If you're following the show on BBC2 you may want to stop reading now, for this is the week that 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' makes it's eagerly awaited return to Sky One, with the two-part season six opener 'Bargaining'. And eagerly awaited is putting it mildly - the last series ended with out heroine dead and buried, having saved the world from yet another impending apocalypse.

'Bargaining' paints with a similar emotional palette (dark to darker), as the Scooby Gang battle vampires through a haz of grief. They're aided by a painful reminder of what they've lost: Spike's Buffybot. Willow has rebooted and android in order to fool demons that Sunnydale is still protected by a slayer (fat chance), and also to prevent the authorities from taking orphaned Dawn into care. Plus is give Sarah Michelle Gellar something to do until her human character is raised from the dead.

Ah yes, resurrection. Willow, powerful wiccan that she's become, is convinced that she can not only perform the highly dangerous spell which will bring her friend back, but that she also has moral justification. However she needs the support of Xander, Anya and Tara, sparking some unusually bitter exchanges. The friction is made worse by the quartet's reluctant agreement to not tell dawn, Spike or dear old Giles, who has decided to return to England.

Although it was triggered by Anthony Stewart Head's decision to return home, Giles's tear-jerking departure fits perfectly with season six's overall theme: dragging the Scooby Gang into the adult world. Willow is now the group's supervisor, a change signified by Alyson Hannigan taking Head's slot at the end of the opening credits. It'd end-of-an-era stuff. There are changes off-screen too, this being the first season premier not to have been written or directed by the show's creator. Joss Whedon. But the great man's sense of the perverse is still in evidence: when it finally happens. Buffy's resurrection is as disturbing a seqeunce as you'll ever see on prime-time television.

Manish Agarawal