Nicholas Brendon Was Always Buffy The Vampire Slayer’s Secret Weapon
The late actor injected the perfect amount of relatability to the series.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer may have been about the once-in-a-generation slayer described in its opening narration, but it has always been an ensemble piece. The “Scooby Gang” surrounding Buffy is just as crucial to every mission, whether through Giles’s arcane research, Willow’s witchy knowledge, or Angel's or Spike’s lived experience as vampires.
Then, there’s Xander. Buffy’s “Xander-shaped friend” may have been the most underrated part of the Scooby Gang, but his deceptively complex character bolstered the cast. Actor Nicholas Brendon, who passed away recently at the age of 54, portrayed Xander with a pang of sympathy that made him an essential part of the series. In Season 3, we finally got to see him take center stage in an episode that subverted the very premise of the show itself and established a brand new TV technique.
Xander buys a snazzy new car in the hopes of becoming cool.
“The Zeppo,” Season 3 Episode 13 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, is barely about Buffy at all. Instead, Xander is the focus. But his issue isn’t the new “techno-pagan” teacher or a strange spell, it’s a lot more mundane: he doesn’t think he’s cool. After Cordelia calls him the “Zeppo” of the Scooby Gang, after Zeppo Marx, the least popular of the Marx brothers, he decides to become cool no matter the cost. He buys a car and befriends Jack, the extremely popular high school bully.
Jack takes Xander to the rest of his friends, who are all zombies. Still, Xander is determined to become cool, so he follows them as they embark on an evil scheme. Eventually, he comes to his senses and realizes what’s going on when Jack tries to “initiate” Xander by murdering him. Xander uses Oz’s werewolf transformation to defeat Jack and the rest of the gang, and goes back to his normal life.
That’s a pretty normal plot for an episode of Buffy, but what makes this one different is the structure. Xander gets into all kinds of hijinks in this show, but they are usually either subplots or messes that Buffy needs to clean up. But in “The Zeppo,” not only does Buffy not even feature in the main plot, but she’s relegated to the subplot, a B-story about stopping a sisterhood of witches from re-opening the Hellmouth. Even at the end of the episode, when Buffy and the gang are recovering from defeating them, Xander chooses not to reveal what he’s been up to — instead, he takes it as reassurance that he’s not useless; he can absolutely hold his own.
Xander’s new friends turn out to be a horde of zombies.
“The Zeppo” was written by Dan Vebber, who is best known for writing comedy scripts for shows like The Simpsons, Futurama, and American Dad. But this story is touchingly realistic, grasping onto incredibly relatable teenage impulses like social climbing, peer pressure, and feeling inadequate. That said, it’s also hilarious, and Brendon tap dances on the line between the two tones like he’s filming “Once More With Feeling.”
This episode inspired plenty of similar episodes across sci-fi television, and these sort of spotlight episodes became commonplace on shows like The Leftovers and Breaking Bad. Russell T. Davies, showrunner of Doctor Who, cited it as an inspiration for the episode “Love and Monsters,” which barely included the Doctor at all. “Love and Monsters” is considered one of the worst episodes of Doctor Who, but that just proves why “The Zeppo” is so brilliant. It takes the perfect combination of character dynamics, acting prowess, and introspective script to tell this kind of story, and “The Zeppo” proved how it can be done.
