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Hank Summers

Hank Summers, played by Dean Butler, is a character in the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Hank is the father of Buffy and Dawn and the ex-husband of Joyce Summers. He first appears in the episode "Nightmares", in which Buffy worries that he will not show up for their father/daughter weekend.

In the Season Two opener "When She Was Bad", Hank admits to Joyce that Buffy was distant with him during their summer together.

In Season Three, Hank is supposed to take Buffy to an ice show for her eighteenth birthday, but cancels at the last minute.

In the Season One Angel episode "I Will Remember You" (contemporary with Buffy season 4), Buffy appears in Los Angeles and tells Angel that she is visiting her father. In later seasons, Hank's character is developed further off-screen into the archetype of an upper-class deadbeat dad. Despite his relative wealth, Buffy cannot rely on him, and he will not play the role of the father.

When Buffy last heard from Hank, he had moved to Spain with his secretary, but she is unable to contact him when her mother dies in Season Five. Dawn indicates in "Bargaining" that she has spoken with her father at some point over the summer between Seasons Five and Six, but she and the others are hiding Buffy's death from him.

Hank's final onscreen appearance is in the episode "Normal Again", set in an alternate reality where the events of the show are simply Buffy's hallucinations.

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