3. Buffy the Vampire Slayer - “I Was Made To Love You”: Joyce Summers dies
When Buffy the Vampire Slayer made the jump from movie to TV, it improved in every way. It became a deceptively deep and emotional series about a young girl with amazing powers and her struggles to balance her own life with the tasks of holding back the hordes of vampires, ghouls, and beasts in the night. The first few seasons saw Buffy and her friends doing all the things adolescents do, albeit against a backdrop of a nightmarish town built atop a Hellmouth. Buffy would kill whatever needed killing, and at the end of the day she was still a girl dealing with the pressures of growing up.
Buffy’s life crashed around her when her mother suddenly died in the middle of season 5. Buffy was left in charge of a little sister, as well as all the responsibilities and requirements of adulthood suddenly thrust upon her. The dynamic of the show quickly changed as Buffy was forced into a greater role of leadership, and the tone of the already dark series noticeably darkened even more. Buffy found herself at first incapable of handling all the necessities of being an adult balanced with being the Slayer, and her devotion to trying to be a good protector for her sister would eventually lead to her own death and rebirth.
4. Alias - “Phase One”: SD-6 Falls
Alias began as an intensely goal-oriented series. In the pilot episode, Agent Sydney Bristow learned that she’d been tricked into working for the terrorist organization SD-6, rather than the CIA, which she’d been led to believe she worked for. From the beginning she tasked herself with burrowing as deeply as possible into the nefarious SD-6 with the intent of bringing it down from the inside. This was a task that required her to be constantly on guard with her double life, always wary in deceiving her SD-6 coworkers, and determined to accomplish a task that surely would take the full series’ run to complete.
But, as it turned out, taking down SD-6 only took a season and a half out of the series’ five year run. In the middle of season two, Sydney learned that the CIA suddenly had obtained information about the terrorist organization’s structure and would be able to bring the whole group down with coordinated strikes around the world. And bring the group down, they did. With SD-6 gone, Sydney’s main driving goal was accomplished, and fans were left wondering what more the series could offer. Quite a bit, actually. The fall of SD-6 sent Alias in a completely new direction that eschewed the previous double agent angle in favor of a superbly constructed science fiction / espionage hybrid that has been dubbed “spy-fi” in recent years.
