Buffy the Vampire Slayer Wanted To Mislead Fans From the Beginning

To contextualize this Buffy the Vampire Slayer story, it’s important to review just who Jesse was and the role he played in the series premiere. Jesse McNally is introduced as a close friend of Willow and Xander when Buffy transfers to Sunnydale High. In some ways, his character is an echo of Xander: he has an unreciprocated crush on Cordelia and is a sucker for a pretty face, something that leads to his downfall.

In the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series premiere, Jesse gets seduced by Darla and taken to the Master, who turns the young human into a vampire. At this point, he’s still crushing on Cordelia but mostly serves as an evil henchman trying to complete a ritual known as the Harvest that would free the Master from a magical prison and unleash his terror (not to mention that nasty Kool-Aid mouth) onto an unsuspecting world.

Introducing Jesse as a core member of the cast before transforming and killing him was one of many surprises in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer pilot. The reveal of Darla as a vampire was similarly shocking, and the entire show is built around the surprising premise that Buffy, who looks like your typical horror movie victim, is secretly a mystical warrior. However, Buffy creator Joss Whedon eventually wanted to make the death of Jesse the biggest surprise by including him in the pilot’s opening credits.

According to Whedon, he wanted Jesse actor Eric Balfour to appear in the opening credits for the first Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode because it would “shake people up, and really confuse them if I had someone who appeared to be a regular get killed right in the first episode.” Why not go through with this ambitious idea, though? Upon further examination, Whedon realized that “it seemed too time-consuming and expensive to do two credit sequences.”

While the death of Jesse was shocking all on its own, Whedon notably got to pull off a version of this deception for season 6 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Amber Benson (who played Willow’s lover and fellow witch Tara) had just been added to the main cast, and she appeared for the first and only time in the opening credits for “Seeing Red.” That was the same episode where Tara was brutally murdered by Warren, kicking off Willow’s surprise turn as that season’s Big Bad.

In retrospect, the shocking death of Tara makes us grateful that Avengers director Joss Whedon didn’t pull the credits stunt with Jesse in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer premiere. For one thing, his death didn’t need anything else to be properly shocking; for another thing, the death of the beloved character Tara was far more impactful than the death of Jesse, and adding her to the credits right before she died was a great way to pull the rug out from under audiences (especially the ‘shippers). 

Now that we’ve been properly re-traumatized by Tara’s death, we’re going to be working on our “Willow did nothing wrong” t-shirt for the rest of the day.