10 Most Depressingly Realistic Lessons From Buffy The Vampire Slayer

7. There Are Some Things You Don't Need To Know About Your Parents

Episode: Season 3, Episode 6 - "Band Candy" Trust us: there are some things you don't need to know about your parents. When/how you were conceived. What sort of trouble they got into in their youth. Who they hooked up with back in the day - or even who they might be hooking up with these days. None of us really want to see our parents as sexual creatures, even if logic dictates that we are all essentially sexual creatures at our core, and that for us to exist, our parents must have been at some point. "Band Candy" does a great job outlining this. It shows how embarrassing it can be to know too much about your parent's personal lives, all thanks to a bit of magical candy that reverts adults back to their teenage selves - mentally, though not physically. Giles goes back to his "Ripper" days a bit and becomes a bad-boy figure. Buffy's mom Joyce swoons over him. It's just... embarrassing. This is an episode that doesn't pay off right away - in fact, it doesn't really pay off fully until nearly the end of the season, in the episode "Earshot" - when Buffy winds up with a bit of telepathy, and discovers that her mother and Giles had sex not just once, but twice, while in their juvenile state.