30 Days of Buffy the Vampire Slayer | Day 16: Something That You Wish Had Never Happened
What happens in “Hell’s Bells” is understandable. Xander gets cold feet. Given the bits and bobs of information we’d received about his parents’ marriage and his shitty childhood, it is absolutely understandable that he’d be worried about making the same mistakes. I am with “Hell’s Bells” up to the point where Xander calls the wedding off. How that episode should have ended? Xander realizes that it doesn’t have to be like that, that he’s not going to make the same mistakes as his parents, that he can give Anya the bright future his father never gave his mother. What a huge, important character moment that could have been. Instead, he leaves her, things get even sadder during an insanely sad season, and the group becomes even more frayed. There was some good stuff mined from it later on, but if I could change any one moment over the course of the series, that’s the one I would change.
