I've been fighting this nasty bug for the past week or so, and by last Thursday, I'd completely lost my voice. But because the universe never takes away something without giving something back, this happened just as the entire Whedonverse started streaming live on Netflix Instant Watch. Which meant I got to dissipate some of my frustration by watching "Hush":
For those of you not familiar, in "Hush," Buffy and her friends have their voices stolen by a posse of incredibly creepy demons, as a first step towards stealing the hearts of seven Sunnydale residents. I saw the episode for the first time in high school, by myself in a hotel room in a small town in Kentucky. It scared the hell out of me. But it's also just a perfect example of why, in television, constraint is genius (as it is in the Homicide episode "Night of the Dead Living"). Stripped of all its witty banter, and reduced to gestures, white boards, and the most hilarious overhead projector presentation of all time, the show was still ineffably itself, and undeniably great. And the performances don't rely on the characteristic zingers: the actors were deeper into the characters than that, something that I'm not sure would have been obvious had they never been denied speech.
Not that it gave me a solution to not having a voice. Sadly, in the world I live in, nobody can smash a wooden box and give me back my voice. But nobody's going to perform emergency surgery on me and put my heart in a mason jar, either. Fair is fair, I guess. And the universe usually balances out.