Buffy, however, not only allows herself connection, she demands it. Furthermore, in the first few seasons, she insisted on gossiping about boys, running for homecoming queen, and going on dates and to the prom -- in other words, having a life -- despite the ongoing demands of fending off archvillains ("If the apocalypse comes, beep me!" is one of her best lines). This, like her mom's inability to see that Buffy is acting like "it's the end of the world" because it literally is the end of the world, gets played for laughs, and it's very funny, but it's also the show's most radical twist to the genres it plays upon. There were girls who kicked ass in pop culture before Buffy, going back at least as far as Mrs. Peel of "The Avengers," but they always wound up living the relatively solitary lives of the male heroes they resembled.

Although Buffy's commitment to having a life initially earns her flak from by-the-books types like Giles and the vampire slayer Kendra, it's actually a source of her potency. As various demonic individuals have observed throughout the series, Buffy is an exceptionally powerful and long-lived slayer, and her friendships are at the heart of that. The original slayer, appearing to Buffy in a vision, objects to these attachments and menaces Giles, Xander and Willow, but Buffy scorns this ancient mandate and successfully fends off the specter. "That's your whatcha-call-it, variable," Spike says to Adam, the Frankensteinian monster looking to eliminate Buffy in Season 4. "The slayer's got pals."

Over and over again, when the going really gets tough, it's love, not might, that gives Buffy the edge she needs to triumph. And in the heartrending conclusion to Season 6, when faced with a Willow who has been swallowed by the Dark Side due to her overwhelming grief over her lover Tara's death, Buffy fails. It is the pure, suffering transcendence of Xander's love for his old friend that saves the world.

The subtler ways in which the series has reinforced this idea are perhaps even more persuasive. Take Faith, the Nietzschean vampire slayer who first tempts Buffy to exercise her powers freely, without conscience or responsibility, for the "rush" of the kill. Buffy rejects this idea and Faith herself, after Faith accidentally murders a human being and claims to be unbothered by it. Faith turns evil, signing on with Sunnydale's mayor (my favorite "Buffy" villain by far) who's scheming to turn himself into an all-powerful demon. However wicked the mayor may be, he and Faith establish a warm, genuinely touching relationship. As Faith soaks up his fatherly affection, it's clear that she's never before felt a sense of belonging and that this is the source of both her failure of empathy and her resentment of Buffy. Badly as Faith behaves throughout that season, her loss and her need are palpable and understandable; she never loses our sympathy. Not only is intimacy the foundation of goodness' strength; its absence also creates a susceptibility to corruption.

This season, however, Buffy has drifted away from that core strength. She's been struggling to find the right way to handle her authority (a harder thing for most women to manage than the usual coming-of-age travails) over both her original group and a passel of wayward and poorly trained potential slayers. As a result, she's been slipping into the leadership style of a thousand westerns and war movies: gruff, remote and preoccupied with her own burden. How much of this is an avoidable part of being in charge, and how much the kind of self-protection she used to disdain? Recently, she confessed to not letting herself care about any of the potential slayers as people because she knows that some of them will die. She knows that's a mistake, but can she regain her heart? Will she figure out how to get back to where she once belonged? That's for the season finale to tell.

Of course, there's also the question of Spike or Angel -- a lamentable "Dawson's Creek"-style note to the end of a series that was more than mere soap opera. But even the resolution of that triangle will, knowing Whedon, tap into his heroine's final dilemma -- to connect or not to connect? It's not so much the kiss between Buffy and Angel in last week's episode that gave me pause as it was something we saw on her face just before the clinch. It was a real, unqualified smile. Can it be the first one she's allowed herself all year? What I read in Buffy's face was not only love but a kind of emotional relief that might be best described as fellowship.

When all is said and done, Buffy isn't really like the rest of us -- she's got a particular, difficult destiny to go along with her superpowers, and lately she's really been feeling it. She's larger than life, and Angel is the only person who can share that with her; the rest of us, Spike included, are life-size. Even her romantic choice, then, must resonate somehow with the show's core theme. Buffy's fought mightily over the past seven years, not just against "the vampires, the demons and the Forces of Darkness," but also against detachment, self-pity and arrogance. The best that this ardent fan can hope for her is that somehow, once and for all, she'll win.

Coming Wednesday: Stephanie Zacharek reviews the final episode of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."

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