With Issue #5 of Buffy Season 8, we come to the last Joss Whedon issue in a while as Brian Vaughn will follow afterward with a Faith mini-arc. Before that in the balance comes The Chain, a one shot issue, a one time story about a dead slayer we never met. The Chain reminds us of what Joss Whedon does best, tell the small stories, the personal stories and connects them to the bigger picture. That was at the root of the success of Buffy and that is what The Chain encapsulates, the life and choosing of a single slayer, her fight against evil and her death without us ever knowing her name because her fight takes place in the shadow of another name, that of Buffy Summers herself.

Where Buffy was once the young girl on the run, struggling to get through High School, make it back home by climbing up the tree and through her window before curfew and patrol and fight vampires, she is now an icon, the leader of an army of Slayers and the bearer of the weight of being the epitome of Slayerness (a word I can safely only use in a Buffy review.) And that's the big picture now and it's what Buffy Season 7 was about and what Buffy Season 8 is really about, Buffy as the lonely girl struggling between human connections and her duty, between her role as a newer and greater Chosen One and her own needs and wishes.

But in the shadow of the big picture are the thousands of ordinary girls who were instantly called, chosen to become Slayers. Girls like the unknown slayer who is the main character in The Chain, sent to impersonate Buffy not by dancing in a nightclub in Rome with the Immortal, like the other unnamed Buffy impersonatrix in Angel did, but by descending down far into the earth into what appears to be a faery kingdom with actual tinkerbell like fairies (but with green skin and lesbian egg laying tendencies) and giant talking caterpillars but grim and harsh all the same to lead a war against a rampaging horde from underneath.

If in Buffy the Vampire Slayer's first season finale, Buffy initially backed out at the thought of going to her death, the nameless slayer does not, knowing what is likely to come she nevertheless embraces it in an epic battle far beneath the earth where no one will know what she did and how she died but the clans of the strange faery folk she fights among. But then she has something that the original Buffy did not yet have, the power of her own name. In "Anne" when Buffy fled her destiny and moved to L.A. making a living by waiting tables and leaving behind her name to use her own middle name, Anne, by reclaiming it in the demon dungeon, she was also reclaiming her own innate power, the power of the slayer's identity. That identity has now become iconic.

Buffy has moved beyond being a slayer to being an icon, the name of a general that people follow. Where the original slayer reclaimed a lonely and embattled identity, the nameless slayer of The Chain subsumes her own identity to that of Buffy's. Is that a positive or a negative development? Did the ominous ending of the previous issue have a point when it suggested that Buffy herself might be a threat as she detaches from the human race and decides to rule and put things right. The final incarnation of the First Evil had been Buffy herself almost suggesting that in the end Buffy was the ultimate "Big Bad." There is of course no way to know and it is all speculation at this point.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight The Chain gives us fragments more of how the world dealt with the sudden influx of slayers, showing a cheesy commercial (probably produced by Andrew) telling Slayers how to get in touch with the New Slayer Order. We have brief scenes of Giles and Andrew and some of the others slayers that have been developed but none of them really matter.

At the end of the day The Chain is the brief story of a young girl's half-life who died for a cause. And Buffy Season 8 continues redefining heroism beyond gender so that the Nameless Slayer's line about "dying like a woman" recontextualizes ideas of gender and heroism. It is not a story about the larger story of Season 8 except where it intrudes. Like The Zeppo or Superstar, Buffy Season 8 The Chain tells the story of a supporting character who would generally go unnoticed. Yet what The Zeppo handled implicitly, The Chain makes explicit with the idea of "The Chain", the connecting link between us all shaped by the bonds of friendship and loyalty that define our duties, our obligations and our characters, the chain which binds us all. That chain leads the Nameless Slayer from her life in High School to battling evil to descending down deep into the earth and to wind up dead at the hands of a demon, without ever regretting any of it.

The chain that binds, binds us all.