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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The world's about to end. Finals are still happening. And somewhere in 1996 Manhattan, a malnourished vampire is eating rats out of a dumpster while a demon in a porkpie hat tells him he needs a sense of purpose. Alan and Jarrod dig into "Becoming, Part 1" — the episode that took an already-shallow Angel and gave him a backstory big enough to launch his own series.

We talk Acathla and the medieval-knight-stabbed-him-in-the-heart-but-not-really problem (the sword is over on the leftside, Joss), Drusilla's new post-recovery swagger and her cold, throat-slitting flex on Kendra ("the blood of a slayer"), Whistler as Angel's first mentor in textbook Joseph Campbell fashion, and Max Perlich's deep-cut résumé from Gleaming the Cube to Gilmore Girls. Plus: the Orb of Thessulah-as-paperweight running gag, the Darla flashback that retcons Angel's siring with full Anne Rice energy, the worm's-eye-view cinematography in the museum that briefly makes Buffy look like a real movie, the deja-vu floppy-disk recovery that puts the gypsy curse back on the table, Buffy's iffy LA Valley Girl flashback, and Sarah Michelle Gellar's slow-motion sprint to Kendra's body that's been burned into Alan's memory since 1998.

We also unpack the central thematic gambit — that the Buffyverse uses beginnings (Angel's siring, his ensoulment, Buffy's call) to talk about endings (Buffy and Angel, the school year, the world) — and why the Vox and AV Club rankings have this two-parter as some of the finest hours the show ever produced.

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