The Infamous Buffy Episode That Nearly Got Fan-Favorite Character Canceled

By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 2 minutes ago

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is considered one of the most revolutionary shows in television, and rightfully so: it ushered in a new era of quippy genre superheroism, essentially paving the way for the later rise of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. On top of its whip-smart writing, the show was also filled with amazing and hilarious characters that you couldn’t help but love. This included Cordelia Chase: she was written to be a vapid mean girl, but fans loved her so much that she helped launch Angel, Buffy’s very successful spinoff.

However, if the Buffy producers hadn’t dubbed over a line from one of the show’s most infamous episodes, Cordelia wouldn’t have been such a fan-favorite; in fact, she would have been canceled altogether! The episode in question is “Go Fish,” which has a scene in which Cordelia makes fun of the idea that all humans are inherently equal. That’s bad enough, but in a line eventually dubbed over, she appeared to defend the practice of slavery!

Cordelia Like You’ve Never Seen Her Before

In “Go Fish,” Buffy and her friends have several run-ins with Sunnydale High School’s swim team, who seem especially aggro (even by the standards of jocks). It turns out that their coach has been giving these athletes something much worse than steroids: he and a crazy nurse have altered these swimmers’ DNA, which periodically transforms them into gill monsters straight out of Creature From the Black Lagoon. Eventually, the monstrous team kills both the nurse and their coach; most of them (including a recently transformed Xander) are given healing treatments, while the swimmers past the point of no return swim out to the ocean, their humanity fully lost.

Relatively speaking, Cordelia doesn’t play a major role in “Go Fish,” but she does have a memorable exchange with Willow and Xander. Willow (who has been teaching the computer science class after Jenny Calendar’s death) complains about a student asking her to change his grade, which Xander gripes is “wrong” because “It’s a slap in the face to every one of us that worked hard and studied long hours to earn our D’s.” That’s when Cordelia mocks Xander for “being the voice of the common wuss” and archly tells him that “certain people are entitled to special privileges. They’re called winners. That’s the way the world works.”

Cordelia Nearly Got Canceled

Instead of backing down, Xander asks her “about that nutty ‘all men are created equal’ thing,” which she deems “Propaganda spouted by the ugly and less deserving.” Xander says he thinks Lincoln said that, and after Cordelia insults Lincoln’s appearance, Willow clarifies that the quote came from Thomas Jefferson. Cordelia replies, “Kept slaves, remember?” But if you watch the screen carefully at this moment, you will see that her lips keep moving after she finished talking.

That’s because actor Charisma Carpenter had to redub her original dialogue. When filming the episode, she originally said, “Kept slaves. Got any more?” The script says that she poses this question as “a challenge,” which may imply she was challenging Willow to produce more factoids about Jefferson, or maybe challenging her friends to cite more problematic people who spouted virtuous things. However, I believe the line was dubbed over for a more sinister reason: the producers realized that it sounded as if Cordelia was actually supporting slavery.

Asking “got any more?” after mentioning that Jefferson “owned slaves” may have made the audience think that Cordelia wanted to have slaves of her own. That might sound crazy, but keep in mind that she is a spoiled rich girl (daddy hasn’t been busted for tax fraud yet) who likely did have the modern equivalent of servants helping around her house. Plus, it’s far easier to believe that Cordelia was making a pro-slavery comment when her previous dialogue had her openly mocking the idea that everyone is created equally.

The Producers Quietly Saved This Fan-Favorite Character

By having Charisma Carpenter redub the line, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer producers removed the challenge from her voice; now, she simply reminds everyone that Thomas Jefferson was a bad man who owned slaves. This helps make Cordelia’s prickly mean girl a far more tolerable character and keeps her from getting canceled by the fandom. Which is good, because it would only be a little over a year later that Cordelia departs Sunnydale to go start a new life in Los Angeles as part of the Angel spinoff, whose titular hero she helps solve cases and fight crimes.

“Go Fish” is already an infamous episode because the fish monsters nearly assault Buffy in a very intimate way while the coach leeringly says, “boys have other needs.” Fortunately, this Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode dodged another scandal by redubbing a line that would have made Cordelia Chase a fan of slavery. Now, without that problematic dialogue, we can enjoy Cordelia for who she really is: the head b*tch in charge of any situation who isn’t afraid to put fellow students in their place!