Mister Furious
Writer David Fury on Angel, Buffy, and brains.
      by Lisa Kincaid

Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) will face another big battle in Fury's "Primeval".

"I've just handed in my first draft of the big season climax [of Buffy] entitled 'Primeval'," Fury reveals. "It's the huge battle episode that ends every season, although this one will actually be followed by an intimate coda episode written and directed by Joss, who wanted a break from the huge battle episodes."

Fury acts as Supervising Producer on Buffy these days, and his previous writing credits on the show were for "Go Fish", in which the members of the swim team start turning into fish-people; "Helpless", in which Buffy loses her super-Slayer powers; "Choices", where everybody's trying to figure out where their futures will lead; this season's Halloween episode, "Fear, Itself"; the apocalyptic "Doomed"; and the Initiative-heavy "The I In Team".

Of all of these episodes, only a few have really had the kind of strange and creepy creatures that many of us grew up being terrified by, but one of Fury's memorable monsters was in "Fear, Itself", with Grachnar the fear demon.

"We had earlier talked about Buffy doing battle with some fearsome demon at the end [of 'Fear, Itself']," Fury says. "But I had thought from the beginning that the more appropriate metaphor for fear is that we tend to allow things to seem bigger than they are. I think I originally pitched that when the demon appeared, it was just an ugly little bug that Buffy steps on. But Joss wanted Grachnar to speak to the Scoobies, a funnier idea, since it got us to a chipmunk-voiced mini-De shouting, 'I am the bringing of terror! Fear me!' And Xander's: 'Who's a little Fear Demon?' taunt."

Xander (Nicholas Brendon) joins the swim team in "Go Fish".

Looking farther back, at his premiere Buffy episode, "Go Fish", the influence of Fury's childhood viewing habits come into play. "When it was time to pitch a freelance idea to Joss and David Greenwalt, we [Fury and then-writing-partner Hampton] knew it had to be a stand-alone episode -- something that didn't need to further the season arc. The show had already done a spin on various classic Universal monsters. The Mummy was spun into 'Inca Mummy Girl'; Frankenstein with 'Some Assembly Required'; then, of course, Dracula and Wolfman with the vamps and Oz. My personal favorite, as a kid, was The Creature From The Black Lagoon. I had a glow-in-the-dark model of it in my bedroom for much of my formative years.

"Also, I'd been very inspired by an H.P. Lovecraft short story called 'Shadow Over Innsmouth', about New England townspeople who metamorphisize into these horrific half-fish creatures. From there it was a matter of bringing it into a high school setting, hence the introduction of the swim team and the allegory of steroid abuse."

The drug theme came up again in his next pitch, "Helpless", though that one didn't come out quite as Fury's original plan had intended.

"The only one that changed from pitch to finished product would be 'Helpless'," he says, "which was called '18', originally. My original plan for the test Buffy was being put through was a drug or hypnosis-induced hallucination that all of her friends were vampires. That she was all alone. The idea changed when the story for 'The Wish' was broken, in which we see Willow and Xander as vampires. Joss and David G. changed the test to make it about losing her powers, instead."

The episode also contained one of Fury's favorite scenes, in which Giles and Buffy have a confrontation and he admits that he's been poisoning her. Other episodes that hold a special place in his heart are Ty King's "Passion", and Joss Whedon's "Hush" and "Becoming, Part 2".

"I have countless favorite scenes from other episodes," he adds. "The Willow/Oz goodbye scene in 'Wild At Heart'; Buffy killing Angel in 'Becoming, Part 2'; Xander and Cordelia hiding from the maggot guy in 'What's My Line, Part 1'; Buffy getting her Class Protector award at the Prom... too many to name."

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