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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