Band Candy

Plot

Principal Snyder distributes boxes of candy to every student, who must sell them to fund new marching band uniforms. Buffy sells half her chocolate bars to her mother and the other half to Giles, then visits Angel while he practices tai chi. When she returns home, she discovers her mother and Giles eating the band candy together. The next day, Giles skips study hall, where Xander and Willow are playing footsie under the table.

Worried, Buffy goes to Giles’s house and finds her mom lounging on the couch. Joyce casually tosses Buffy the car keys and tells her to drive herself home, which shocks Buffy. Giles, now behaving like his teenage self and answering to “Ripper,” invites Joyce out for fun. Buffy and Willow head to the Bronze and find it packed with adults acting like teenagers, including Principal Snyder.

They go back to Giles’s place to figure out what’s happening. At a warehouse, the vampire Mr. Trick checks on Ethan Rayne and the candy production. Trick accuses one worker of eating the candy and kills him as a warning to the others. Buffy eventually realizes the candy is turning adults into immature teenagers.

She sends Willow and Oz to the library and drives to the warehouse. On the way, she spots her mother and Giles kissing in the middle of the street. Inside, Buffy corners Ethan, and her threat of violence forces him to explain that Trick needs to dull the adults of Sunnydale so he can collect a tribute for a demon named Lurconis. Meanwhile, four vampires enter the hospital to steal four newborn babies.

Willow calls Buffy from the library and reveals that Lurconis eats babies. Giles recalls the demon might be in the sewers. Down there, the Mayor and Mr. Trick wait impatiently while the vampires chant to summon Lurconis. Buffy, Giles, and Joyce crash the ceremony, and the Mayor slips away unnoticed.

Buffy fights the vampires while Giles and Joyce move the babies to safety. The huge snake-like demon appears and swallows one vampire whole. Giles attacks Trick but is thrown into Lurconis’s path. Buffy pulls down a gas pipe and ignites a fire that kills the demon.

Back in his office, the Mayor asks why Trick fled, letting Buffy destroy Lurconis. Trick says he thought he was doing the Mayor a favor by having the Slayer kill the demon, leaving one less demon to owe tribute to. The Mayor warns Trick not to do him any more such favors. The next day, the adults are back to normal.

Buffy and Giles meet Joyce, and Buffy says they’re lucky she stopped them before they did anything worse. Joyce and Giles look embarrassed, but Buffy doesn’t notice.

Cultural references

The website Women at Warp compares the irresponsible adults theme with the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Game." "In space, a Ktarian woman introduces the Enterprise crew to a video game they can't stop playing. In Sunnydale, warlock Ethan Rayne distributes mind-altering candy, causing adults to act like teenagers. The vehicles for delivery are different, but the effect is the same: adults are rendered useless so villains can exploit the situation.

In both cases, it's the younger generation (Wesley Crusher/Buffy and the Scoobies) that steps in to save the day." When she and Willow enter the Bronze to find it full of partying adults, Buffy says, "Let's do the time warp again," the famous song from The Rocky Horror Show. Anthony Stewart Head played the mad doctor Frank N. Furter in that musical in London in 1990 and 1991. Xander, accepting a box of candy from Snyder, asks, "You weren't visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past, by any chance?"

He's referring to the Charles Dickens novel A Christmas Carol. Buffy, protesting the idea of selling chocolate bars, says to Snyder, "I'm sure we love the idea of going all Willy Loman, but we're not in the band." Willy Loman is a character in Arthur Miller's play Death of a Salesman. Principal Snyder says, "Call me Snyder.

Just a last name. Like Barbarino." Vinnie Barbarino was a character played by John Travolta in the TV series Welcome Back, Kotter. Buffy, complaining to Willow, says, "I'm putting in Mom time.

She's been drastic ever since I got back. And Giles is even worse. I'm supervised 24-7. It's like being in the Real World house, only real."

It was an MTV reality TV show which films a group of strangers, living in a house together, who are under constant supervision. Some adults, including Willow's doctor, sing "Louie, Louie" by The Kingsmen on stage at The Bronze.

Continuity

Snyder and the Mayor almost certainly know Buffy is the Slayer now, if they didn't before. Giles's tattoo, the Mark of Eyghon, was revealed in "The Dark Age" and is later seen in "Goodbye Iowa." While under the band candy influence, Giles and Joyce have sex on the hood of a police car. Buffy discovers this in "Earshot" when she reads her mother's mind, and mentions it again to Giles when she's in Faith's body in "Who Are You?" Joyce tells Giles she likes his music albums, which are also approved by Oz and Xander in the episode "The Harsh Light of Day." Giles is playing "Tales of Brave Ulysses" by Cream; he plays it again in "Forever."

Reception

The episode was well received, becoming a fan favorite. Reviewer Brett White enthuses, "Zombies, monsters, snazzy vampires, our heroine had seen it and slayed it week in and week out without breaking a sweat or a nail. And then came 'Band Candy.' ... In the episode, written by Buffy's comedy maven Jane Espenson, all the adults in Sunnydale got mentally and emotionally de-aged back to their hormonal teenage selves. ...

Band Candy isn't a totally essential episode of Buffy, but it's still a fan favorite. Truthfully, all of Espenson's episodes are comedy classics, packed with some of the best one-liners in the entire series." Vox ranked it at #21 on their "Every Episode Ranked From Worst to Best" list (to mark the 20th anniversary of the show), writing, "In true Buffy form, the candy-induced chaos is a distraction to allow the Mayor’s cronies to steal babies to feed to a giant snake demon, but it’s also a fun showcase for some of the older actors and a wry commentary on just how much responsibility the teenage Buffy shoulders on a regular basis — even if her mom still doesn’t think she should be allowed to drive a car."

Paste Magazine, in a similar list, ranked it at #25 and called it "hugely funny—for which writer Jane Espenson is justifiably famous." Rolling Stone ranked it at #43, saying, "Rayne's scheme gives us badass Giles, chic Joyce, and Principal Snyder being a desperate hanger-on. One of the most fun episodes throughout Buffy." Noel Murray of The A.V. Club writes that the episode "shows an alternate version of Sunnydale that's grounded in the town's own dark reality. Or as Oz says, 'Sobering mirror to look into, huh?'"