The fundamental issues in BtVS are ontological but with even a rudimentary investigation into the nature of the characters' existence moral and social conundrums of such complexity are revealed compel us to accept that we are not dealing with the simple run of the mill dichotomies of physical and mental, moral and immoral, living and dead. At its simplest BtVS about the living pitting their wits, strength and ingenuity against the non-living. But it is not that simple for the categories of living and non-living are indistinct and the other entities that inhabit the Buffyverse constitute a rich array of the dead, a state that, at one stage, both Buffy and Joyce occupy, artefacts like the buffybot and Warren's 'girlfriend', artificial life forms like Adam, the non-living or undead of which the most obvious examples are vampires, the undead who have regained their souls and who now seem very much alive, and finally the living in their multifarious forms. In short, my intention is to investigate the nature of the numerous kinds of being and beings that exist in BtVS, and to show how their collision provides a confusion over the very nature of essence and what we consider essential for existence as an autonomous agent.