Who Watches the Rewatchers

Jarrod and Alan finally get to a top-tier one, and they frame "The Wish" as Buffy's It's a Wonderful Life — the episode that answers what Sunnydale becomes if Buffy never came to town. Gutted by the Xander betrayal and freshly back from her injury, Cordelia befriends a too-eager new girl named Anya, complains that Buffy is the common thread in all her misery, and wishes her away — not knowing Anya is Anyanka, a vengeance demon for scorned women, and that the amulet around her neck will make it so. What follows is a bleather-clad nightmare: a vampire-run Sunnydale under curfew, the Bronze converted into a feeding hive, Willow and Xander as the Master's prized, sadistic underlings (Vamp Willow toying with a caged, powerless "puppy" Angel), and a grim, militarized Buffy who arrives all business — proof, as the guys put it, that without her friends she'd have turned out much more like Faith. Alan traces the episode's real lineage to the X-Men's "Days of Future Past" (Whedon's beloved Kitty Pryde thrust into a ruined future) and Star Trek's Mirror universe, while the two wrestle with what the talisman is really for, whether it's just a narrative device, and a genuinely rich tangent on relics, sacramental imagination, and whether objects and places can be imbued with grace — Battle of Peachtree Creek and all. There's the free-will-versus-circumstance question (would the world really have gone this bad?), the gruesome blood-decanting assembly line, and a final battle where the good guys fall one by one until Giles gambles everything on smashing the amulet. It ends the instant it began — Anya, fresh-faced and powerless, staring at a Cordelia whose wish simply won't take. Plus a look ahead: Amends, the First Evil, and the bigger mythology to come.

Note: these are recorded WAY in advance, and there is some banter about looking forward to the Buffy Reboot that we now know is not going to happen.

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Jarrod's daughters said it best — "Spike's back!" — and Alan mostly agrees, with the hot take that Spike improves every scene he's in, sometimes at the expense of everything else the show has going. He and Jarrod dig into "Lovers Walk," the James Marsters showcase that opens on SAT scores and closes with every romance in Sunnydale in ruins. They trace the episode's real engine — hidden truths getting dragged into the light — from Cordelia hiding that she's smart and Buffy not knowing that she is, through the scene-transition trick the writers lean on all episode (Cordelia sneers that only a loser would come back to Sunnydale, cut to Spike drunkenly plowing his car into the town sign, a deliberate callback to his wooden-sign entrance in "School Hard"). The guys follow Spike's whiplash between pathetic, Drusilla-pining wreck and predatory monster, praise Alyson Hannigan's genuinely frightening turn as a terrified, weepy hostage, and clock the small delights along the way: Oz's Pez witch, Joyce making Spike hot cocoa with the little marshmallows, Xander noting the spell smells like church "but evil church," and the Mayor practicing his putting while discussing despicable violence. It builds to the gut-punch — Oz and Cordelia opening the factory door on Xander and Willow mid-kiss, Cordelia fleeing and falling onto rebar, and a "funeral" cut that turns out to be a fake-out. There's a useful tangent on A/B/C-story structure and how soap operas perfected it, the famous "love's bitch" speech, and the closing "everyone sitting down, sad" montage set against the one happy man in town: Spike, cured by violence, cruising off in daylight singing "My Way." Plus a forward nod to the season-four callback where Spike remembers exactly what Willow was wearing. The Wish is next.

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Jarrod cops to grimacing at the title (a Bible nerd's reflex — it's Revelation, singular, and this one has nothing to do with the book anyway), and then he and Alan make the case that "Revelations" isn't a mythology-mover so much as a masterclass in community dynamics: everyone's a little bit right, everyone's a little bit wrong, and everyone's furious at everyone else. It opens on peak Giles — tweeds, glasses, a Styrofoam cup, watching his Slayers work with rock-star calm — right up until Gwendolyn Post sweeps in as Faith's new Watcher and shatters his composure with a torrent of judgment. From there the guys track the fault lines: Xander catching Buffy and Angel mid-kiss and going high-and-mighty, the library intervention that turns hypocritical fast (he and Willow are hiding their own stolen kisses in the stacks), and Post quietly working Faith's outsider ache into a weapon. Along the way they dig into the episode's real intellectual meat — what makes an object like the Glove of Myhnegon "powerful" in the first place, and how that question opens onto porous pre-modern worldviews versus the buffered Enlightenment one, with the multiverse quietly reopening the door to porosity. There's a genuine appreciation for craft (Vaseline on the lens for that Hollywood-kiss glow, powdered milk making the fire flare on Are You Afraid of the Dark?, the miniature-scale sets that force everyone to walk in short strides), a rundown of the great cinematic McGuffins (the Rabbit's Foot in Mission: Impossible III), and Serena Scott Thomas as the rare strong older woman the show hasn't offered before — a template Alan suspects they reused, more weakly, for Professor Walsh. It ends on the season's saddest through-line: Faith, alone in a motel with a black-and-white TV, realizing just how much more Buffy has than she does. Plus a long closing riff on whether a universe built on original chaos rather than original goodness can ever really let good win — and how Whedon, the atheist absurdist, keeps reaching for Christus Victor sacrifice language he can't quite escape.

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Jarrod opens with a confession about a Great Pyrenees named Sebastian who once ate fifty caramel chocolate bars meant for a school fundraiser, which is exactly the right doorway into "Band Candy" — the Jane Espenson episode where Ethan Rayne's cursed chocolate turns every adult in Sunnydale into a reckless teenager. Alan and Jarrod trace the whole delicious mess: Snyder's forced candy sale, Giles pulling first a number-two pencil and later a cigarette from behind his ear with matching panache, and the gradual slide as Giles becomes leather-jacketed Ripper and Joyce becomes a bubble-gum-snapping, boot-wearing kid trying to be as cool as he is. They dig into the subtext running under the comedy, that everyone in Buffy's life has been quietly accusing her of dodging responsibility right before every adult abdicates theirs, and they praise the two performances carrying it: Armin Shimerman playing Snyder as the eternal nerd who finally thinks he's cool, and Kristine Sutherland letting Joyce become a full, flirty, insecure human being for the first time. Buffy, meanwhile, becomes the only grown-up in town, right up to the mortifying moment she catches her mother and her Watcher making out on a police car — and the handcuffs from Joyce's purse she begs to never hear about. Along the way: a genuinely fun tangent on Krazy Kat and George Herriman's shifting love triangle, Trick joining Team Mayor and snapping a worker's neck to make a point, a giant snake demon named Lurconis fed on stolen babies, and a closing philosophical run on what kind of universe Buffy is building — original goodness versus original violence, why the mythology gets clearer over on Angel, and what it means that a vampire is scared of the Mayor. It ends the way it began, on a fake-out: Buffy sounds like she's mourning the battle, but she's really just talking about the math section of the SATs.

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Alan calls it out before the credits even roll: the fact that Scott Hope dumps Buffy the moment a shinier love interest is on the horizon is one more brick in the case that this guy was never any good. From there Jarrod and Alan dig into "Homecoming," the by-the-numbers-but-a-blast hour where Buffy, freshly single and feeling invisible (a teacher doesn't even remember the student whose life her class supposedly changed), throws herself into a homecoming-queen grudge match against Cordelia — right as Mr. Trick debuts Slayerfest '98 and sics a roomful of assassins on what he thinks are two Slayers. The guys trace the episode's real engine, competition as validation, through Trick's mission statement of a monologue, and they have a lot of fun with the machinery around it: the "Winklevoss twins" hunters, a live video switcher dressed up as spy tech, the return of country-vampire Lyle Gorch, and the most-dangerous-game lineage running back to Richard Connell's 1924 short story. Along the way, Willow and Xander's dressing-room kiss finally cracks a seal Alan suspects the writers will have to awkwardly reseal, Oz stays magnificently expressionless, Faith spreads a fake-STD rumor to torch Scott on the dance floor, and Cordelia stakes a vampire with a spatula before verbally reducing Lyle to a cowering boy. There's a real digression into why theme songs and title sequences are a lost art (blame Lost), a color-theory tangent on why Freddy Krueger's red-and-green sweater works, and the eternal Buffy question of who cleans up all the bullet holes. It ends on a homecoming-queen tie neither rival wins — and Trick trading up to a job with the Mayor. Band Candy waits next week.

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Content note up top: Jarrod opens with a real one, flagging that this episode's domestic-violence material can hit hard for anyone who's lived near it. Then he and Alan get into "Beauty and the Beasts," the Monster-of-the-Week hour that lines up three beasts at once — Oz on his werewolf nights, Pete roiding out into a jealous monster, and a chained, feral Angel back from a hell dimension and cowering in the corner like a beaten dog. Their central gripe: the thesis (everyone has a demon inside) gets stated by Faith, then Mr. Platt, then Giles, then Buffy, then Oz, then Scott, until the metaphor is doing laps. Along the way they clock Willow going full CSI: Sunnydale with a Scooby-Doo lunchbox (which sends Alan down the Velma-Daphne-Fred-Scooby casting of the whole gang), the on-a-budget morph-cut werewolf transformation lifted straight from Michael Jackson's "Black or White," and Buffy accidentally tranquilizing Giles in the backside. The bigger conversation runs on two tracks: the genuinely uncomfortable portrait of an abuser and the partner who comforts him, and a long, good-faith tangent on Jekyll and Hyde as a story about technology outpacing our natural rhythms, whether Hyde was ever really separate from Jekyll, and which modern tale tells it best (Hulk, Venom, Moon Knight, that 2007 BBC Jekyll, and the winner: Fight Club). They land where they started, freed a little by Jack London bookends and the sad, milquetoast presence of Scott Hope, before Homecoming waits next week.

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A limo rolls up to a Sunnydale burger joint, the window slides down, and Mr. Trick steps in as one of the slickest vampire intros the show has ever pulled off. Alan and Jarrod take on "Faith, Hope and Trick" — the episode that drops the bad-girl Slayer into town and quietly sets up half of season three. They dig into the on-the-nose naming of Scott Hope (and why his apologetic, impatient energy lands so awkwardly), the deep-cut Johnny-Depp-as-Buster-Keaton-obsessive theory from Benny and Joon that might explain that strange pop-culture hook, and Trick playing political aide to a cloven-hoofed Kakistos while joking that Sunnydale makes DC look like Mayberry. From there it's into the meat of it: Buffy's prophetic Angel dreams turning from grief to almost-Freddy menace, the painful idea that even her most intimate moments play out performatively in front of passive friends, Joyce flexing some surprisingly sharp parenting against a cornered Principal Snyder, and Faith arriving as the shadow-self mirror — where Kendra was discipline and shame, Faith is the bad girl who gets under Buffy's skin. The guys puzzle over why the Watchers Council keeps Giles off the Cotswolds guest list, riff on Eliza Dushku carrying her own show (Dollhouse and that Oxford theology paper included), unpack the Single White Female and Martha Stewart references, and land on the freedom-versus-constraint theme before that final tag — a naked, sweaty Angel falling from the sky — pulls Buffy right back in.

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Buffy's back from L.A., and now everyone has feelings about it. Alan and Jarrod dig into "Dead Man's Party" — the one where a Nigerian mask of dubious provenance raises the dead, the Scoobies throw the world's most ill-advised welcome-home party, and a milquetoast blond casserole-bearer named Pat proves the gang predicted the Karen years ahead of schedule. Along the way: Giles in full Ripper mode threatening Snyder, the joy of "do you like my mask?", Shatner lighting (and its inversion), an unexpected Pet Sematary detour, and whether the real metaphor is the zombies or the mask itself. Plus the eternal question — is it a gathering, a shindig, or a hootenanny? A serviceable transition episode with a muddy metaphor, sharp one-liners, and a whole lot of unburied resentment.

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Buffy's gone. The Scoobies are slaying without her (poorly — "that never works"). And somewhere in LA, a waitress named Anne is wearing gingham at Helen's Kitchen, keeping her head down — until a street preacher with a sketchy flyer, a familiar face from "Lie to Me," and a vat of black baptismal sludge drag her into a literal hell dimension. Alan and Jarrod open Season 3 with the premiere that sets the whole year's identity theme in motion, and make the case Vox ranked this one (#56 of 144) way too low.

We talk the visual motif Alan tracks across the entire episode (Buffy's face cropped, obscured, hair-curtained, shoulder-blocked — until she "becomes" herself again, with mirrors, reflective surfaces, and that black baptismal goo that pointedly doesn't reflect); Jarrod's reverse-baptism Exodus reading via St. Irenaeus of Lyon's "the glory of God is a human being fully alive" and the Hebrew Mitzrayim (Egypt as the narrow, constricted place); the Tony Alamo documentary Ministry of Evil and how cults and predators target the marginalized; the body-horror tattoo reveal that calls back to The Substance; Joyce's "I don't blame myself, I blame you" gut-punch to Giles; Cordelia and Xander's accidental-spike-explosion reunion makeout; the iconic "Who are you?" / "I'm Buffy. The Vampire Slayer. And you are?" moment that lives in the opening credits forever after; and Lily inheriting Buffy's discarded "Anne" identity — what that says, and doesn't say, about agency, baptism, and standing on your own account.

Plus: kombucha as the only plausible Bronze beverage, Buffy reboot buzz (Sarah Michelle Gellar everywhere again), the prodigal-son return home to Joyce, the fight stance that becomes part of the opening credits, and why Season 3 is where this show really finds its legs.

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Season two ends the way the best Buffy ends — with a kiss, a sword, and a school bus pulling out of town. Alan and Jarrod close the book on "Becoming, Part 2," the finale Vox ranks #4 of all 144 episodes, and dig into why a story this devastating is also the show operating at its absolute peak. They walk the wreckage left by Part 1 (Kendra dead, Giles kidnapped, Buffy arrested for murder), unpack the cop who "wouldn't shoot" as a relic of It's a Wonderful Life–era filmmaking, and follow Whistler — the neo-noir mentor demon — into a genuinely deep conversation about fate: Greek tragedy versus comedy, why the Resurrection scandalized the Greco-Roman idea of a balanced cosmos, and whether Angel's "destiny" implies a Calvinist god pulling cosmic strings. Then there's the theology of the blood sacrifice that closes Acathla's portal (Christus Victor, or the healing model?), and a tour through the vampire as religious figure — Bram Stoker's "Catholic" Dracula, Anne Rice's belief-optional "Protestant" vampires, and Buffy's postmodern melange of crosses and holy water that throws real shade at the church. At the center of it all: Buffy catching the sword bare-handed and answering Angelus's "what's left?" with the only word that matters — and what it means that she's finally claimed her identity with her mother, her friends, and her ex. Plus: Spike and Joyce's gloriously uncomfortable couch summit ("Get your hands off my daughter"), the "Kick his ass" line that launched a thousand anti-Xander posts, Drusilla seducing Giles while wearing Jenny Calendar's face, Anthony Stewart Head naming "Passion" as his favorite episode, Snyder phoning the Mayor to seed season three, Alan's road stories filming Sean Murphy draw a Batman Beyond cover, and Sarah McLachlan's "Full of Grace" carrying Buffy out of Sunnydale.

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