"Billy" — Angel Season 3, Episode 6 — is the episode fans still argue about, and for good reason. When Wolfram & Hart's Billy Blim discovers he can "infect" men with his own violent hatred of women through a single touch, the show turns its own beloved team into a threat — and Alexis Denisof's Wesley curdles from bookish and loyal into something genuinely frightening as he corners Fred in one of the most stomach-churning scenes the Buffyverse ever aired. It's not a monster-of-the-week story so much as a dare: how far will Angel go to show "good men" turning violent, and does the show earn that darkness or just wallow in it?

Also happens to be the show's 50th episode.

Fred's parents showed up in LA and the gang immediately assumed they were evil. They are distressingly, confusingly normal. This is somehow more suspicious.

This week on Re-Watcher's Council, we're covering Angel Season 3, Episode 5: "Fredless" — the Fred episode, and a really warm, character-rich hour that earns its ending completely.

Fred's parents show up in Los Angeles to bring her home, and Team Angel is instantly suspicious of them — they seem a little too normal. Roger and Trish Burkle are sweet, well-meaning Texas parents who have spent five years desperately searching for their daughter, and the gang's immediate assumption that they must be sinister is both very funny and very telling about how warped everyone's frame of reference has become after years of fighting demons. When Fred panics and disappears rather than face them, Team Angel and the Burkles have to work together to find her.

What the episode is really about is belonging — again — but from a completely different angle than S2E19. Fred spent five years in a demon dimension writing equations on cave walls just to stay sane, and she came home to find that the people who saved her have become her world. The question this episode asks is whether that world is something she chose or something she fell into by default. Her answer, when she finally gives it, is one of the sweetest moments of the season.

We also get the gang quietly reflecting on their own complicated parental relationships — a blink-and-you'll-miss-it scene that says volumes about every single character without making a big deal of it. And Cordelia and Wesley's dramatic reenactment of the Angel/Buffy reunion that none of them got to witness is exactly as chaotic and wonderful as it sounds.

Oh, and Fred solves the demon problem with physics. Of course she does.

It's Halloween in Sunnydale, which means the vampires are taking the night off. Xander finally announces his engagement to Anya, the Magic Box explodes into a party, and everything is briefly, wonderfully fine.

Dawn has other plans.

Armed with a fake sleepover alibi and a friend named Janice, she's out trick-or-treating with two boys she just met — one of whom is charming, sweet, and very much a vampire who did not get the memo about Halloween being a night off. The old man whose house they break into also did not get the memo. The night takes a turn.

Meanwhile the Xander and Anya engagement news is doing its rounds and Buffy is reacting the way Buffy reacts to everything this season: distantly, politely, and from somewhere slightly outside her own life. Willow erases Tara's memory of an argument without telling her. It's a small moment. It will not stay small.

Snark and Fares dig into the Season 6 Halloween episode — lighter in tone than most of what surrounds it, but quietly doing a lot of work. Dawn is growing up whether anyone is paying attention or not. Xander and Anya are engaged. And Willow just crossed a line that's going to matter a great deal more than it seems right now.