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A couple of days ago my sister and I started watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I find the way they talk about and interact with technology really charming. The show’s first season takes place during the early stages of the dot-com bubble. It’s 1997, the internet and computer science at large is new and exciting.

Episode 8, titled “I, Robot… You, Jane” is about a demon whose soul is accidentally uploaded to cyberspace. This has been one of my favorite episodes so far since we get a really cool window into the zeitgeist while exploring themes that we still talk about nearly 30 years later. People use phrases like “jacking in” and “the Net”. Buffy calls emails “letters”.

High school students in the show defend the use of technology, while Giles the librarian (who is also the Watcher and Buffy’s mentor) argues there’s nothing better than a good book.

A student replies:

The printed page is obsolete. Information isn’t bound up anymore. It’s an entity. The only reality is virtual. If you’re not jacked in, you’re not alive.

The episode starts in Italy, at a church in the 1400s. A group of monks traps an ancient demon called Moloch the Corrupter in a book, to which he is bound unless the pages are read aloud. Centuries later, the demon gets released onto the Internet when Willow, Buffy’s friend, laser-scans the old book to save it in the library’s digital archives.

A message appears on the screen: "Where am I?".

Willow begins chatting with Moloch and becomes infatuated with the virtual demon, who calls himself Malcolm and pretends to be an 18 year old boy living about 80 miles away. Her friends are concerned about her becoming close to someone she’s never met, but Willow insists Malcolm knows her better than anyone.

There is a scene in the episode in which Jenny Calendar, the school’s computer science teacher, calls Giles a snob for refusing to acknowledge the utility of the Internet.

Calendar: Do you really think knowledge should be kept in these carefully guarded repositories where only a handful of white guys can get at it?

Giles: Nonsense. I simply don’t adhere to a knee-jerk assumption that because something is new it’s better.

Calendar: This isn’t a fad, Rupert. We are creating a new society here.

Giles: A society in which human interaction is all but obsolete, in which people can be completely manipulated by technology. Well— thank you, I’ll pass.

With full access to the school’s digital records, the demon learns about every student. He identifies Buffy as the Slayer and plots to kill her. He continues communicating with the students through the computer, manipulating two of Willow’s classmates (Dave and Fritz) to carry his orders out in the physical world.

Moloch orders them to electrocute Buffy by leaving a stripped live wire in the school’s locker room showers. Buffy sees Dave and asks him if he knows where Willow is. Dave replies she had said she’d be in the locker room. When Buffy gets there, she finds a leaky shower head and makes her way over to close it. Dave runs to warn her about the stripped wire and it becomes a close call.

Dave realizes he can’t follow through with Moloch’s plan. At first the demon attempts persuading Dave by promising him knowledge and power in return for his allegiance. Dave stands his ground. In response, the demon writes a fake suicide note on the computer and we see Fritz looming behind Dave.

Next, the gang (i.e., Buffy, Giles, and Xander, no Willow) eventually realize Moloch has been uploaded to cyberspace. They try deleting the computer file where the demon was scanned, but the demon’s face appears on screen and angrily yells at them to leave Willow alone. Buffy goes to the computer lab hoping to find Willow, but instead she finds Dave dead, hanging from the ceiling with the fake note taped to his chest.

When Willow gets home, she receives two emails from Malcolm saying he can’t wait to meet her. Moments later Fritz shows up at Willow’s house and kidnaps her, taking her to an undisclosed laboratory where a scientist has built the demon a mechanical body. Moloch meets Willow and says he wants to give her the world. He kills Fritz. Next he turns to Willow and tells her he feels grateful because she has given him life once more. She doesn’t appear surprised that Malcolm is a big mechanical robot demon, but she’s certainly disappointed that the demon, who had claimed he loved her, had lied to her all along.

Buffy and Xander go to the laboratory to rescue Willow. Meanwhile, Giles and Calendar collaborate to find a way to defeat Moloch. Calendar reveals that she’s a technopagan, so when Giles tells her about a demon’s soul being uploaded to cyberspace, she’s unfazed and ready to help. She helps Giles upload a spell from one of his books to the computer, which kicks Moloch “out of the Net”, leaving him only with the mechanical body and no more universal access to the digital realm.

At the lab, Moloch fights with Buffy, Willow and Xander, and after he’s been weakened by Giles’s spell, Buffy finds a way to electrocute the demon, finally defeating him.

The closing scene is another dialogue between Calendar and Giles:

Calendar: Honestly, what is it about computers that bothers you so much?

Giles: The smell

Calendar: Computers don’t smell, Rupert.

Giles: I know, I know. Smell is the most powerful trigger to the memory there is. A certain flower or a whiff of smoke can bring up experiences long forgotten. Books smell musty and rich. The knowledge gained from a computer is… it has no texture, no context. It’s there and it’s gone. If it’s to last, then the getting of knowledge should be, uh, tangible. It should be, uh… smelly.