wasn’t making the right decisions with Buffy. In the same way that as children we were convinced that our parents were immortal, the idea that Joyce could die never occurred to us. A regular, everyday death that had nothing to do with the supernatural made her passing all the more poignant, and her absence left a gaping hole in the hearts of everyone who watched the show.
