Sometimes I shouldn't use words

I think Gone is fundamentally a rather grim episode dressed up as a comedy, or at least with comic interludes. It focuses on Buffy's suicidal yearnings more intensely than pretty much any other ep (if you take the central idea of being invisible, being "gone", as a metaphor for death, which it's pretty easy to do given that the long-term consequence of being hit by the invisibility ray is to turn into a puddle of dead goo). The key thing about "going", of course, is that Buffy loves it - she feels happy for the first time since TR, and she seems to like it because it liberates her from being herself. Not only does she head straight to Spike's crypt to indulge in some guilt-free shagging, she also pulls a really nasty stunt on the social worker (who for all that she reads Buffy wrong does seem to have Dawn's welfare genuinely at heart). It's as if she can only be happy by giving up *good* aspects of herself, like her conscience.