Lately, Whedon and his writers have found some terrific ways to explore the show's central themes of female empowerment, destiny vs. free will, the search for identity and the many varieties of families. The show's most audaciously wiggy plotline this season was also the one that required the most patience on the part of viewers: Buffy suddenly had a bratty 15-year-old sister, with no immediate explanation. We'd never seen or heard about "Dawn" (Michelle Trachtenberg) before, but there she was, and Buffy, her mom and everybody else acted as if her presence was perfectly normal.

As it turned out, Dawn isn't really human; she's an orb of pure energy called "the Key," and she supposedly figures into an evil recipe for disaster. The order of monks that had been protecting the Key for centuries sent it to Buffy in the form of something she would protect with her life (obviously, those monks never had a bratty little sister) and put everybody under a "veiling spell" so they would accept Dawn as human. Only the mentally ill and certain animals are able to see Dawn for the empty shell she is. But, listen, the "my sister, my energy orb" plot line isn't all good vs. evil mumbo-jumbo. The fact that Dawn is "negative space" is a breathtaking metaphor for an adolescent's lack of self-esteem -- Dawn feels completely overshadowed by her so-important, bossy big sister.

As for Big Sis, Buffy is no longer the perky high schooler who pouted when her Watcher (mentor) Giles (Anthony Stewart Head) made her patrol the graveyard for vamps and miss the big dance. Buffy is now 20, a college sophomore (still a mediocre student, alas), and she's come to understand some hard truths about herself. For instance, deep down, she likes all the fighting and slaying -- she needs it. If given a choice, she'd rather be a normal girl than a predestined vanquisher of evil, but she's past feeling sorry for herself; this is her job, and she's focussed on being the most ass-kicking demon-killer she can be.

Buffy has also realized that her perfectionism and self-reliance -- useful traits for a well-oiled Slayer -- kind of get in the way of romance. She tried to be all girly and yielding for her last boyfriend, macho soldier Riley Finn, but he complained that she didn't need him enough. He was right; she never felt the same soul-deep passion for Riley that she did for Angel, the good vampire cursed to turn evil when he felt "perfect happiness." (Unfortunately, Angel got really happy when he was sexually initiating Buffy, and that was the end of that.)

There's also an S/M streak in Buffy that comes with the Slayer territory. And this season, she's working overtime to keep it in check. Recently, Buffy's old nemesis, the bleached-blond punk vampire Spike (James Marsters), has fallen daffily, perhaps dangerously, in love with her. But Buffy's "you repulse me" responses to Spike's declarations of love seem overly harsh, even cruel -- maybe because she's trying so hard not to relive l'affaire Angel. Or, maybe, she fears that little bit of darkness curled up inside her.

Each season, the writers have given Buffy a character-building crisis to deal with. She lost her virginity to Angel and he turned on her. She had to lead an apocalyptic battle with evil at her graduation ceremony. She was almost beaten to a pulp by Faith, a vicious, thrill-killing Slayer who represented what Buffy could become if she lost sight of her nobler purpose. Riley dumped her (he was last seen flying off to lick his wounds in a secret jungle military operation). But they were only dress rehearsals for what she's facing now.

You have to hand it to the writers; Joyce's demise came as a complete surprise. She'd had surgery for a brain tumor, but had seemingly recovered, and Buffy was starting to relax again. She'd nursed her mom and maternally soothed Dawn's worries, but you could sense that she was happy to only be playing the role of mom, confident that the world would soon slide back onto its proper axis. And that's why "The Body" was so devastating. In the very first scene, Buffy comes home and starts chattering to Joyce, who she thinks is upstairs. When she sees her mother lying face up on the couch, she casually calls, "Mom? Whatcha doin'?" But then she comes closer and sees her mother's lifeless, staring pose. "Mom? Mom?" she calls, and then the concern in her wide eyes turns to terror: "Mommy?" In that instant, Buffy's childhood officially ends. (Even if "Buffy" gets stiffed in every other Emmy category this year, "The Body" should convince the nominating committee that Gellar is for real.)

In last season's hair-raising "Hush" episode (which unexpectedly received an Emmy nomination for best writing), Whedon experimented with the power of silence as a storytelling device. Grinning, skull-headed, eerily gliding demons had stolen the voices of everyone in Sunnydale (to prevent screams when they cut people's hearts out), so Whedon staged the second half of the episode like a silent movie, using pantomime and notes written on cards, chalkboards and computer screens in place of dialogue. In "The Body," Whedon played with silence again; there was no background music in the episode and only a few ambient sounds, like wind chimes and sirens. The effect was almost Bergmanesque in its starkness. The spooky stillness and the long, spacey pauses in conversation as characters struggled to articulate their feelings exaggerated the sense of time elongating and standing still. I can't remember the last time I saw a more wrenching portrayal of the shock of loss.

In one scene, Buffy listened numbly as a paramedic told her Joyce was dead, but the camera was focusing on him from Buffy's disoriented perspective -- all we saw was his face from the nose down, as Buffy tried to grasp the meaning of the words coming out of his mouth. And in a heartbreaking depiction of the discomfort people feel as they grope for the "correct" response to death, Buffy's friends Willow, Tara, Xander and Anya tried to pull themselves together before going to see Buffy, but they were uncertain about how they were supposed to act. Anya, a formerly immortal vengeance demon newly made human, is always asking childlike, tactless questions about the ways of mortals, so it made sense that she was the one to voice what the others were too embarrassed to say.

"What will we do?" Anya asked. "What will we be expected to do?" When the others remained speechless, she cried, "I don't understand! I don't understand how we go through this. I knew her. And there's just a body. And I don't understand why she just can't go back in it and not be dead anymore!"

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