Posted in: Preview, streaming, TV | Tagged: Amber Benson, btvs, buffy, joss whedon, tara, willow

Buffy: Amber Benson Discusses Tara's Death, Not Returning for Season 7

Where else can you find Sarah Michelle Gellar, Charisma Carpenter, Emma Caulfield, Amber Benson, James Marsters, Anthony Head, Seth Green, Marc Blucas, Nicholas Brendon, Danny Strong, Tom Lenk, Bianca Lawson, Julie Benz, Clare Kramer, K. Todd Freeman, and Sharon Ferguson; and writers Douglas Petrie, Jane Espenson & Drew Z. Greenberg offering dozens of heartwarming, heartbreaking & enlightening personal perspectives on Buffy the Vampire Slayer? You need to look no further than Evan Ross Katz's Into Every Generation a Slayer Is Born: How Buffy Staked Our Hearts (you can purchase it here), which we have been going through word-by-word and line-by-line. And as we've mentioned before, one thing that separates this work from others is the access that Katz had to those in the know who helped him craft an examination that addresses both the franchise's immense impact on pop culture and society as well as a number of its failings (including directly addressing the abuse accusations leveled at Joss Whedon by many connected with the show in 2021).

How Tara (Benson) and Willow's (Hannigan) relationship was handled still remains a serious topic among the fandom. On one hand, the couple was praised by the LGBTQ+ community for bringing a lesbian relationship into prime time and having it involve two major characters. And then Whedon had "amazing news" to share with Benson while filming the Season 5 finale… news that would leave Tara dead and Willow consumed with magic-fueled rage & heartbreak. But while Whedon may have thought the idea was "great" from a storyline perspective, for Benson it spoke to a very "blinders on" worldview that Whedon had that didn't allow him to look through the eyes of others and empathize with how such a decision could impact those already underrepresented,

"He was so excited from a story point of view. He was really interested in the addiction storyline for Willow, and I think he intuitively understood that the only way for an addict to hit rock bottom is to lose the thing that's most important to them. And so in his mind I know it was never a thought about how her death was going to impact the audience in a very negative way," Benson explained during her interview with Katz. "You want to talk about entitlement? There are just things that people don't think about because it's not in your world purview. And so I think if he would have had some connection to that world, I think he would have done things differently. But because he's a cisgender white man, that never occurred to him."

So the sixth season found Tara struck down by a stray bullet intended for Buffy (Gellar) and fired by big-bad-wannabe Warren (Adam Busch), with the storyline continuing as we all know it did. But it was clear that the writers & producers weren't aware of the level of pushback the move would receive even in pre-social media craze days. It was bad enough that a beloved character was being written off in such a random manner (stray bullet), but to kill one-half of a positive, loving lesbian relationship on prime time television at a time when there were none to this extent simply as a means to moving a storyline forward was seen by many as sending the message that LGBTQ characters were "disposable." In fact, Whedon had even gone public at San Diego Comic-Con in 2007 to offer details on how he wanted to bring Tara back in the seventh season (with Greenberg confirmed Whedon's plan to bring Benson's character back. As for why the return never happened, "conflicting schedules" was always the reason given. But while talking with Katz, Benson offered some additional layers to her reason for not returning.

"This is the first time I'm talking about this. I had had some issues with somebody on the show, and it had kind of come to a head as I was getting ready to leave. Leaving the show was sad because there are some of the crew and the writers and some of the cast that I just adore, but I had made my peace with that person and the show, and I was done: 'I'm leaving everything in a good place. I don't need to come back,'" Benson explains. "And then all the shit hit the fan and Joss realized he had messed up. I mean this is a time when people are, like, sending faxes to the production office, like this was a big, horrible thing, and it was devastating to a lot of people. And I think it had hit Joss that he made a mistake, that he had been short-sighted. I truly, for all of his faults and for all of the things about him that are frustrating, I don't think he ever meant to hurt the LGBTQ+ community. He just wasn't thinking. I can truly, from the bottom of my heart, say [that] this was nothing intentional. This was a thoughtless error. But I didn't want to come back. He really wanted me to come back and we just couldn't come to an agreement on it. And most of that was my schedule. I was gonna miss going to England, not being able to direct 'The Ghosts of Albion' if I had said yes."

But along with scheduling and having made peace with moving on from "Buffy," Benson also didn't have much faith that a second go-around for Tara would end any better than it did the first time. "I didn't really trust what was going to happen to the character. I think that's something if you've talked to some other cast, people are like, 'Yeah, I came back… and then he just did what he wanted. Even though he told me that he wasn't going to kill me in this way, he killed me in that way.' I just didn't feel super trusting of the situation. And I felt like people had already been really hurt by this. And I'm not the writer. I can't decide what's going to happen to this character. I don't have the reins. And so between the schedule, and not really having a hundred percent trust in what was going to happen and some other things, it just didn't work out," Benson explained. And while she understands & feels for those who loved Willow & Tara, Benson also sees the situation as a teachable moment for others to not repeat those same mistakes. "I'm sad for people who loved the character and wanted to have her back. But I also think when you make a decision like Joss made and kill this character and not understand what was going to happen, sometimes you have to let the error lie so that people can learn from it."

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