How Michelle Trachtenberg changed the Buffy-verse

And to be honest, Dawn was kind of annoying at first. She mucked up Buffy’s life both on and off the graveyard shift, got kidnapped by bad guys with alarming regularity, and was just generally a brat. But demonic abductions aside, that’s par for the course when you’re a young girl. 

When Buffy learned of her sister’s vital importance to the fate of the world, however, that all began to change. Suddenly, the slayer saw this kid not as a thorn in her side but something precious to be protected at all costs. (Though the series was famous for Buffy’s string of doomed love affairs with undead hunks, her ever-evolving relationship with Dawn is the series’ most epic romance.)

Then Dawn herself found out who she really was halfway through the season, and Trachtenberg flexed acting muscles we never knew she possessed. In the 13th episode, “Blood Ties,” she goes through all the stages of grief that come with the revelation that, up until a few months ago, she didn’t even exist. 

Just try not to weep during the final scene, in which Buffy talks Dawn down from her (very understandable!) existential crisis, which culminates in a tender embrace. In a series famous for quippy, rapid-fire wordplay, Trachtenberg’s delivery of one simple line—“I was so scared”—was worth a thousand words. Gellar was at the height of her acting powers in season five, and the fact that Trachtenberg matched her talent spoke volumes.

The story only got darker from there, particularly in what’s undoubtedly one of the greatest TV episodes of all time, “The Body,” which took place in the immediate aftermath of the sudden death of Buffy and Dawn’s mother, Joyce (Kristine Sutherland), from a brain aneurysm. Though every member of the main cast delivered devastating performances, Trachtenberg arguably had the most difficult task of all. With the adults around her too ravaged by grief to help Dawn through hers, she finds herself at loose ends, unable to accept Joyce’s death until she sees the evidence with her own eyes. So she slips past the hospital staff into the morgue. 

Yes, there’s a tussle with a vampire; but the meat of the scene is the achingly human moment when Dawn gazes, unblinking, at her mother’s corpse. “Is she cold?” she asks. “It’s not her. She’s gone,” Buffy says. Her voice broken, Dawn whispers into the silence, “Where’d she go?”

One could rhapsodize at length about Trachtenberg’s talent for subtle drama. But she also nailed that classic, tongue-twisting dialogue style that’s come to be known as Whedonspeak. (“I think it’s Mmm-Fashnik, like ‘Mmm, cookies!’” Dawn suggests brightly when she comes across the name of an obscure demon.) What’s more, she excelled at slapstick (never mess around with your sister’s crossbow, kids!) and, in Buffy’s iconic musical episode, classical ballet. 

Trachtenberg’s death at the age of 39 feels as abrupt and earth-shattering as Joyce’s fictional one, eliciting an outpouring of tributes from her former co-stars. (In an Instagram post, Gellar paraphrased Buffy’s moving farewell to Dawn in the season-five finale: “The hardest thing in this world is to live in it. I will be brave. I will live…for you.”) And though Trachtenberg left us all too soon, her memory and the often brilliant body of work she left behind live on.