Hidden Details In Buffy The Vampire Slayer's "All The Way" S6 E06

All The Way is Season 6 Episode 6 of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Dawn lies about her Halloween plans to Buffy and goes out with her friend to meet two older boys who turn out to be Vampires. After a long day working at The Magic Box, Xander and Anya announce their engagement to the Scoobies and have an impromptu celebration at the Summer’s house. Tara and Willow are fighting about misusing magic. 

Air Date: 30th October 2001

Written by: Steven S. DeKnight

Directed by: David Solomon

Halloween Costumes:

Buffy: Nothing

Willow: Moaning about Witch Stereotypes

Xander: A Pirate

Anya: A Roller Skater (a Charlie’s Angel)

Giles: Blue Wizard Robe with Stars on (like the Purple Wizard Outfit)

Dawn: In the Sport’s Jacket

Tara: Nothing

After Dawn’s brief romantic encounter with a Vampire, this episode, “All The Way” marks all three of the Summers women having had a romance with a vampire. Obviously Angel and Spike with Buffy, Dawn with Justin and Joyce met with Dracula for coffee!

Dawn and her friend Janice convince their respective parents/guardians that they are going round to each others houses and later laugh about how stupid each of them were to fall for it. They really spend their evening meeting up with two older boys. Buffy and Giles are incredibly angry with Dawn for lying and putting herself in grave danger however this is just the sort of lie Buffy and the Scoobies were telling during their time at school. Buffy would tell Joyce that she was with Giles and Giles that she was with her Mum. The Scoobies also covered up the fact that they were spending time together researching and fighting demons in high school by co-ordinating a ‘round robin’. Xander, Willow, Cordelia, Buffy and Oz would “call everybody’s Mom and [tell] them that they’re staying at everbody’s house” which would “free [them] up for world saveage.” This was notably discussed in the Season Two episode “Surprise”.

Dawn’s best friend from school is Janice Penshaw played by Amber Tamblyn. Tamblyn  has also starred alongside Sarah Michelle Gellar in The Grudge 2 (Shimizu, 2006) and has appeared in The Ring (Verbinski, 2002) and 127 Hours (Boyle 2010)

“All The Way” uses the brilliant storytelling technique of misdirection to convince viewers that the villain was going to be the lonely Old Man Kaltenbach but instead it was Justin and Zack, the vampires posing as school boys. Kaltenbach was a toy designer in the 1950s who made some kind of mistake and could not work again. He becomes a recluse and mysterious figure in Sunnydale and assumed to be a creepy old man. Instead he is very kind and misjudged. During “All The Way”, Kaltenbach invites Dawn, her friend Janice and Zack and Justin into his home for some Halloween snacks despite catching them defacing his pumpkins. Kaltenbach was bitten by Justin and died in his kitchen. 

John O’Leary played the role of Kaltenbach in “All The Way” and had previously starred in All President’s Men (Pakula, 1976), Airplane! (Abrahams, Zucker and Zucker, 1980), The Last Starfighter (Castle, 1984). At time of writing O’Leary is 95 and has starred in many other TV shows including Brooklyn Nine-Nine as Franklin, Scandal as Terry, Curb Your Enthusiasm as Jim O’Malley and Frasier as Old Niles to name a few!

In “All The Way”, Willow’s increasing use of magic is discussed again. She silences everyone using a spell “Sukut” which means Silence in Arabic. Tara ‘unmutes’ everyone by saying “Takalam” which means Talk in Arabic. Tara also realises in “All The Way” that Willow has unforgivably used magic to alter Tara’s reality by erasing her memory. This leads to her ending their relationship in “Tabula Rasa” two episodes later.

Since the episode “Life Serial” (S6 E5) in which Buffy has to relive her trial shift at The Magic Box over and over again thanks to The Trio (Warren, Andrew and Jonathan), she regularly mentions the time loop when in store. In “All The Way”, Buffy has been sent down to the basement to get more Mandrake Root and she meets Spike who came into the store from underground. She mentions that it isn’t her fault if their conversation is had over and over again. 

In the Season 2 episode “Halloween”, Xander is threatened by the school bully Larry Blaisdell who is dressed as a pirate. Here in “All The Way”, we see that Xander has reclaimed the Pirate costume for himself including an eyepatch. The eyepatch sadly foreshadows the fact that Xander will loose an eye in the Season 7 episode, “Dirty Girls”. 

