Season 3, Episode 6 | Aired: 10 November 1998 | Written by: Jane Espenson | Directed by: Michael Lange
The chocolate fundraiser episode. Mayor Wilkins has commissioned enchanted candy bars — sold by Sunnydale High students — that cause adults to regress to their teenage selves. Joyce and Giles spend the episode as impulsive seventeen-year-olds. The show makes the most of this premise, Armin Shimerman plays Principal Snyder as a lad desperate to be cool, and Anthony Stewart Head visibly has an enormous amount of fun being Ripper for twenty minutes.
What Happens
The candy is cover for a tribute delivery to Lurconis, a sewer demon requiring a periodic offering of babies — the regressed adults are too distracted to notice the hospital nursery being robbed. Buffy figures it out, destroys Lurconis (by dropping him on a gas main), and recovers the babies. The B-plot — Joyce and Giles, teenage and reckless, doing things Buffy would rather not think about — is the episode.
Key Moments
Giles as Ripper: leather jacket, cocky, playing guitar, completely insufferable, delightful. He and Joyce end up on the hood of a police car. The show never quite confirms what happened between them. Buffy never quite asks.
Monster / Villain
Lurconis — a giant sewer snake that requires regular infant tribute. The Mayor’s fingerprints are on the scheme, but he maintains deniability.
Notable Quote
“It’s Giles. At sixteen I would’ve… well, let’s just say I had a bad reaction.” — Buffy. She does not elaborate.
Where It Fits
Band Candy establishes that the Mayor is operating through intermediaries — he’s been quietly running Sunnydale’s supernatural economy for some time. Jane Espenson’s script is one of the funniest of the season and trusts the cast completely.