Every Major Buffy The Vampire Slayer Villain Ranked

“Buffy the Vampire Slayer” is famous for its blend of comedy and drama, silly rubber monster suits, and ’90s dance sequences. But it’s perhaps most famous of all for its villains. That’s not just because they’re super memorable (not all are, but we’ll get there), but also because of how the use of seasonal villains on “Buffy” completely changed the way most serialized TV was written. That format will surely continue in the recently reported “Buffy” sequel series at Hulu.

The concept of the “Big Bad” of a season overshadowing all the smaller “monster of the week” episodes and tying together a cohesive story with a climactic finale every year basically came from “Buffy.” That narrative model, which had worked in various forms in the comic book medium for years, gave the show a distinctive feel on TV in the late ’90s and early 2000s. It also became hugely influential for the whole medium of dramatic television. The villains mattered not just because of great performances or evil plots, but also because of how they were built up and used repeatedly throughout a season. But which “Buffy” Big Bad is the best of the best? That’s what we’re here to figure out.

For the purposes of this extremely scientific ranking, we’re only going to be considering the Big Bad of each of the seven seasons of “Buffy.” No short-term villains like the Judge (though he’s great), no one from the “Angel” spin-off series, and no one from the “Buffy” sequel comics. We also won’t be ranking antiheroes or main characters briefly turned bad, although Faith (Eliza Dushku) and Dark Willow (Alyson Hannigan) certainly get honorable mentions. With all that out of the way, let’s get to the list.

The First Evil is the first and worst villain on our list but the final Big Bad of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” What makes Buffy and co’s series-ending foe such a disappointment? Well, a couple of things. For one, Season 7 as a whole is widely seen as one of the weaker seasons of “Buffy.” While I wouldn’t call it the worst of the bunch, it struggles with the difficult task of bringing a climactic conclusion to the whole series. That might not sound so hard when you have as much material to work with as “Buffy” did at the time, but when you remember how climactic the end of Season 5 is and how uneven the subsequent Season 6 is, you start to understand how Season 7 became so mediocre.

The core concept of the season is that all of the “potential” slayers around the world have gained the powers of the active slayer. Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) then brings them together into a kind of teenage girl superhero team to fight the First Evil, which is exactly what it sounds like. From the Hellmouth beneath her home of Sunnydale, this primordial force wages war against the slayers, primarily through the body of sadistic priest Caleb (Nathan Fillion) but also via various other vessels, including the forms of previous “Buffy” villains.

It’s an interesting idea in concept, but it comes out feeling like those mimic characters from fighting video games — boring and with no real personality of its own. The premise of having Buffy face the sum of all her past enemies had potential, but compared to the other Big Bads of the series, the First is just underwhelming.

“Buffy the Vampire Slayer” Season 4 is the dictionary definition of a mixed bag. You get some of the best comedic material in the entire series from a neutered Spike (James Marsters), but you also get a totally inert romance arc between Buffy and her new college boyfriend Riley (Marc Blucas). You similarly get an incredible three-episode run with “Pangs,” “Something Blue,” and “Hush,” which many consider the creepiest “Buffy” episode, as well as perhaps the most embarrassing comic book day Big Bad arc in the whole show.

Season 4’s The Initiative is basically the CIA for fighting demons. Maybe “The Matrix” and the “Star Wars” prequels made the “Buffy” writers room believe that sci-fi was the future. Or maybe they just wanted to see how far they could stretch their practical effects budget before it ripped down the middle like a badly crafted rubber suit. Regardless, the result is the same — a middle-grade adventure novel plot about a secret (and secretly evil) monster-fighting organization that employs buff college kids from Iowa. Move over, Caitlin Clark, Riley is the real patron saint of the Hawkeye State.

The plot of Season 4 itself is so uninteresting that by the time we get the double-whammy villain of evil lecture hall queen Maggie Walsh (Lindsay Crouse) and her Spirit Halloween Frankenstein Adam (George Hertzberg), we already don’t care. There’s a lot to love about “Buffy” Season 4, but none of it has to do with the Big Bad(s). They only rank higher than the First because they at least have some personality.

Warren Mears (Adam Busch) is a curious case. On one hand, he’s the first “good” villain we’ve hit on this list. On the other hand, he’s the worst. “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” Season 6 is a thick sludge of depression poured right down your gullet, lightened briefly by That One Episode Where Everyone Sings and That Other Episode Where Giles Comes Back. It flips the script on the show by making Buffy’s real struggle a mental health battle. It also reverses the series’ previous model of larger-than-life supernatural villains and replaces them with a trio of infuriatingly cringe-inducing basement incels.

