The episode continues the emphasis on the consequences of actions. Spike takes the time to explain to Dawn that what he and Anya did was wrong. This is the first and only episode where
Amber Benson (Tara) appears in the main title credits, and is also her death episode.
Joss Whedon had long wanted to kill off a major character the first time they joined the main credits. Originally he indicated that he wanted
Eric Balfour who played Jesse in "
Welcome to the Hellmouth", and "
The Harvest" to be added to the beginning credits to add the shock that a main cast character could die unexpectedly, but due to budget constraints he could not be added at the time. Whedon also saw Tara's death as necessary to further Willow's character; she had to deal with her dark powers, but nothing short of Tara's death would allow them to come out so forcefully. Tara had become popular among fans, and Whedon and series writer
David Fury decided that her death would elicit a strong response, something that Whedon felt sure was the correct course to take. He was unprepared, however, for how forcefully viewers reacted to Tara's death. Fans were so upset that some stopped watching. Because the death came at the end of an episode where Willow and Tara were portrayed in bed between sexual encounters, critics accused Whedon of implying that lesbian sex should be punishable by death, a familiar trope in film. Producers were inundated with mail from people—women especially—who expressed their anger, sadness, and frustration with the writing team. Series writer and producer
Marti Noxon was unable to read some of the mail because it was so distressing, but she counted the response as a natural indication that television simply had few strong female role models, and no lesbian representation. Benson defended Whedon in 2007, saying he "is 100 percent behind the
LGBT community. I know this for a fact." Author Rhonda Wilcox writes that Tara's death is made more poignant by her earthy naturalness representing the "fragility of the physical". Roz Kaveney comments that Tara's murder is "one of the most upsetting moments of the show's seven seasons", Kaveney concurs with the opinion that the series avoided playing a cliché, "proving that it is possible for a queer character to die in popular culture without that death being the surrogate vengeance of the straight world". In the DVD commentary,
James Marsters said that filming the scene in which Spike attempts to rape Buffy was one of the hardest he ever had to do. He has since said that he will never do such a scene again. That scene has also generated controversy between fans and the writers, but Marsters and writer
Jane Espenson said that the moment was necessary to set up a powerful motivation for Spike's quest to gain a soul. Marsters would later say in 2012 that he understood the idea to have come from "a female writer, [who] had a situation in her life where she was and her boyfriend were breaking up and she decided if she just made love to him one more time, that they wouldn't break up. She ended up trying to force herself on him and decided to write about that. The thing is, if you flip it and make it a man forcing himself on a woman, I believe it becomes a whole different thing... I'm not really sure it expressed what the author was intending and on that score it was not successful." In her essay on sex and violence in
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Gwyn Symonds calls the scene itself "technically and emotionally intricate" in that, unlike most depictions of attempted rape, it "encourages a complex audience engagement with both... the perpetrator and the victim." The action was "very carefully choreographed" according to James Marsters, ==Cast==