Catherine’s in her daughters body
Catherine Madison (Robin Riker) was the main villainess in the 1997 episode "The Witch" for the TV series "Buffy the Vampire Slayer".
Catherine Madison was the mother of Amy Madison (Elizabeth Anne Allen) as well as a powerful witch.
In her youth Catherine attended Sunnydale High School where she was a popular student and captain of the cheerleading squad. She led the squad to be tri-county champions, earning her a trophy, which would be housed in the school trophy cabinet with a photograph of her, as well as the nickname “Catherine the Great”. She was also Homecoming Queen, while her boyfriend was Homecoming King. The couple got married right after graduation. At some point they gave birth to a daughter called Amy.
Eventually, Catherine discovered and began practicing witchcraft; in a few years, she was a truly exceptional, powerful witch. But when her husband found out, he began to get angry. Young Amy often heard her parents argue terribly; at one point, her father called Catherine a witch, but Amy had no idea how precise this insult was and didn’t know he meant it literally. When Amy was 12, her father divorced her mother and began dating a younger woman known as “Miss Trailer Trash”. Catherine eventually put herself through cosmetology school to support herself and her daughter; she proved to be a brilliant cosmetologist, being able to afford an elegant home and buy Amy anything she wanted.
Catherine clearly suffered from depression or mental health issues. She wanted her daughter to be a cheerleader like she had been, forcing Amy to train a rigorous routine with her, 3 hours in the morning and 3 in the evening. But soon Catherine learned Amy would never have the athletic ability or dexterity to be a cheerleader. She felt Amy was wasting her youth, so she took it from her.
During Amy’s sophomore year at Sunnydale High, Catherine used her magic to switch bodies with her daughter in order to relive her glory days as a cheerleader. But in her new body, she found she was restricted due to her daughter’s small amount of dexterity. Amy had been a bit overweight before her body switched and Catherine posing as Amy was off school for a bit to lose weight. As she was restricted, she did poorly in the cheerleading tryouts, and was left as the third alternate for the squad.
Unwilling to accept this, Catherine placed dangerous curses on several of her rival cheerleaders in order to make the official squad. She used Barbie dolls dressed as cheerleaders as talismans in a sort of voodoo-like ritual over a cauldron to focus each curse on its intended victim; these included Amber Grove (Lisa Dempsey) (whom Catherine caused her hands to spontaneously combust while performing her choreography), Lishanne Davis (Nicole Prescott) (whose mouth was erased in the middle of biology class), Cordelia Chase (Charisma Carpenter) (who went blind during her Driver's Ed class and crashed into traffic) and, in order to stop her from ruining her plans, Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar), who was cursed with a Bloodstone Vengeance Spell, a curse that caused a severe, debilitating fever that killed the victim in a matter of hours. Surprisingly, Joy (Amanda Wilmshurst), the captain of the squad, avoided Catherine's wrath despite her snobby attitude. However, it was probably because Buffy sealed her fate when she inadvertently threw Joy into a wall; Amy was named the replacement girl in the squad instead of Buffy, probably saving Joy from possible humiliation or worse. By this time, Catherine kept a cat to guard her spellbook.
With Buffy suffering from the Bloodstone Vengeance Spell, Rupert Giles (Anthony Head) cast a spell of his own to reverse all the curses that Catherine had cast, and thus also successful at switching Catherine back into her own body; however, he was knocked out by Catherine soon afterward. Back in her original body, Catherine turned against her daughter.
Catherine then tried to cast an imprisonment spell on Buffy (not realizing Buffy was the Slayer), but she deflected it back at Catherine using a mirror. Under the effects of her own spell, Catherine became trapped within the trophy she had won in high school, the only signs of her presence within the trophy was her moving eyes and a muffled voice, pleading for help.
When the school was destroyed during the Graduation Day battle, it is more than likely that the trophy was destroyed as well, presumably destroying Catherine in the process. In the unlikely case that the trophy was not destroyed, she would have been sucked into the Hellmouth in 2003. Nine years later, Buffy took Catherine's appearance with a magic illusion to frighten Amy, who had by then become an evil witch who took Willow Rosenberg (Alyson Hannigan) hostage.
Trivia[]
- Robin Riker appeared as villainess Frances Pritchard in the 2004 episode "Til Death Do Us Part" for the TV series "Crossing Jordan".
- Robin Riker later appeared on Wizards of Waverly Place as the evil Linda Greybeck, and played psychotic villainess Colleen Barton in 2019's Psycho Granny.
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