Trivia / Buffy The Vampire Slayer S 6 E 19 Seeing Red

• Completely Different Title:
  • Portuguese: Final Trágico (Tragic Ending)
  • German: Warrens Rache (Warren's Revenge)
  • French: Rouge passion (Passion Red)
• Creator Backlash:
  • James Marsters absolutely hated having to do the Attempted Rape scene. After doing it, he had his contract updated so that he would never partake in such scenes again.
    I do understand why they did it but I still think it was a mistake. The truth is the writers on Buffy were being incredibly brave. Joss was asking each of them to come up with their most painful day, their most humiliating day, the day that they made the biggest fools of themselves or the day they hurt someone else the most, and then put a patina of fangs and blood over that. Basically that's why I think the series is so delightful, because of the bravery of the writers on that score. One of the writers, a female writer, 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. Even though Buffy is super strong, even though she kicks him through a wall at the end of it, how it plays to the audience changes when you change the sex that way. It worked out and everything but I’m not really sure it expressed what the author was intending and on that score it was not successful. I think it was a big risk for everybody but I think if she could have found a female character to express that with it would have gotten closer to what she was trying to say, and I'm not really sure that we got there with that episode.
  • Marti Noxon later admitted that killing Tara off was a mistake, while Amber Benson wasn't happy with the nature of her death.
• Deleted Scene: A line was cut where Buffy tells Xander that it's a little early in the morning for him to be drinking:
  Xander: The tyranny of the clock must be overthrown.
  Buffy: So how many coup d'états is that?
  Xander: General Cirrhosis has seized control of the Liver Parliament.
• Edited for Syndication: Several scenes were cut out during its first airing on The BBC in the UK. The attempted rape of Buffy was cut from where she falls and hits her back on the shower to where she finally kicks him away. The exit wound appearing on Tara’s chest and her blood being splattered on Willow’s shirt was also cut and restarted from where Tara says, "Your shirt". Warren snaps a demon’s neck, but the scenes were changed so that only the sound effect was heard.
• Enforced Method Acting: In order to get Spike's final scene filmed the way the writers intended it, James Marsters was told Spike was going to get the chip out of his head and return to being evil. Naturally, Marsters wasn't happy when he read the final script.
• One-Take Wonder: The bathroom scene was done in one shot due to James Marsters being uncomfortable with it.
• Reality Subtext: Warren accidentally kills Tara. At the time Adam Busch and Amber Benson were dating, and Joss Whedon actually told Adam, "You're gonna kill your girlfriend," to which the reply was "Warren gets a girlfriend?" "No, I mean your real girlfriend." They split in 2009, but remain friends. Ironically, their characters never interact once, not even in the scene where he accidentally shoots her.
• Similarly Named Works: There are also episodes/chapters of Arrow, The Flash (2014), Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, Ms. Marvel (2022), Power Rangers Beast Morphers, RWBY, and Rainbow Magic: Scarlett the Garnet Fairy.
• Write What You Know: According to James Marsters, the bathroom scene was inspired by an experience of one of the writers.
  In the case of that scene, one of the female writers, in college, had been broken up with by her boyfriend, and decided that if she went over to his place, and if they made love one more time, everything would be fine. And so she tried to do that, and really kind of jumped the guy, and he had to push her off and say, "No, you have to leave now".

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