"Oh man! It's Nazi Germany and I've got Playboys in my locker!"
In a way this, Jane Espenson's second script is a harking back to what already seems an earlier era of the show: the fairly clear cut metaphor at the heart of the story. After all the arc episodes of late it would almost be a relief to have a more dependable type of one-off episode, except that the subject matter is intrinsically rather harrowing. It's a good thing that it's leavened with so much humour.
Moral panics are terrible, terrible things, always. Even when they aren't virtual witch hunts, people always get hurt. The obvious example which occurs to me is the moral panic against paedophiles here in the UK around a decade ago, whipped up by The News of the World, on whose grave there can never be too much dancing. There can hardly be a more genuinely loathsome section of society, but even in these cases innocent people get hurt, as the paediatricians who had been mistaken for paedophiles by a particularly stupid mob would no doubt agree. So much worse, then, when the target is much less deserving. Even without the literal presence of witchcraft the allusions to Salem would be obvious.
The demon (ironically, or rather deliberately, a rather Satan-like one) is closer to being literal than most of the metaphor monsters we've seen so far on Buffy. Even the mental fog which stops people asking basic facts about who the dead children is not much of a stretch; hysteria and groupthink do bad things to rational thought.
One thing which particularly impresses me is the way the theme is only gradually developed, though. The scene of the coven of witches doing seemingly dark deeds is shot especially to look as incriminating as possible, so the fact that we suddenly find Willow amongst them is a shock. The sudden reveal of the same occult symbol from the children's corpses is a truly shocking moment.
The true horror of the whole situation is played out via mother / daughter relationships, though. We've never seen Willow's neglectful mother before; the first time she takes an interest in her daughter, she burns her at the stake. The scenes between the two of them are simultaneously horrifying and very, very, funny. Alyson Hannigan is such a great comic actress.
It's the irrational actions of Joyce that are more shocking, though. Partly this is because of the convincingly gradual build-up, but also because it shows that moral panics can affect even people who are normally quite rational. Her speech ("This isn't our town any more. It belongs to the monsters and the witches and the slayers. I say it's time for the grown-ups to take Sunnydale back.") is another of several moments that hits you (and the Scoobies) like a punch.
It also, of course, hints at Sunnydale's "selective memory thing" that Willow mentions at the end. That means we get to see the glorious confrontation between Giles and Snyder in the library without any big consequences, but this isn't a fully-fledged reset button, not quite. For the first time we're explicitly told that the people of Sunnydale mat repress, but they don't forget, not completely.
The regulars, then? This is Cordelia's best episode since she split with Xander, back to her comedy gold best. Amy (nice to see her again) is stuck as a rat, potentially for a very long time. Also funny is Xander's exaggerated oversensitivity towards the very suggestion that he might know where Willow is. In fact, it's almost as though the Scoobies' interpersonal relationships are being drawn lightly as a contrast from the heavy themes. I'd say it might be a harbinger of some heavy stuff between regular characters next episode, but that can't be, right? It's Buffy's birthday!
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