Michelle Trachtenberg

When Michelle Trachtenberg suddenly appeared among the already-familiar cast members of Joss Whedon’s much loved turn-of-the-21st-century TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, at the start of Season 5, no one knew what to make of her.

- STEPHANIE ZACHAREK

Her character, Dawn, had emerged from nowhere, though the implication was that she was the younger teen sister of the show’s heroine, Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Buffy Summers, and that she’d been there all along. Suddenly there she was, eager to be accepted by her older, cooler sister and that sister’s older, cooler friends. She was an interloper. She was annoying. Viewers wanted her to just go away.