Goodbye, Dawn

Michelle Trachtenberg has passed. For a particular generation of television fans she will forever be Dawn, Buffy’s younger sister/magical macguffin on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It’s a shame that she won’t be around for the revival. I never watched Gossip Girl, but I also remember her from EuroTrip (funnier than it has any right to be) and briefly on Six Feet Under. Fran Hoepfner has a tribute at the Vulture:

In the final moments of Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s fifth-season premiere, the titular slayer (Sarah Michelle Gellar) heads up to her room to grab her things before going on a date with her hunky college boyfriend, Riley (Marc Blucas). Standing in Buffy’s sunlit bedroom is Dawn (Michelle Trachtenberg), her little sister, a scenario otherwise completely innocuous except that, for the first four years of the show, Buffy doesn’t have a little sister.

Dawn’s retconning — a jarring, bizarre moment in an often jarring, bizarre show — was crucial to the moving and wonderful fifth season of Buffy. The season’s Big Bad is Glory (Clare Kramer), an evil goddess searching for a Key (in any shape or form) so she can return to her hell dimension, a process that would then unleash hell upon earth. The Key’s protectors, however, turned the object into a person — Dawn — assuming that someone who is related by blood to the Slayer might have the ultimate protection on earth. Dawn’s arcs were never Buffy at its strongest, but Trachtenberg shined through even her character’s weakest moment, proving herself as an actor and an essential element of pathos by the series’ end.

It is a terrible shame when we lose someone short of two score years.

Photo credit: By dodge challenger1 – All of the celebrities that drove the All-New Dodge Challenger, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19306419