Best Quotes From "Pangs" - A Buffy Thanksgiving

"Pangs" is one of my favorite episodes. The writers and actors had a great time exploring all the various pros and cons of celebrating Thanksgiving Day, and we get to see Buffy showing that she can also Slay the Culinary Arts in the kitchen. Angel makes a cameo, unbeknownst to Buffy, and Spike has to be tied to a chair in order to behave, but gets to eat some gravy as a reward. Xander contracts syphilis as Native American revenge, but then finds a cure. There's a LOT to be thankful for!

Read the complete script Here on Buffyworld

Some of the best quotes:

BUFFY: You know what I should do? I should have my own Thanksgiving.Invite all you guys, cook the whole meal just ike Mom always does. It'll be great!
WILLOW: Buffy, earlier you agreed with me about Thanksgiving. It's a sham! It's all about death!
BUFFY: It's a sham, but it's a sham with yams. A yam sham.
WILLOW: You're not going to jokey-rhyme your way out of this one.

GILES: Tell me again why we're not doing this at your house.
BUFFY: Giles, if you want to get by in American society you have to learn our traditions. You're the patriarch. You have to host the festivities or it's all meaningless.
GILES: And this is in no way an elaborate scheme to stick me with the clean up.

Spike peers through a dusty window into a dilapidated building. Inside, in a pool of golden lamp-light, a small nest of vampires is settling down with a dazed human victim. An older vampire is about to bite. Then he pauses and holds the whimpering victim out to a younger vampire. A heart-warming domestic scene. Spike watches, his breath frosting the window, a picture of misery and longing.

RILEY (Talking about his home in Iowa) ... After dinner, we all go for a walk down by the river with the dogs. And there's... trees, and I know what you're thinking, it's like I grew up in a Grant Wood painting.
BUFFY Exactly. If I knew who that was.
RILEY Just a guy who painted stuff that looked like what I grew up in.
BUFFY: Ah. Well, have fun at the homestead.
RILEY: Always do. What's the line -- "Home's the place that, when you have to go there --"
BUFFY: "-- they have to take you in." That's what they say.

BUFFY: We don't say Indian.
GILES: Yes! Right. Always behind on the terms. Still trying not to refer to you lot as 'bloody colonials'.
BUFFY: The thing is, I like my evil like my men: evil. You know, straight up, black hat, tie you to the railroad tracks, soon my electroray will destroy metropolis BAD. Not all mixed up with guilt and the destruction of an indigenous culture.

BUFFY: What happened to the Chumash?
WILLOW: How about imprisonment? Forced labor? Herded like animals into a mission full of bad European diseases?
BUFFY: Boy, the Cultural Partnership center really didn't stress any of that stuff.

XANDER: Can we come rocketing back to the part about me and my new syphilis?
ANYA: Oh, that'll make you blind and insane, but it won't kill you. The smallpox will.
XANDER: Sweetie... not helping.

GILES: Buffy, Xander is in real danger. Are you sure the solution is pie?
BUFFY: Over bickering and confusion? I'll take pie.

GILES: We will find a solution --
BUFFY: And we will have a nice dinner. Okay? Both. End of story. I'm having a Thanksgiving. It's going to be perfect.

SPIKE: Help me...
Buffy slams a palm to his chest, sends him flying back on his ass. He scrambles out of the direct sunlight, his blanket beginning to smoke.
SPIKE: What part of "help me" did you not understand?
BUFFY: The part where I help you.
SPIKE: Come on! I'm parboiling out here!

SPIKE: I'm saying Spike had a little trip to the vet and now he doesn't chase the other puppies anymore. I can't bite anything. I can't even hit people.

Spike is being tied to a chair. Buffy finishes the last knot as he complains:
SPIKE: Bloody hell, woman! You're cutting off my circulation.
BUFFY: You don't have any circulation.
SPIKE: Well it pinches.

SPIKE: Oh, someone put a stake in me!
XANDER: You got a lot of volunteers in here...

SPIKE: I just can't take this mamby-pamby boo-hooing over the bloody Indians!
WILLOW: The preferred term is --
SPIKE: You won! All right? You came in and you killed them and you took their land. That's what conquering nations do! That's what Caesar did, he's not going around saying "I came, I conquered, I felt really bad about it"! The history of the world is not people making friends. You had better weapons, you massacred them, end of story!

XANDER: Maybe it's the syphilis talking, but some of that made sense.

SPIKE: Do you know what happens to a vampire that doesn't get to feed?
GILES: Actually, I've always wondered.
SPIKE: Living skeletons, mate. Like famine pictures from those dusty countries, only not half as funny.

BUFFY: You can have gravy. Gravy has blood in it, right?
SPIKE: You know what else has blood in it? Blood!

(After the Chumash Warrior turns into a bear)
SPIKE: You made a bear!
BUFFY: I didn't mean to!
SPIKE: Undo it! Undo it!

