"" is the 10th episode of season 4 of the television show ''
Buffy The Vampire Slayer ''. See also
List Of Buffy The Vampire Slayer Episodes .
The Gentlemen, some very
Brothers Grimm -style monsters, steal the voices of the population of
Sunnydale , none of the town (including the Scooby Gang) can speak. Sunnydale is under a quarantine caused by the "Mysterious" lost voices.
The Gentlemen, accompanied by "goons" wearing un-tied
Straitjacket s, are trying to gather together seven human
Heart s from the residents of Sunnydale, who, of course, cannot scream or alert anyone to their being attacked and can't leave the city. Giles reveals using an overhead projector, music, and drawings that the only way to defeat The Gentleman is a real human scream, so the focus turns to how Buffy can regain her voice.
Professor Walsh talks about communication in class and then asks Buffy to come and lie on her desk for a demonstration. Riley steps forward and kisses Buffy, then the sun goes down and its night. Buffy then hears a young girl's voice and walks out of the classroom and into the halls where a girl stands chanting and holding a small box. Buffy wakes up to see she was dreaming in class. As they're leaving, Riley overhears Buffy and Willow talking about a dream then Willow leaves them to talk. Riley inquires about Buffy's dream and then they talk about their plans for the night. Both make up excuses for their real plans.
Giles tries to research the information Buffy got from her dream about The Gentlemen. Spike makes himself very comfortable at Giles' place and complains about there not being any more
Weetabix . Xander and Anya arrive where Giles informs Xander that he has to keep Spike with him for a few days. Willow goes to her Wicca meeting but finds that all the girls in it are just wannabe Wicca's with no knowledge of the real magic. One girl, Tara, seems to be interested in magic, but she's shy and very quiet. After the meeting, Buffy and Willow chat about how things are going slowly with Riley.
While he's sleeping, Xander ties Spike down to a chair and Spike talks continually to annoy Xander. Olivia shows up at Giles' apartment and after some brief talking, they get right to kissing. That night, at the clock tower, one of the Gentlemen opens a box, and the voices of all the people in Sunnydale are taken from them and put into the box. When Buffy and Willow wake up the next morning and find they have no voices, they panic and then see that everyone else in the dorms also don't have their voices. Riley and Forrest try to enter the underground lab, but without his voice, Riley cannot activate the voice command. Professor Walsh however opens the elevator and they see a sign that says they should have used the stairs.
Buffy and Willow walk through the town, seeing that everything is closed down. Armed with dry-erase boards to write down their words, Buffy and Willow show up at Giles' and meet with everyone else. The news states that everyone in Sunnydale has come down with a case of laryngitis and the town has been quarantined. The threat of chaos that night, Buffy goes out to patrol, and Professor Walsh sends Riley and his team out. Riley and Buffy meet while walking out on the streets and as Riley is about to leave, he turns and kisses Buffy. The Gentlemen travel, floating a foot up into the air with their demon assistants following with them on the ground. Olivia wakes up in the middle of the night, and through the window she spies one of the Gentlemen.
A couple of the Gentlemen travel through the dorms until they find a freshman boy. The demon assistants hold the boy down while they cut out his heart. The next morning, Olivia draws a picture of the creature she saw, and when Giles recognizes it, he gets out a book of Fairy Tales. In one of the lecture rooms at the college, Giles tells the story of the Gentlemen through drawings and text on an overhead projector. The sound of a real human voice--not recorded--can kill them, so they took everyone's voice so that they could get the seven human hearts they need. Riley suits up and then goes out to patrol, while Buffy is doing the same thing.
Tara, from the Wicca group, tries to get to Willow while the Gentlemen chase after her. She finally makes it to Willow's dorm and the two girls make a run for it. Riley is attacked by several of the Gentlemen's demon assistants in the clock tower, until Buffy shows up and starts fighting along side him. The two are first shocked to see each other, but have no time, let alone ability to speak. Spike gets a mug of blood out of the fridge at Giles' apartment and vamps out in the process of drinking it. As he's bending down to pick up some dropped books, Xander sees this from a different angle and thinks that Spike is biting Anya. Xander attacks Spike and punches him several times before Anya and Giles stop him.
Willow and Tara combine their powers to move a vending machine in front of a door and protect them from the Gentlemen. Buffy gets caught by the Igor-like assistants and the Gentlemen are about to cut into her when Riley shoots them with bolts of electricity. They fight and one of the demon's grab on to Buffy as she spots a box on the table and recognizes it from her dream. She points it out to Riley and after one false try he smashes the box and everyone's voice is returned to them. Buffy lets out a loud and long scream, which causes the Gentlemen to explode into a green slime. Willow and Tara talk about being a Wicca while Giles and Olivia talk about how many scary things there really are out there. Riley goes to Buffy's dorm to talk, but neither know what to say.
- This episode earned Buffy its first Emmy nomination (for best original writing), but did not win.
- The actors who played "The Gentleman" were actually professional Mime Artists .
- Actor and former personal assistant to Joss Whedon Andy Hallett appeared as an extra in the opening classroom scene of this episode. He would later go on to play Lorne a.k.a. "The Host" in the Buffy spin-off Angel .
- This episode contains very little actual dialog. The actors succeed in expressing the storyline without using words, and the "background" music also plays a huge role in the critical success of the episode.
- The gentlemen monsters in this episode look similar to the monster seen in Season 2's '' Killed By Death ''.
- Joss Whedon created this episode after hearing repeatedly that the crucial part of his series was the dialogue.
- Joss Whedon wanted "The Gentleman" to be very nightmarish, hoping that they would be a monster children would remember being scared of later in their lives.
- This episode is one of three episodes not shown in the regular line up, in the UK and Ireland, before the nine o'clock watershed. (The other two are '' The Body '' and '' Tabula Rasa ''.)
- The original rating of 'Hush' received 6.6 million vieweres, the highest rated episode of the season.
The episode is notable for containing the start of Buffy's relationship with
Riley and each character's discovery that the other is not what they seem — again playing out the theme of the characters' inability to communicate with each other. At the start of the episode, it is made clear that each character is attracted to the other, but neither knows how to broach the issue. Equally, neither character knows of the other's "
Secret Identity " — that Buffy is a
Vampire slayer and that Riley also slays demons and vampires, for the US government.
Whilst muted by The Gentlemen's magic, the two characters run into each other and enjoy their first kiss. Subsequently, whilst fighting The Gentlemen and their goons, they encounter each other again, their mutual secrets revealed. Similarly,
Anya and
Xander start the episode arguing, as Anya believes Xander does not love her; later, though, his actions when he believes
Spike has bitten her resolve her doubts.
That the episode is all about communication is highlighted when Buffy and Riley sit down to talk about their feelings for each other and their respective secrets, once The Gentlemen have been vanquished, and they sit in uncomfortable silence until the credits start.
This is also the episode where
Willow's girlfriend
Tara Maclay first appears. Willow's
Homosexuality had first been hinted at in the Season 3 episode "
Doppelgängland ".
- Stories that take place around the same time in the Buffyverse:
