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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