That’s it. The end. And what an end it was.

By the time Angel said, “Well, personally, I’ve always wanted to slay a dragon,” I was sobbing — half laughing with joy, half crying from grief. Where the ending of “Chosen” just left me with a general feeling of relief and joy, where the only things to make me wistful was the cold knowledge that this was the end of “Buffy”, that there’d be no more Buffy, no more Willow, no more Xander, the ending of “Not Fade Away” has left me completely drained, and an emotional wreck.

Sure, the death of Wesley didn’t reduce me to tears in the way that those of Tara or Fred did, but I suspect that is because I knew that this was the last episode, and so I’ll never really get a chance to miss him. The rest of the episode, though… enormous amounts of sadness.

Because, you know? There really is a hole in the world after this.

Okay, that was what I had to say after watching the episode itself. Since then I’ve watched co-writer and director Jeffrey Bell’s commentaries, as well as the special features on this disc. Neither of which really had anything of particular interest in them, with the possible exception of someone (either Bell or Whedon) describing Gunn as “half-dead”, which is interesting as he apparently shows up in one of the Angel/Spike comics that take place after this, looking like post-vineyard Xander. However, I don’t know how much emphasis one should put on this comment, since he only said “half-dead”, and anything beyond that would be speculation. Like Bell said, the important thing isn’t what happened after the episode/show ended, but rather that Angel and his fellows went out fighting, and that if they survived they’d find some other fight.

Also, I want to mention how much I love the sequence where it’s shown how the characters have the day off. It says quite a lot about them, I think, how they choose to spend what might be their last day alive. And how what — with the, again, possible exception of Gunn — they choose to do is so obvious, yet so surprising and fitting. Awesomely done, that.