Entertainment
Deleted Buffy The Vampire Slayer Scene Completely Changes Every Fan’s Favorite Character
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Ever notice how fans go crazy for deleted scenes, especially when it comes to their favorite shows? If you love a series hard enough, it’s easy to look at deleted content like something that was taken from you. When the scene in question is good enough, you might even start to wonder why it was cut in the first place.
Well, very few series are as popular as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a show with more than a few deleted scenes. This includes a snippy interaction between Willow and Cordelia in “Phases” that many fans wished had been kept in the episode. However, it’s good that this dialogue was cut because it would have completely changed Willow’s character, effectively hinting at her later transformation into a much darker character.
A Self-Defense Class Gone Wrong
“Phases” was, of course, the episode where we discover that the eternally Zen character Oz has quite the secret: he’s a werewolf who transforms into a dangerous, ravenous monster by the light of the full moon. The Slayer keeps the big, bad wolfman from harming anybody, and she also stops a hunter hellbent on making Oz his latest prize. Along the way, our Sunnydale High students took a self-defense class, and some dialogue between Willow and Cordelia was ultimately removed from the final episode.
In the scene, Cordelia is about to spar with Xander, who sarcastically tells her, “Be gentle with me.” Matching his sarcastic vibes, Cordelia turns to Willow and says, “You’re first. I wouldn’t want to be accused of taking your place in line.” In response, Willow replies, “Oh, I think you pushed your way to the front long before this.”
Girls Can Be So Mean
Things get increasingly snippy between the young women, with Cordelia claiming, “Hey, I can’t help it if I get the spotlight just because some people blend into the background.” Willow frostily responds, “Well, maybe some people could see better if you weren’t standing on the auction block, shaking your wares.” Cordelia tells her, “Sorry, we haven’t all perfected that phony ‘girl next door’ bit” before Willow brings this deleted scene to an end with a distinctively vindictive response: “You could be the girl next door, too. If Xander lived next to a brothel!”
Important context for this episode is that Cordelia and Xander have been secretly dating behind everyone’s back. However, Xander is preoccupied with Willow’s relationship with Oz, even stopping his makeout session with Cordelia to wonder what his witchy friend sees in this wolfy senior. While Willow isn’t directly aware of this particular relationship drama, that same drama helps to explain why Cordelia was being so mean in this deleted scene from “Phases.”
A Girlfight Scarier Than Any Vampire Fight
What the drama doesn’t really explain, though, is why this scene portrays Willow as a Cordelia-esque mean girl in her own right. Historically, early Buffy the Vampire Slayer portrayed Cordelia as the preppy mean girl and Willow as the mousy nerd. The two women had a rather cantankerous relationship going back to before the show starting, and in their very first onscreen interaction, we see Cordelia criticizing Willow for how she dresses.
In early Buffy episodes, Willow wasn’t afraid to get back at Cordelia, but she usually did so in relatively subtle ways. Perhaps the most infamous (and funniest) example of this is when Willow tracks the other women into deleting an assignment on the computer by convincing Cordelia that the DEL key on her keyboard stands for “deliver.” However, she didn’t really push back against Cordelia’s snark more directly until Season 3, which included the messy plot point of stealing Cordelia’s boyfriend (they are openly dating by this point), Xander.
The Mousy Girl Bites Back
In this deleted scene from “Phases,” however, Willow’s sarcastic replies seem out of character, much more in line with the snappy repartee of Buffy Summers. Willow basically tells Cordelia to her face that the other woman, despite having advantages like wealth and beauty, is still neurotically obsessed with being popular. She then calls Cordelia a prostitute, accusing her of selling her body to men before outright saying she belongs in a brothel.
Is it funny? Of course, and it’s not like ditzy mean girl Cordelia didn’t have it coming. But I keep reflecting on the fact that this is much more like what we’d expect of Willow in Season 6: that was the season where she began recklessly using magic, needlessly resurrecting Buffy, brainwashing Tara, and eventually becoming a threat to the entire world. Dark Willow was always great for sassy quotes, including calling a foe “superb*tch” and saying “bored now” right before she rips the skin off another human being.
A Scary Glimpse Of What She Would Become
Obviously, the Willow in the deleted scene of “Phases” isn’t in danger of ripping the flesh off anyone’s body. But she is in the business of dropping the kind of harsh truth bombs that Dark Willow would be known for, and like her later villain persona, she’s suddenly not taking crap from someone who gives her attitude. This is arguably an improvement over mousy Willow, of course, but it’s also completely out of character with the Willow of Season 2, one who had yet to fully come out about her love of magic (among other things).
Long story short? It’s good that this Buffy the Vampire Slayer scene was cut, even though countless fans would give up their Mr. Pointy replicas to see it in the final episode. Cutting the scene meant cutting out a severely out-of-character moment for everyone’s favorite girl next door, and that helped make it all the more surprising when Willow later stopped playing by the rules and showed everyone just how dangerous a mean girl could really be.