YMMV / Buffy the Vampire Slayer S2E17 "Passion"

• Genius Bonus: The opera piece playing when Giles walks in on Jenny's corpse isn't a subversion. Angelus was deliberately playing it because he knew Giles would recognize it and assume it was part of the romantic gesture. The song is about two characters realizing, once and for all, that they love each other. It was Angelus being extra cruel in a way only Giles could recognize.
• Growing the Beard: This is regarded as one of the first near perfect episodes, proving that Angel wasn't coming back any time soon because Angelus was responsible for the first major character death of the series. The series later became famous for them.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Angel uses Jenny's body to torture Giles. In the next season, it's the other way around; the First Evil taking Jenny's form to torture Angel into killing himself.
• Les Yay: Willow/Buffy exit the Bronze arm-in-arm, followed by Official Couple Xander/Cordelia. Lesbian shippers certainly noticed the Homoerotic Subtext here, intended or otherwise.
• Moral Event Horizon: Word of God says that Angelus' murder of Jenny Calender was important for the purpose of displaying how evil Angelus was. Before that act, Angelus had murdered at least four people since being turned, but had not yet committed an offense so grievous to the audience (and the Scoobies) that it became a serious question as to whether or not it was even possible to redeem Angel, and if it was would anyone (besides Buffy) want him to be? They also decided against having Angelus out of vamp face during the act, as many fans would likely never be able to look at him the same way, making it clear that who Buffy fell for really is gone, and this is the true Angelus.
• Narm:
  • A major plot point is Angelus destroying Jenny’s computer to get rid of the evidence on how to restore his soul. Except - he doesn’t. He only trashes Jenny's monitor and leaves her actual computer completely untouched, meaning that regardless of her backing up her findings on the soul curse onto a floppy disk, Willow would have easily been able to recover the files by simply getting a new monitor. Oops! The show came out at a time when computers weren't as common in every household and knowledge about them wasn't that widespread yet, meaning most audience members wouldn't have even noticed that Angelus rather dumbly failed to destroy the evidence on how to regain his soul. It sure is Narmy to a modern audience watching back, though.
    • This one might actually be sneakily justified and thus somewhat less Narmy: Jenny never informed the rest of the group that she was trying to restore Angel's soul, so the group would never have known to look for a backup file, and despite being quite brilliant generally, Angel admits later in his own show that he was never great with technology (especially since he was centuries old and never needed it), leaving computer work to Cordelia and the other members of the group both there and in Buffy. It's entirely possible he thought it was like a television set and that the monitor breaking meant the whole thing was destroyed.
    • Lending credence to the idea that Angel is Technologically Blind Elder who didn't realize that destroying the monitor didn't mean destroying the computer is the fact that Willow mentions later that Jenny left lesson plans on her computer. Unless Willow was referring to a different computer, it would seem the writers may have been subtly playing off of Angelus's ignorance. Why Willow didn't find the original file (since Jenny would have had no reason to delete it from the computer) is another matter, however, since she also finds other supernatural-related files.
  • Jenny shoves a conveniently-placed mop and bucket into Angelus' path and he clearly runs right into it.
• Sampled Up: Ed Sheeran tweeted about sampling Buffy music in the buildup to the release of his x album; "Afire Love" nicks the piano riff from this episode's "Remembering Jenny".
• Values Dissonance: At the time, the episode was heralded as a brilliant subversion of viewer expectations and a statement on just how dark Joss Whedon was willing to get to keep the audience off guard. In retrospect, to some viewers it comes off as a horribly cliched and offensive piece of Stuffed into the Fridge. There is an element of Once Original, Now Common here, in that the Stuffed into the Fridge trope became popularised, and horribly over-used, in part because of the shock factor that this very development had. It is worth noting also that Jenny was a semi-regular cast member for an extended period before this, and it was a huge moment for the show, whereas Stuffed into the Fridge generally draws complaints for being lazy and thoughtless. It is however worth noting that, to qualify as 'Fridging' by most definitions, the character must be a complete innocent killed only because of their relationship to the person their death motivates; Jenny was not an innocent, and was an active participant who was killed while in the process of trying to stop the villain, though Angelus obscured this point by leaving her body for Giles to find.

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