So Buffy empowers all of the potentials, giving them back the power they were born with. Now they have the choice to do whatever they want with that power. They can become Slayers or they don’t have to. You ask who wouldn’t use that sort of power and maybe very few wouldn’t. But I must say that living a life constantly at battle with creatures who want to kill me doesn’t sound like a life I would particularly care for. I’d rather use my Slayer strength for opening tightly sealed jars or maybe building a house.

I think Whedon is trying to suggest that these women now have access to the power they were born with, and they may use that power however they choose, whether it’s slaying vampires, playing softball, or standing up for themselves.

Now having said all that, I really don’t like this episode as a series finale. Buffy had a half-assed plan and Spike had to save them all? BULL.SHIT.

I know that watching it makes my heart lift but at the same time it bothers me.

I’m all for tapping your inner power and I admire the work that you do.

It is addressed in Season 8 where we see rogue slayers as well as the slayers who fight the good fight with Buffy.

I still get verklempt just talking about the scene where the girls get powered up. I work on the issue of refugee and immigrant women’s rights and building on their inner strengths, so that scene of potentials tapping into their inner power really speaks to me.

To me the choice isn’t about being super-powered or not, it’s about being in control of yourself. You potentials (and every other woman/girl?) no longer rely on anyone else to define your destiny – the choice is “be who you want when you want”. I know that doesn’t quite marry up with the montage during the empowerment but it makes more sense to me that way. I have problems a-plenty with the finish of S7 but I’m not so bothered by “the choice.”

No, I asked [Buffy creator Joss Whedon] to kill me, so there was no problem there,” said Caulfield, “I wasn’t expecting him to kill me in a…um…scene, I thought I’d get, I dunno, a little bit more love. No, but I wanted to die, I thought it would be poetic.

I thought she’d get a little more love too.

Buffy Season 8 addresses the issues arising from Buffy’s ‘empowerment spell’.

The “Spike’s death” fake-out had no resonance for me because by the time the episode aired, WB was already promoting Spike joining the cast of Angel. So it was just a summer death, and everyone who’d been paying attention to WB promos already knew it. In any case, the death lacked dramatic impact because it was so random: “Here, Spike, wear this amulet that might do something sometime and, oh, look, a completely unexpected deus ex machina that turns you into living sunlight at just the right moment to bail us out after my tactically idiotic plan very predictably fails, and then it inexplicably craters Sunnydale. Whaddaya know?” I had similar problems with the Slayer empowerment deus ex machina, and the Angel delivering a random magic device from another show (which itself was handed to him by Wolfram and Hart), and the Scythe just being dropped in their laps … I can’t even tell if Buffy won any kind of victory here, and if she did, she certainly didn’t earn it.

Your point about empowering all the Slayers in the world without so much as a “by your leave” was spot-on. Sure, Buffy said “here’s the part where you make a choice,” and those who weren’t there didn’t get to choose … but really, neither did those who WERE there. They could chose to join Operation Mass Suicide In The Hellmouth or get out of town, but getting Slayer-charged was an all-or-nothing deal. Dissenters couldn’t bow out from being turned into superpowered demon magnets.

Joss couldn’t have a happy ending while killing a major character. Anya’s death eliminated any chance of a “happy ending” for Anya fans. Plus, the way it was done was completely disrespectful to the characters and (IMO) the viewers — Anya got the crappiest death scene of any major Joss character, ever, and besides, it was a death that didn’t make sense. Why were Anya and Andrew even IN that fight? “Anya, we’re expecting some ubervamps to get through because we didn’t station anyone at the entrance to the Hellmouth. You and Andrew don’t know how to fight, so both of you just stand here with swords so they can kill you when we let them out.”

Plotting has never been Joss’s strong suit, but here his utter disregard for even basic story logic left me feeling empty, totally disappointed, glad that this series was finally over, and wishing it had ended a couple seasons earlier.