Entertainment
The Buffy Episode That Secretly Fixed The Show’s Most Frustrating Mistake
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Buffy the Vampire Slayer is one of those shows I have watched until nearly every frame is burned into my brain. That’s because the series is borderline perfect: it features a killer premise, brilliant actors, and some of the best writing in television history. Even with the excellent writing, however, there are occasional mistakes that, once you notice them, will bother you forever.
For example, when Angel loses his soul and becomes evil, he wrecks Jenny Calendar’s computer, ostensibly destroying the information on how to restore his soul. However, all we see onscreen is the vampire destroying her computer monitor, which geeks like Willow know is not where the information is stored. Fortunately, season 2’s 19th episode, “I Only Have Eyes for You” fixes this mistake, revealing that Willow was still able to get information off Calendar’s computer and that the non-tech-savvy Angel didn’t really know what he was doing.
Breaking Vlad
Part of what made Buffy the Vampire Slayer so effective is that the show explored the real threats faced by young people through a fantasy lens. For example, countless young women have had the negative experience of a boy turning into a jerk after they have sex. But it was so much worse for Buffy: after she and Angel did the nasty, he lost his soul, becoming the scariest vampire of the modern age.
Once he became Angelus, this violent vamp didn’t want to simply kill Buffy: instead, he wanted to torment her by torturing and killing her friends. In “Passion,” he really takes this malevolence to the next level by killing Jenny Calendar and displaying her body for Giles to find when he shows up for a date. He initially attacks her at the school, where Angel takes the time to destroy the computer containing instructions for restoring his soul.
Talk About A Firewall
At least, that’s his goal: while he comments on how far technology has advanced, he slams her computer monitor to the ground, damaging it before setting it on fire. It makes for a very scary moment, one that underscores how horrifying it is for this teacher to be attacked in her own classroom by a ruthless vampire. But what always frustrated me as a young nerd was that “Passion” implies that Angel successfully destroys the information on the PC, which is absurd: destroying a computer monitor (even a chunky ‘90s monitor) would do nothing to actually destroy all of the information in the hard drive, housed safely in the undamaged body of the PC.
Fortunately, the later episode “I Only Have Eyes For You” fixed this mistake, though this was likely by accident. In the wake of Jenny Calendar’s death, Willow (her star pupil) becomes the new computer science teacher. When Giles comments on how well the young student has adapted to teaching, Willow points out that she had access to “good lesson plans…Ms. Calendar had them on her computer.” Furthermore, she also “found a bunch of files and Internet sites on paganism and magic and stuff.”
Finally, A Good Retcon
From a narrative standpoint, this helps to set up later plot points, including Willow discovering how to restore Angel’s soul (Calendar kept the spell on a floppy disk) and her eventually becoming a full-fledged witch. However, this throwaway line also confirms that Angel’s attempt to destroy the teacher’s computer and all of the information on it was a complete bust. That may seem disappointing, but it makes sense: the centuries-old vampire has never been good with technology, so it makes sense that he would just destroy the biggest, most visible part of the computer without realizing he’s damaging the wrong thing.
As all Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans know, “Passion” is a killer episode, one filled with high emotion, crazy action, and the unforgettable death of a major character. For this fan, though, the episode’s implication that destroying a computer monitor would affect the hard drive. While it would take the Scoobies a little while longer to figure out how to restore Angel’s soul, “I Only Have Eyes For You” managed to restore something else entirely: my faith in the writers!