Look, any Buffy fan will admit that season six isn’t the show’s best, with weak villains, grim, questionable storylines, and a character death you will never recover from (RIP Tara, you deserved so much better than the writers trying to replace you with Kennedy in season seven). However, the brightest spot of this season--and possibly of the whole show--is “Once More, With Feeling”.

A full-scale musical episode could have gone so, so wrong, even for a show that already pushed the envelope with a silent episode. But with witty banter and lyrics, songs that move the plot along and dissect each character, and a cast that goes all in, it goes so, so right.

In the words of Stefon, this episode has everything: explosive solos about bunnies. Mustard removed from shirts. Heartbreaking confessions from a woman just returned from the dead.

What’s truly amazing is the character study packed into one song-and-dance-filled hour. Forced to sing their deepest feelings under control of a demon named Sweet, Buffy and her friends bare their souls to us, finally confessing the secrets they’ve been keeping all season. It’s the real cleverness of the songs in this episode--their reasoning is worked perfectly into the plot, and instead of avoiding the character’s issues with catchy songs, it’s the same catchy songs that end the deceit and force the characters to communicate their problems, to show themselves to each other and to us.

Xander and Anya, fresh off announcing their engagement, share their fears about marriage. Tara (wearing a Medieval-style dress for reasons that are unmentioned, but welcome) sings sweetly about her love for Willow, before a sorrowful reprise where she realizes Willow is messing with her memory so she forgets about Willow using too much magic. Dawn continues stealing in the hopes someone will notice her. Giles grapples with leaving Buffy so she can truly come into her own and his own fatherly love for her. Spike pleads for Buffy to let him rest in peace while knowing she is the only thing that makes him feel alive. And Buffy sings about her struggles to feel alive, about how she’s just going through the motions in her life, before dropping the real bomb on her friends: while they thought they were saving her from some hell dimension after she died to save the world in season five, they really pulled her out of heaven.

The acting in this episode is phenomenal, but the moment when Buffy’s friends realize that they’ve brought her from heaven into a living hell, no matter how good their intentions, is the rawest, realest moment in the episode. It’s what makes this so much more than a gimmick episode, what exposes the real strength of Buffy, both the character and the show: people still wanting to carry on and live in a world that often feels like a living hell.

It’s this that pulls me back to this episode time and time again, that make it an instant cure to a bad day, especially now (*gestures at entire world*). No matter how bad things get, there is a group of people still fighting evil and trying to make the world a better place. Trying to live.

After Buffy makes her confession and is about to combust in her dance routine (the consequence of too much singing and dancing, because this is Buffy and there has to be some threat to life), it’s a simple reminder from Spike that makes her see what life truly is: “Life’s not a song. Life isn’t bliss. Life is just this … it’s living.”

It’s living.

Ironic words from an undead man to an undead woman. But it is these words that ring the most true. It is these words that make me want to fight through bad days, through my own anxieties, through the world. Life is living. Through the good and bad, the demons and angels, life is living. And no matter what happens, episodes like this make me want to.

Olivia Martello lives in central New York with her family. She has previously had writing published in Voyage: A Young Adult Literary Journal. When she’s not writing or doing work for her Master’s in English, she enjoys reading, watching excessive amounts of drag queen lip syncs, and baking.