As the leader of that group, Warren Mears is everything wrong with humanity, which makes him an interesting antagonist despite how much I hate seeing him every time he’s on the screen. He’s grotesque, deeply sexist, entitled, full of unjustified rage, and a complete loser. He also becomes the catalyst for one of the show’s most controversial moments when he shows up in Buffy’s backyard with a handgun, tries to shoot her, and accidentally kills Tara (Amber Benson) instead. This kicks off the Dark Willow arc for the last couple episodes of the season, and it also made a lot of fans very, very angry.

Warren gets flayed alive for his crimes, which is only right. Is he a good villain? That’s up for debate, but he sucks in all the ways that dudes like him suck in real life, and that makes him interesting at the very least.

Let’s not mince words here: “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” Season 1 is kind of a mess. The effects and fight choreography are hilarious, the writing isn’t nearly at the level it reaches later on, and Xander (Nicholas Brendon) is the worst, though that part never really gets better. When friends of mine watch “Buffy” for the first time, I tell them that if Season 1 is just too tough to get through, they can just watch the first couple episodes, “Angel,” and the finale, then skip to Season 2. Despite all that, the show’s first Big Bad is a pretty good one.

The Master (Mark Metcalf) is the epitome of ’90s TV prosthetics, with a permanent vampire face that gives him a kind of classic horror movie look. As low-budget as it is, it also works, and Mark Metcalf’s mustache-twirling performance does a lot to elevate the character. While the Master’s grand plan is pretty standard fare and he doesn’t have the layers that the show’s best villains get, he’s a strong anchor for the series’ first season when much else is still getting figured out.

In other words, he belongs right here in the dead center of this list.

Now we’re getting to the really good villains. The Mayor (Harry Groener) is a genius Big Bad for “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” Season 3, answering the question that nobody asked: “What if the dad from ‘Leave it to Beaver’ was an immortal demon?” His villain/reluctant henchman dynamic with Faith is fantastic, and in a season where pretty much every character and storyline is operating at peak performance, he stays abreast, overseeing one of the show’s greatest stretches as a perfect Big Bad.

There are three points in “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” that act like proper endings, and they come at the end of Season 3, Season 5, and Season 7. The combination of the battle against the mayor and the Scooby gang’s high school graduation is one of the pinnacles of the whole series, and pretty much every beat building up to it hits just as well. The only thing holding the Mayor back here is that while he’s great, he doesn’t have the gravitas that the top villains on this list possess. Season 3 excels for many reasons that have nothing to do with its Big Bad, but a bronze medal is nothing to sneeze at.

The first time I watched “Buffy” Season 5, I didn’t get it. I was in high school, I loved the campy, ridiculous vibe of the earlier seasons, and I was completely unprepared for the tone change. The second time I watched “Buffy” Season 5, however, I saw it for what it is: the absolute peak of the show and one of the greatest seasons of genre TV ever made. Glory (Clare Kramer) isn’t the only reason for that, or even the biggest one, but she is a huge part of it.

It’s really hard to create a great villain. It’s even harder to nail the archetype of “this person is basically invincible, and there is no conceivable way for us to defeat them.” Those kinds of bad guys tend to get stale as the heroes lose again and again in the same way and the audience starts checking their watch to see when, inevitably, the villain’s secret weakness will be revealed. Glory works because she’s not just an all-powerful hell god — she’s the thing that Buffy finally can’t beat. She’s great because Buffy’s Season 5 arc is so strong. By introducing Glory (and Dawn, to be fair), the series elevates its protagonist far beyond her previous highs, and thankfully, Kramer and Gellar both rise to the challenge and hit every single mark. It takes everything, quite literally, for Buffy to defeat Glory, and we even get an all-timer Giles moment out of that victory.

But Glory doesn’t quite earn the top spot here. That honor belongs to a trio of villains who truly define their season.

The Mayor and Glory are both great, but their seasons excel in many ways that have nothing to do with them. “Buffy” Season 2 is different. It’s one of the show’s absolute best explicitly because of its Big Bads.

The glow-up from “Buffy” Season 1 to Season 2 has got to be one of the greatest sophomore surges in television history. Spike and Drusilla (Juliet Landau) step onto the scene at the start of Season 2 and immediately make a splash by killing the Anointed One (Andrew J. Ferchland), the supposed main villain after the Master’s death. Landau and Marsters are just so much fun on screen together, they make you almost start rooting for the villains from the start just so that you can see more of them. “What if Billy Idol was a vampire?” is a fantastic question to ask, and the fact that Spike is motivated entirely by love makes him an instantly compelling character.

But things take another full step up after Angel (David Boreanaz) experiences a “moment of true happiness” with Buffy, as the kids call it, and loses his soul to an ancient Romani curse. The setup might be a bit questionable, but the result is the most villainous Big Bad in the whole show. Boreanaz ascends to new heights as the evil “Angelus” and torments Buffy in myriad ways before falling in the heartbreaking season finale. His love triangle dynamic with Drusilla and Spike only adds to the drama, making this Season 3 triumvirate an easy winner of the “Buffy” Big Bad crown.