Towards the end of the episode, “All The Way” Giles suggests that Dawn needs a strong talking to after lying about her whereabouts and getting into a sticky situation with a vampire. Buffy remarks that she is glad that she has Giles to do it for her. He realises that Buffy is relying too heavily on Giles and she needs to stand on her own two feed as Dawn’s legal guardian after Joyce’s death. So, he broaches the subject of him leaving to go back to England.

Xander is shown in “All The Way” to have some reservations about marrying Anya especially when the Scoobies through them an impromptu engagement party at the Summers’ house. This is a theme that plays out over the rest of the episodes leading up to the wedding day in “Hell’s Bells” (S6 E16) including during Xander and Anya’s duet in “Once More With Feeling” (S6 E7) named “I’ll Never Tell”. 

During the season two episode “Halloween”, we learn from Giles that Halloween is usually quite quiet for demon activity. In “All The Way”, Spike gets frustrated on the two Vampires Zack and Justin for not taking Halloween off despite his attempt to kill Buffy during Season two on Halloween.

“All The Way” marks another episode which includes the trope of male characters giving their jackets to female characters they are romantically interested in. Justin gives his Letterman jacket to Dawn which she wears proudly. Angel gave his jacket to Buffy in the episode “Teacher’s Pet” (S1 E4). Joyce would be given a jacket by Giles aka ‘Ripper’ in “Band Candy” (S3 E6). Then later in the Season 7 episode, “Him” Dawn is given yet another Letterman jacket by R.J.

Willow comments that she could do a “self cleaning incantation” and that it would be like “Fantasia” when The Magic Box is finally closed after the Halloween rush. In the Season 4 episode, “Fear Itself” which is also set on Halloween, Xander is mistakenly given the film Fantasia from the video rental store instead of Phantasm for their spooky movie night. Talking of movies, Spike can be seen watching Night of the Living Dead (Romero, 1968) when Buffy visits his lair in “All The Way”. He also remarks to Buffy in The Magic Box’s basement at the beginning of the episode that he plans to watch “It’s The Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown” which is the third Peanuts special created by Charles M. Schulz in 1966.

Buffy, Xander and Giles are the only three main characters to be in Halloween costumes in “All The Way” due to their work at The Magic Box during the Halloween Rush. Xander is a Pirate, Giles is wearing a blue Wizard’s robe with stars on and Anya is on roller skates in red top and short shorts. She claims to be an Angel but more specifically, “A special kind of angel called a ‘Charlie’. We don’t have wings. We just skate around with perfect hair, fighting crimes.“ 

Some fans have questioned the continuity of “All The Way” and the romance between Dawn and Justin. They kiss each other in the car and Dawn doesn’t react as if he is cold in any way. You could argue as it was a cold night and Dawn had previously mentioned the temperature, she could have just thought he wasn’t feeling very warm. Justin also changed to a Vampire without Dawn noticing in the middle of their kiss.

The episode “All The Way”, marks Dawn’s first time ‘dusting’ a Vampire and her first kiss. She staked Justin with an arrow from a crossbow as he leaned down to bite her.

Justin was played by Kavan Reece who is also well known for starring in The Rules of Attraction (2002) and That 70’s Show as Chip (1998). He also appeared alongside a Buffy The Vampire Slayer co-star David Boreanaz in an episode of Bones, “The Shallow In The Deep” (S6 E6) in 2010. Interestingly “All The Way” is also Season 6 Episode 6 of Buffy The Vampire Slayer.

International titles of the episode “All The Way” are very different and arguably more descriptive of the episode itself. 

• In Portuguese, it was named Até o Fim meaning Until The End. 

• In French, it was titled Baiser Mortel meaning Deadly Kiss. 

• In German, it was named Halloween - Die Nacht der Überraschungen meaning The Night of Surprises.

• In Italian, it was named Bugia Pericolosa which translates to Dangerous Lie.

In many previous episodes, Buffy is physically repulsed by Spike’s suggestions of romance or intimacy with her however in the opening scenes of “All The Way”, the pair meet in The Magic Box Basement and have a moment of crossed wires about the phrase “Rough and Tumble”. Buffy assumes Spike means sex but he means patrolling together. The pair sort of laugh the mistake off instead of the usual punching. This could be paving the way for their intimacy later on in the series, Buffy is no longer completely appalled by the idea.

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