By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
While Buffy the Vampire Slayer is one of the greatest shows ever made, it’s filled with bonkers plot points like characters building Star Trek-style androids and even bringing the dead back to life in episodes like “Some Assembly Required.” Eventually, show writer David Fury asked Joss Whedon how the heck Sunnydale residents could pull off such amazing feats. In turn, the showrunner told Fury that “The Hellmouth should be able to provide us with anything we want to do; the energy that comes out of it makes mad scientists out of humans who then go ahead and create something evil.”
Some Assembly Required
What made Fury ask this question was that “Some Assembly Required” featured a plot point where a character successfully brought his deceased brother back to life. The writer understandably found it bizarre that residents of a sleepy town could pull off scientific feats (including making robots as sophisticated as Commander Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation) that the most veteran medical and scientific professionals in our own world could never accomplish. Whedon explained that it all goes back to the Hellmouth’s corrupting influence, which is brilliant because it explains almost every inconsistency in this crazy show.
In the world of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, details about the Hellmouth are relatively sparse…all we really know is that it connects Sunnydale to another dimension, attracts demons, and affects the local population with mystical energy. The show has always been vague about how this energy works, but we’ve seen it bring nightmares to life, turn girls invisible, and even make residents (in Willow’s words) “pray harder” because many religious people could sense its malign influence. These things all seem relatively magical, though, and David Fury was interested more in how (like in “Some Assembly Required”) regular residents could suddenly become genius scientists, practically overnight.
Joss Whedon’s answer is quietly brilliant, though, because it turns that question on its head to ask why we accept the Hellmouth having certain powers and not others. If it can bring nightmares to life, why shouldn’t it be able to help some weird kid bring his dead brother back to life? If it can make a girl invisible just because nobody ever noticed her, then why couldn’t it help local residents build robots that would even have impressed Captain Picard?
Some Buffy fans (and especially haters) might say that Whedon’s explanation is a little too easy…after all, this means the show’s writers never have to worry about breaking the rules about what can and cannot happen because there are no firm rules. However, we see that as one of the show’s greatest strengths: no two episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer are the same because the writers had creative carte blanche. At the end of the day, that will always be more exciting than a show that sags beneath the weight of its own dusty rules.
“Some Assembly Required” is a great Buffy episode, but we’ve always shared David Fury’s curiosity about how a random high school student suddenly had the medical knowledge and skills of Dr. Frankenstein. Thanks to Joss Whedon, we now know that the Hellmouth is capable of transforming people into mad scientists on top of its other magical properties. For longtime fans, that does more than contextualize one-off villains…it also explains the rise and fall of Dr. Walsh, who died at the hands of Adam, her own mad science monstrosity.