XANDER: Hey! Gentle Ben! Over here!
Not getting a reaction, Xander grabs a bag of raw, unpeeled potatoes. He starts lobbing them at the bear.
XANDER: (to the bear)That's for giving me syphilis!

WILLOW: ... did you see me? Two seconds of conflict with an indigenous person and I turn into General Custer.

BUFFY: It wasn't exactly a perfect Thanksgiving.
XANDER: I don't know. It kinda seemed right to me. A bunch of anticipation, a big fight and now we're all sleepy.

Anthony Head as the Tro-Lo-Lo Guy!

This is so wiggity-whack!

Slayer Soundtrack Sunday ~ Band Candy

The episode "Band Candy," season 3, episode 6, has some hilarious moments as Buffy's Mother Joyce and Mr. Giles eat some magical chocolate candy and revert back to their teenage years, creating a Freaky Friday role-reversal situation for Buffy. Giles channels his inner-Spike as he seeks to impress the bad-boy crazed Joyce, and they make out (and more) while listening to old records. Soon they are joined by Principal Snyder, turned back into a teenage Geek by the candy, and he also wants to woo Joyce by doing some rockin' Tae Kwan Do maneuvers. It's all quite a bit of fun until they realize there are several small babies stolen from the local hospital by the Mayor and the Mr. Trick gang of vampires.

All the role reversals are great fun, and Buffy has to be the adult voice of reason for once.




Cream "Tales of Brave Ulysses"
One sad note - Giles listens to this song again in Season 5 "Forever" when Joyce dies.







Four Star Mary (Dingoes Ate My Baby) ~ Violent



The Kingsmen "Louie, Louie"



Christophe Beck (Soundtrack) "Sugar High"

Slayer Soundtrack Sunday ~ "Danse Macabre"

The memorable episode "Hush" in Season 4 is considered by some Buffy fans to be the scariest of the whole series. A group of creepy floating demons known as "The Gentlemen" are haunting Sunnydale in order to capture the voices of sleeping people. As part of their evil plans they also begin to harvest the hearts of various poor souls for a ritual.

source: Wikipedia

The Gentlemen, called the "creepiest villains we've ever done" by series writer Doug Petrie, were inspired by a nightmare Whedon had as a child, specifically one in which he was in bed and approached by a floating monster. Whedon fashioned The Gentlemen as something from a Brothers Grimm fairy tale, intending them to be frightening to children — monsters who carve out people's hearts, smiling as they do so. Nosferatu, Pinhead from Hellraiser, and Mr. Burns from The Simpsons all served as physical models for The Gentlemen.
Elegantly Victorian in costume and demeanor, Whedon found their politeness and grace especially unsettling. Their metallic teeth were inspired by the intersection of Victorian culture with the height of the Industrial age, an era that Whedon considers "classically creepy". For Buffy studies scholar Rhonda Wilcox, The Gentlemen and their straitjacket-wearing minions, who clumsily flap, gyrate, and crouch as they move, are representative of class disparity and patriarchy: The Gentlemen, with their Victorian suits, move effortlessly to accomplish what they set out to do while their minions, whom Whedon called "footmen", do the "dirty work".

This episode was nominated for Emmy Awards in the categories Outstanding Writing in a Drama Series and Outstanding Cinematography. It also received a Writers Guild of America Award.

A little girl appears in Buffy's prophetic dream singing a song about The Gentlemen:

Can't even shout

Can't even cry

The gentlemen are coming by

Looking in windows

Knocking on doors

They need to take seven

And they might take yours

Can't call to mum

Can't say a word

You're gonna die screaming

But you won't be heard

When Giles has to silently explain his discoveries about The Gentlemen using an overhead projector, for background music he plays "Danse Macabre" - a classical work by the composer Camille Saint-Saens, inspired by Medieval morality plays and paintings about Death:






Source: La Mort Dans L'Art

The dances of death were mostly painted (or more rarely carved) on the outside walls of cloisters, of family vaults, of ossuaries or inside some churches. These frescoes represent an emaciated corpse or a skeleton coupled with a representative of a certain social class. The number of characters and the composition of the dance vary. The dance of death often takes the form of a farandole. Below or above the picture are painted verses by which death adresses its victim. He often talks in a threatening and accusing tone, sometimes also cynic and sarcastic. Then comes the argument of the Man, full of remorse and despair, crying for mercy. But death leads everyone into the dance: from the whole clerical hierarchy (pope, cardinals, bishops, abbots, canons, priests), to every single representative of the laic world (emperors, kings, dukes, counts, knights, doctors, merchants, usurers, robbers, peasants, and even innocent children). Death does not care for the social position, nor for the richness, sex, or age of the people it leads into its dance. It is often represented with a musical instrument.

Dance Macabre is better known today as the background music for several Halloween cartoons. Americans may remember the one that was shown on PBS, along with the classroom filmstrip with Harold Dexter Hoopes watercolors, which reminds me the most of The Gentlemen because of the big clock tower. The last one is a fantastical award-winning animation from Ireland. It's very Buffy-esque, with skeletons popping up out of the graveyard - enjoy! :)