In the final moments of Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s fifth-season premiere, the titular slayer (Sarah Michelle Gellar) heads up to her room to grab her things before going on a date with her hunky college boyfriend, Riley (Marc Blucas). Standing in Buffy’s sunlit bedroom is Dawn (Michelle Trachtenberg), her little sister, a scenario otherwise completely innocuous except that, for the first four years of the show, Buffy doesn’t have a little sister.
Dawn’s retconning — a jarring, bizarre moment in an often jarring, bizarre show — was crucial to the moving and wonderful fifth season of Buffy. The season’s Big Bad is Glory (Clare Kramer), an evil goddess searching for a Key (in any shape or form) so she can return to her hell dimension, a process that would then unleash hell upon earth. The Key’s protectors, however, turned the object into a person — Dawn — assuming that someone who is related by blood to the Slayer might have the ultimate protection on earth. Dawn’s arcs were never Buffy at its strongest, but Trachtenberg shined through even her character’s weakest moment, proving herself as an actor and an essential element of pathos by the series’ end.
After her emergence, Dawn gets saddled with tedious subplots: a kleptomaniac streak, bad boyfriends, and an overeager tendency to put herself in danger. So: a little sister. Even as sloppy or one-sided as Dawn’s subplots could be, Trachtenberg always transcended the material through her innate chemistry with Gellar. (Watching the show as a preteen, I assumed she was Gellar’s real-life little sister.) Their arguments, frequent and fiery, came to define how these characters love each other. In “Forever,” when Dawn tries to raise their mother from the dead, the two go head-to-head once again, with Dawn finally articulating what she has felt all season: “It’s so obvious you don’t want me around.” Gellar’s eyes soften, holding back tears. For all that Dawn made herself unwelcome, she is family, no matter what.
Trachtenberg, whose death at 39 was announced on February 26, spent much of her career playing the most likable version of a precocious brat, a know-it-all who gets away with just about everything thanks to her doe eyes and charisma. Like several of her characters, Trachtenberg seemed wiser than her years; when she popped up on The Rosie O’Donnell Show at the age of 10 to promote Harriet the Spy, the two seemed like a natural double act, trading jokes and barbs. Trachtenberg’s confidence and playful sense of humor carried her into her early 20s, when she emerged as one of the industry’s most reliable stars, appearing in Mysterious Skin and Gossip Girl. Trachtenberg felt like someone you knew: She was pretty, smart, and good-humored, one step ahead of whatever material was put in front of her.
On Buffy, however, more than in Harriet the Spy or on Gossip Girl, Trachtenberg could showcase a rich emotional depth. Dawn, despite being a teenager, was new to the world — no more than 3 years old in human form when the show came to its conclusion. She wore that sensitivity on her sleeve, suffering not only from whatever demons, vampires, and hellmouths the Scooby Gang fought but also the pain of learning how the world works.
“The Body,” a fifth-season episode in which Buffy’s beloved mother, Joyce, dies unexpectedly of a brain tumor, marked a dramatic shift in the tone of the show. Here was a death that was permanent in the mundane sort of way. Though Joyce’s absence haunts the rest of the show, Dawn in particular cannot bear to let her mother go. In “Conversations With Dead People,” one of Buffy’s best final-season episodes, all the characters go on their own separate spooky journeys. While Willow (Alyson Hannigan) has an unnerving conversation with a dead student in the library and Buffy runs into an old classmate turned vampire, Dawn sits at home alone with various electronic devices turning on and off, thudding and clanking in the dark. Those scenes are right out of Poltergeist, and Dawn soon comes to think that whatever presence is in their house is preventing Joyce from visiting her. Dawn fights off the ghost, bleeding and shrieking into the void, pouring her heart into the battle. When the presence leaves, Joyce does appear at last, bathed in golden light shining down on her daughter’s face. But the ghost of Joyce is the malicious presence and warns Dawn that Buffy will betray her. Trachtenberg lends her character’s grief a moving desperation — Dawn desperately wants time not to have passed.
Her best episode, “Potential,” which came not long after “Conversations With Dead People,” sees Dawn briefly believe that she could be a potential slayer in waiting. For a character often defined by her insecurities and lack of confidence, “Potential” sees Dawn at her most determined, right up until she realizes the potential slayer is someone else. As the potentials go off with Buffy for training, Xander (Nicholas Brendon) takes Dawn aside to commiserate over their lack of specialness: neither has powers, neither has incredible strength. They are miserably, permanently human. And yet — “You’re not special,” he tells Dawn. “You’re extraordinary.” Dawn processes the compliment briefly, eyes welling with tears, and then does what she does best: She carries on.