Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a show that was never supposed to last.

It had a silly title, an unlikely premise, and was based on a movie box-office flop. Its title still draws snickers from non-viewers, who don't realize they are ridiculing what is arguably the most intelligent and best-written series on television today, if not the past decade. Yet that same title contains the very essence of the show: It's a drama laced with comedy, just as a fluffy name, Buffy, is juxtaposed with a rather ominous signifier, Vampire Slayer.

After seven years of pain, pain, a few laughs, and more pain, Buffy is about to stake her last vampire. The final four episodes will run Tuesdays at 8 p.m., beginning next week.

It all began in March, 1997, when Buffy the Vampire Slayer was slotted in as a midseason replacement on the WB network. The show was about a girl, played by Sarah Michelle Gellar, who was the Chosen One, the one who was destined to fight evil. It's the stuff of comic books.

Except this girl didn't want to be chosen. She wanted to be a normal teenager, and for the first season she dealt with the usual perils of teen angst -- divorced parents, new friends, problems at school, and a confusing love life -- alongside the not-so-usual perils -- having to patrol graveyards at night, discovering her boyfriend is a 242-year-old vampire, and trying to stop a nest of vampires from opening the mouth of Hell and bringing forth the apocalypse. By the end of the first season, she knew that her destiny was inescapable.

Now, seven years later, Buffy has grown up. She's killed her boyfriend (but he's feeling much better now), lost her mother to a brain aneurysm, acquired a kid sister, sacrificed herself to save the world, and crawled out of her own grave. As one character has commented, "I suddenly find myself needing to know the plural of 'apocalypse.'"

Now, she faces perhaps the biggest threat the gang has ever seen -- a malignant non-corporeal entity that embodies the world's most primal evil -- and in the process viewers have watched Buffy grow from a 16-year-old girl into a 22-year-old woman, and suffered with her along the way.

Buffy is different from other shows on television. It might only have about five million viewers every week, yet its cultural significance far outweighs its seemingly small audience. In contrast, shows such as ER or The West Wing, both well-written, well-acted programs with four times the viewership, are not considered worthy of study and fan dissection, certainly not to the extent that Buffy or its spinoff show, Angel, might be.

On dozens of Web sites, its fans dissect everything from whether the lovesick, formerly evil vampire Spike is a proper consort for Buffy, to the criminal neglect that the show has faced from the awards establishment (even its best episodes, such as the near-silent Hush or the all-musical Once More, With Feeling have been ignored by the Emmys). Famously, Buffy also has a devoted fan base among academics, who parse its every shot and line of dialogue for cultural significance.

Buffy is the subject of four books of academic essays, and in October, 2002, fans from around the world gathered at the University of East Anglia in England to hear more than 50 papers on the "Buffyverse" delivered by academics. Topics ranged from "Queering the Bitch: Spike, Transgression, and Erotic Empowerment" to "Yeats's Entropic Gyre and Season Six of Buffy the Vampire Slayer." So what happened to the idea of this being a juvenile television show?

What sets Buffy apart is the writing. Joss Whedon, the creator of the show, had a vision of a series that was dramatic and mythic but still contained a lot of humour. Along the way, he developed an original language that found its way into the vocabulary of his viewers. He mapped out a seven-year arc for the show that he and his staff have followed religiously for the show's duration, with a few pit stops along the way. As such, the series has always had a forward momentum, a feeling that everything that has happened has had a reason.

David Fury, writer-director and co-executive producer on Buffy and consulting producer and writer on Angel (most fans will recognize him more readily as the Mustard Man from Once More, With Feeling) says the perception of Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a pop-culture icon was a bit of a surprise at first. "Nobody sets out to be a cultural phenomenon," he says. "I can't imagine that Joss ever imagined that it would be that, but he's enormously gratified that it has, that what he set out to do has been recognized by the intelligentsia, and it's very rewarding for us. It feels really good to know we're respected like that."

This season, the show is going back to seasons one through six and using all of the knowledge viewers have gained over the years to bring it to a mind-blowing climax. Whedon has rewarded his loyal fans by bringing up unresolved events that happened years ago and finally offering an explanation for them. However, in doing so, he has made this a show that has become impenetrable to new viewers. This season the ratings have been lower, because while the adult viewership has expanded due to Buffy's darker and more complex plots, the teen viewership -- the staple of UPN -- has dropped (The show is carried on City TV stations in Canada).

