"Reptile Boy" Live from LA's NerdMelt

The year is 2017, and the podcast Buffering the Vampire Slayer is recording its very first live episode at NerdMelt in Los Angeles — a venue that, as host Jenny Owen Youngs notes, "is no longer there." Almost a decade later, this encore airing kicks off a month of live recordings leading up to the podcast's tenth anniversary celebration in New York City. The episode under discussion is Season 2, Episode 5 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: "Reptile Boy."

The Episode's Core: Patriarchy as Monster

Jenny's self-written summary sets the tone immediately: "In this episode, a bunch of white men with rich dads keep women in the basement of their private club and eventually kill them to maintain their own wealth and power. They also answer to a reptile." The hosts acknowledge the political resonance — they had recently polled listeners about whether to discuss politics on the show, and while most email respondents wanted the podcast to remain an escape, the Twitter response was more open. Their compromise: keep the show escapist but "call things out like the theme of this episode and tying it into what's going on in the world around us." Jenny promises the audience they'll say "patriarchy" roughly 450,000 times over the course of the night.