1. Lessons

Complete story — includes the ending

In Sunnydale, Buffy trains Dawn to fight and tells her that slaying is about power. Sunnydale High has just reopened (with Xander working construction and noting the principal's office sits over the Hellmouth), and Dawn starts attending. Buffy finds a talisman in the school and is confronted by a vengeful ghost who warns she failed to protect the girl and will fail Dawn too. Dawn and two other students, Kit Holburn and Carlos Trejo, fall into the school basement and are menaced by three dead students, who claim everyone in Sunnydale dies. Descending to help, Buffy is blocked by the same spirits and instead finds a frail, deranged Spike, who reveals the ghosts are corporeal manifestations tied to the talisman rather than true ghosts or zombies. Guided by this, Buffy arms Dawn, fights off the spirits, and has Xander destroy the talisman, ending the attack. Afterwards, principal Robin Wood, impressed that Buffy got the two troubled students to socialise and go to class, offers her a job as the school's outreach counsellor. Left alone in the basement, Spike speaks to a hallucinated Warren Mears, who morphs in turn into Glory, Adam, Mayor Wilkins, Drusilla, and the Master, the show's past villains, before finally becoming Buffy herself and echoing her earlier line that it is not about right or wrong but about power. In a parallel storyline in Westbury, England, Willow studies magic and meditation under Giles and a coven of Wiccans, still shaken by having killed people and nearly destroyed the world. She has a vision of "the Earth's teeth", the Hellmouth, prompting Giles to remind her that although everything is connected, not every connection is good.