I think it was a false memory induced by the drug as well. To make Buffy unsure of herself, unsure what is real.

That is entirely possible. I thought that the drug latched on to bits of reality and turned them around on Buffy so she couldn't figure out what was real anymore.

"BUFFY: (tearful) I was only there a couple of weeks. I stopped talking about it, and they let me go. Eventually ... my parents just ... forgot."

There are some earlier posts here about continuity and how Buffy gets sent to an institution. Here's HoyaSaxa's Currently Official Stand on this issue --

1. When Buffy "saw" vampires, she may not have been under the guidance of a Watcher and probably wasn't slaying yet. Remember, in the S1 opener Buffy is having dreams of vamps walking in the night. Perhaps she told her parents about a dream instead of an actual live-fire environment setting.

2. Theroetically, Joyce/Hank's divorce could have been the result of said psychological conditions. Think about it, in one S1 ep. one of Buffy's biggest fears is that her dad won't come get her.

3. Why would the parents "forget" something so disturbing? As I thought about it, I'm going to take a stab and say that continuity -- at least in the view of the principal characters -- has already been altered when the monks created Dawn and uploaded her vitals into the memories of the Scoobies. Maybe on the "bandwidth" of recollection, the monks who formatted the Dawn program had to "overwrite" other segments of people's lives to make Dawn fit in the stream of consciousness.

So there could be a time frame plausible enough to fit Buffy's time in the clinic, and later on there might be an explanation as to why her parents "forgot."

All that said, Joyce's ignorance of Buffy's calling as a Slayer sounds to me a nice writer's trick of conveying a parent's denial of a potentially unflattering truth about a child. Remember in Becoming II, when Buffy comments about the blood having to be washed out of her clothes? I always felt Joyce knew Buffy was the Slayer, but would never bring it up directly. Buffy's admission to Joyce in S2 was like saying "Yes, and the sky is blue!"

I have been watching the early seasons lately wondering what Dawn would have known in the changed history. I would like to think that she was more aware than Joyce about what was really happening.

sj -- see my little theory on Dawn.

Interesting theory. I am not so sure how much we are supposed to think that history has changed, but it does seem that some stuff would have to. I think I am too tired to think my ideas through tonight.

Just FYI: The current 4-shot of the Buffy comic series is about this very thing. It covers what happens when, pre-the Summers' divorce, Buffy gets sent to an institution and how Dawn figures into the whole thing . So far it has been one of the better of the multiple-issue story arcs I've read. But then again, this is a series that just gave us Buffy in Vegas.

HoyaSaxa-

I think that the scenario you imagine under "3" is the ONLY way that Buffy's mental instituition memory makes much sense...aside from that, it seems to me that the writers simply stuck it in there to make it all seem more emotional...the trouble is that I just find it unbelievable that Buffy never told anyone about it. TV shows often invent experiences that their characters had in the past that makes something that they're going through now more emotional; the trouble is that it's usually never mentioned after that episode, and so instead of being emotional and touching it seems clunky and forced (one show that used to do it all the time is the sci-fi show Sliders, but Buffy rarely does it, which is one thing that makes-or made it-great TV.).

I have always been fascinated by the idea of what the first four seasons would have been like w/ Dawn in the picture. It seems like kind of a gip that no one actually remembers the first four seasons having happened exactly as they did in the actual show. Oh well...my theory is that one thing that Dawn's existence also changed is Hank Summers' relationship w/ his family: it seems like as soon as Dawn was introduced, Hank went from being a father who sometimes stayed in touch w/ his daughter to a jerk who ran off to Spain w/ his secretary. Could it be that Dawn actually influences her family's past? It seems plausible to me that Hank could have been overwhelmed by having TWO teenage girls to contend with, and that led the divorce to be messier and him to become more estranged from his family.

I'd chalk that up to Giles and his fellow Watchers not being powerful (or unwise) enough to tamper with the mystical forces behind the Slayer. Medical exams, including a hospital stay in "Killed by Death" and the lengthy trip to a sanitarium revealed in "Normal Again," never revealed anything physically remarkable about Buffy.

Don't they usually expect crazy folk to be stronger than normal? Besides, she was only there for a few weeks, and I doubt she was actively trying to escape. And it's not like they did a full body MRI in "Killed By Death" to scan for structural abnormalities.

As for the Summers parents' permanent vacation in Egypt, if they can parentwank bloodstains in clothing, I'm sure they could do the same for old fantasies about vampires.

Cornelius: Good point about Hank's increased parental suckitude with the advent of Dawn. That might explain a lot.

Strange enough, of all the episodes in S6 that people like to rip on my least favorite is "Normal Again".

For me, "Normal Again" would have been just fine had they left two things out of the episode:

1. Buffy's aforementioned confession about really having been in an institution AND having previously told Joyce and Hank about the vampires. It just totally didn't fit with any previous continuity.

2. The ultra-cheesy ending scene in the clinic. "It wasn't real--or was it? dun dun DUN!

But I liked the rest of the episode. The concept of Buffy having to choose between her crappy reality and an easier, nicer fantasy world was an interesting one, especially since she probably still felt cheated for having been ripped out of heaven.