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Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode
Hush
Episode No.	Season 4 Episode 10
Guest star(s)	Marc Blucas (Riley Finn) Emma Caulfield (Anya) Leonard Roberts (Forrest Gates) Phina Oruche (Olivia) Doug Jones (Lead Gentleman) Amber Benson (Tara) Lindsay Crouse (Professor Maggie Walsh)
Writer(s)	Joss Whedon
Director	Joss Whedon
Production No.	4ABB10
Airdate	December 14th 1999
Episode chronology
Previous	Something Blue
Next	Doomed

Hush 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 straitjackets, are trying to gather together seven human hearts 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.

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 Wiccas 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.

• 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.

• The gentlemen monsters in this episode look similar to the Der Kindestod monster seen in Season 2's Killed by Death.

• Christophe Beck mentions, on DVD interviews, that he thoroughly enjoyed the task of writing the episode's soundtrack; one scene also uses Camille Saint-Sans's Danse Macabre to somewhat melodramatic effect.

• Camille Saint-Sans - Danse Macabre
• Christophe Beck - Hush Suite

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

Buffy the Vampire Slayer#Hush

• The electro/shoegaze group, The Very Hush Hush, has alluded in interviews to receiving inspiration for their name from Buffy the Vampire Slayer (presumably the episode, Hush), rather than the more obvious reference of the tag-line for L.A. Confidential (Off the record, on the QT, and very hush-hush).

• 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 Doppelgngland.

• BBC episode guide to Hush
• BuffyGuide.com episode guide to Hush
• Buffy Body Count synopsis of Hush
• Doug Jones - the Lead Gentleman

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