But because UPN is one of the smaller networks, ratings don't really matter. "We don't register [the fact the ratings have dropped] because we're just doing the show as best we can, like we always have, and we know our fans and we know we're not a show based on ratings," Fury says.

Aimee Grosso, a fan from Chesterfield, Mich., believes the reason the show is so popular is because the writers "give the fans what they 'need' rather than what they 'want.' "

One factor that often kills good shows is when relationships are requited; when Mulder and Scully got together on The X-Files, for example, the tension was gone, and the show lost its viewers. But on Buffy, as much as the viewers want to see Buffy and her erstwhile mortal enemy Spike get together, the writers realize that what will be more intriguing to viewers in the long run is to make the characters suffer, doubt each other, and show their worst sides to one another before deciding if they should start a relationship.

Spike is a witty, generous, funny guy who truly cares for Buffy. Or at least the "man" part of him does. Spike (played by James Marsters) may be in love with Buffy, but he's a vampire with a demon trapped inside him along with the man. One minute he's pledging his everlasting love to Buffy, and the next his demon side emerges and he tries to rape her. It's these grey areas that act as metaphor for the complexities of human relations but also have alienated some viewers, while allowing others to appreciate the risks the writers take.

But these conflicts lend Buffy a realism that is lacking in other programs. Heather-Anne Gillis of Dartmouth, N.S., agrees: "Even though the struggle is couched in the life of a young woman, we see in her struggles the demons that we face every day." In reality, relationships are difficult; on the Hellmouth, they're practically impossible.

Spike isn't the only one with a dark side. Buffy's friends as well as her sometimes reluctant allies -- Willow, Giles, Angel, Oz and Anya -- have all recognized a frightening darkness within themselves. Even Xander, the heart of the group, fears that the alcoholism in his family might turn him into a monster some day. Each character has committed acts that are thoughtless and stupid, and much of Buffy is about the remorse and self-hatred they must live with.

Buffy, the one who is supposed to fight evil, has been living with the fear that she has evil within her too, and her struggle to overcome her fears, and not to succumb to a death wish, has given the show its dark edge for the past two years.

Rhonda Wilcox is a professor of English at Georgia's Gordon College and co-editor of Fighting the Forces: What's at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Slayage: The Online International Journal of Buffy Studies. She was one of the organizers of the East Anglia conference, and she agrees that what sets Buffy apart from other shows is its epic quality.

"I think that Buffy has raised the bar for television art," Wilcox says. "While Twin Peaks was unprecedented in terms of its visual work and dream-like content, Buffy is unprecedented in its use of long-term narrative. The people who make Buffy have done so with great integrity -- with respect for the audience and with respect for their own text. The series' careful continuity has allowed for character development of a sort never seen before. This show has made it possible for people to see that while most of television is wasted mental space, TV can be art."

The writers knew years ago how season seven would end and, as a result, the show has a definite momentum, a feeling that we're moving toward something. But along the way the writers have had fun with more gimmicky episodes, such as Once More, With Feeling, the musical episode that cemented Whedon's reputation as a genius in song as well as script. Or Hush, which boasted 29 minutes of silence when the demons stole everyone's voices, yet the personality of each character still shone through.

So, to quote a song from the musical episode, Where do we go from here? The talk of a spinoff this fall has been quashed. The writers had hopes of developing a show about Faith (the darker, even more messed-up vampire slayer) before Eliza Dushku, the actress who plays her, accepted a role in another television pilot.

Considering the present amount of academic literature on the show, the end of Buffy could signal the true beginning of its study. Scholars will now have the entire oeuvre to debate, and perhaps only then can the true analysis begin. Which would be a fitting irony for a Slayer who preferred a good staking to a good book. "Introduction to the Modern Novel?" she says as she's choosing her university courses. "I'm guessing I'd probably have to read the modern novel.... Do they have an introduction to the modern blurb?"

For the viewers of the show, we'll be able to take our memories with us. The characters felt like people we all knew, and we could identify with Buffy's problems. For seven years, the series taught us that nobody -- not even the Chosen One -- is perfect. It left us with the notion that a petite blond woman can save the world, as long as she has friends in her corner. "You have to take care of each other," she says. "You have to be strong. The hardest thing in this world is to live in it. Be brave. Live. For me."

Nikki Stafford is the author of Bite Me: An Unofficial Guide to the World of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, published by ECW Press.