Restless (Buffy The Vampire Slayer) - Production and Writing

Production and Writing

The most important thing when I first started it was that the dreams be dreamlike... It's about combining the totally surreal with the totally mundane... It then became a question of basically writing poetry...basically free-associating. Obviously, things had to get worse at the end of each act—people had to be in peril because this thing was trying to kill them in their dreams. But beyond that, there really was no structure. So I was basically sitting down to write a forty-minute tone poem.

“ ” – Joss Whedon describing the writing process and the episode's structure.

Previous seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer had ended with an action episode which tied up all the threads of the season's main plot line, but series creator Joss Whedon wanted to end season four differently. The penultimate episode, "Primeval", had concluded the Initiative storyline, but Whedon felt the season's overall story arc had not been as cohesive as it could have been, and therefore chose to create an episode to act as a "grace note" to the season, an episode which would comment on each of the four main characters and what they had just been through. While talking about the writing of the episode, Whedon said it had been like writing poetry, a process he found "liberating and strange". Like the earlier "Hush" — an episode with almost no dialogue — he viewed the episode as an exercise in form and writing, and what it means to write. The episode has no real structure, which was a departure for Whedon, as everything he had written before was constructed before even starting the script. Yet despite its fragmented style, the episode unfolds coherently in four discrete acts, each act comprising one character's dream.