"Pangs" is an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that has either aged very well or terribly depending on your politics. The drama in this Thanksgiving episode from 1999 hinges on a spirit of California's native Chumash people rising from the grave to murder various people of European descent. Writer Jane Espenson constructs the story as a vehicle for philosophical argument in a way that feels very natural for the characters and organic overall.
Willow (Alyson Hannigan) has started to inherent some of her mother's ideological attitudes which Espenson had mocked in the episode "Gingerbread" from the previous season. Now Willow, in college, condemns the idea of even celebrating Thanksgiving as reinforcing the values of European settlers who violently appropriated territory. Once a Native American spirit (Tod Thawley) starts committing race based assassinations, Willow and Giles (Anthony Head) take up opposite positions. Willow thinks maybe they should help the spirit while Giles feels its madness to help the spirit murder innocent people. At the time the episode aired, Espenson's own position would hardly have been subtle, but to-day, when people commonly argue for the idea of racially inherited malevolence (now often called "whiteness"), Willow's position is entirely plausible.
I really like how Espenson uses the supporting characters of Spike (James Marsters) and Anya (Emma Caufield) to bring complexity to the argument in ways that are both funny and meaningful. Xander (Nicholas Brendon), who's been infected with syphilis and various other diseases by the ghost, doesn't hesitate to side with Giles and makes a sweeping statement about the irredeemably of "vengence demons", forgetting that the woman tenderly wiping his brow, Anya, is herself a former vengeance demon.
It's been very amusing that the former mass murderer has been accepted into the Scooby Gang but in this moment we're compelled to question our own sympathies. We can apply that to the argument at hand in two ways--either to realise that a person (or a group occupying the conceptual space more suited for an individual person) can be redeemed of even the most horrific of past sins or that its habit for the person/group mind to selectively forgive past transgressions based on the convenience of circumstance. Looking at it either way compels us to probe the validity of either position.
It takes a villain, Spike, to finally clear things up and point out the spirit is trying to kill them so that, whatever the history, now it's a matter of kill or be killed. Spike now takes up an interesting position on the series as a neutered villain who essentially becomes an amoral chorus. It's not unlike the idea behind Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight, a story in which ideas normally impermissible in public discourse can be engaged in because the people expressing them are all understood to be villains.
It's episodes like this that make it seem little wonder the modern Left wants to disassociate itself from this former cornerstone of Internet liberal culture.
Fortunately for humanity, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is available on Amazon Prime.
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