The reality of the end came when "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" executive producer Marti Noxon drove into the Fox Television parking lot and found a man wandering there.

It wasn't just any man, but the creator of the show she has worked on for the last seven seasons. It was Joss Whedon.

"I asked, 'What are you doing?' and he said, 'I don't know,'" Noxon recently told CNN's Andy Walton. "He said, 'It's all gone, Marti,' and we looked in one of the buildings, and sure enough, all of the sets were gone. And that really hit hard, that Sunnydale High is no more. It's in boxes and crates somewhere."

With that, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" will say good-bye Tuesday night at 8 EDT on UPN with a gut-wrenching finale that could have fans talking for quite some time. But the little series that couldn't back in 1997 has quickly become a iconic success. And that's no accident, Noxon said.

"Joss's master plan was really to create an icon," Noxon said. "Of all the people I've ever met, Joss is the most organized, creative thinker. More often than not, he knew exactly where we were going in the big picture."

Even those who have studied the series can agree with that, like Lynne Edwards, a professor at Pennsylvania's Ursinus College that teaches a course called "Deconstructing Buffy."

"What's neat about 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' is that on one level, it appears to be pure pop culture: hot-looking girl runs around killing things, kicking, screaming, it's all good," Edwards said. "But on another level, for those of us who were kind of nerdy in high school, we get the literary references, like saying that a girl is so late she makes Godot look punctual."

Whedon was able to plan much of the series far in advance, and used that type of planning to tease the future to audiences. One instance occured in Season 3 during a dream sequence about events that wouldn't actually happen until the fifth season.

"Certain storylines, Joss just knew what he wanted to do, and had plans a year in advance, and we could plant a reference," Noxon said. The Scoobies "were conceived as outsiders. They were conceived as sort of misfits. That certainly was part of the whole mythology that I think people really responded to, was this idea of 'geek on the outside, supergeek on the inside,' special powers and abilities, hidden depths."

Edwards said that the show easily moved from pop culture into reality.

"Young people see what's going on, they see it in their high schools, then they come home and see it played out on television," Edwards said. "Granted, the football player is a demon, but it's all still kind of the same. I'm not even sure you can really call this pop culture any more, because of the way it reflects what's really going on in the world."

The last episode has been especially hard for star Sarah Michelle Gellar, despite the fact that her desire not to return served as one of the catalysts for the show's cancellation this season.

"The whole time I kept thinking, 'When am I going to cry?'" Gellar told the Associated Press recently about filming the last episode. "I remember when it finally came, it was like getting hit with a brick wall."

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