The Shooter Episode

“Earshot” is a good episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, rooted in the premise of Buffy accidentally garnering the ability hear the thoughts of everyone around her (following an encounter with a demon). Like most episodes, the brilliance is less in the central concept than the multiple masters it serves. The episode has a comedic bent, including Buffy using her new powers to steal answers from a class know-it-all during a class discussion, besides eavesdropping on Oz’s zen, profound thoughts and uncovering that Cordelia says exactly what she thinks. The new ability also sets up the central threats of the episode, though: the promise that Buffy will lose her mind if she can’t lose this ability and the discovery that someone in the school is planning to commit a mass murder.

Ask the average viewer from the late 1990s about this episode and I doubt they remember much, if any of the above about this episode. For this, arguably the most infamous episode of the seven-season series, there are two things people remember.

1. Columbine
Make no mistake about it. Season three of BtVS was on fire. While I have a slight personal preference for season two, three was inarguably the more consistent and polished season of the two, and best bundled the Hellmouth as metaphor for high school focus with the young cast fully coming into its own. Eliza Dushku and Harry Groener elevated the entire enterprise with the dark doppelgänger and big bad energy of their respective characters. Everything was coming to a boil en route to the climactic graduation finale, where Groener’s mayor promised to ascend to epic demon form.

"Earshot," despite its original placement as episode eighteen out of twenty-two, isn’t all that pivotal to the overarching season storylines (besides arguably building on the relationship between Buffy and fellow classmates beyond the cast of normally featured characters—particularly Jonathan—in ways that payoff in episodes twenty and twenty-two). Nonetheless, for all the momentum the show gathered both creatively and in terms of audience size and intensity, it was a big deal when it didn’t air as originally scheduled.

The Columbine school shooting happened.

Particularly from the perspective of a high school student at the time, I can attest to the degree to which this shooting, at the vanguard of similar incidents across the twenty years and counting to follow, rocked the US. And so, it made sense that a teen show with an episode threatening a mass killing would need to be handled with sensitivity. So it came to pass that this episode did not air as scheduled, instead held until the following fall.

2. The misleading gun
The threat of violence may well have been enough to postpone this episode on its own, but the tension building as a sweaty Danny Strong, as Jonathan, set up a rifle in the school clock tower pushed the episode over the edge.

Buffy uses her words to defuse the situation, as opposed to physically disarming him. (More on this later.) It’s only in the aftermath that Jonathan reveals he never meant to shoot up the student body, but rather to kill himself.

It’s easy to criticize the contrivance of the rifle, complete with scope, in this scenario as a wildly impractical choice for Jonathan to shoot himself, besides the nonsensical choice to commit suicide in the clock tower. Everything about that set up looks like he's aiming for mass murder, and so the show appears to be setting up a red herring.

Indeed, the red herring overshadows the actual reveal that it was a disgruntled lunch lady who meant to poison the student body.

For all the real-life drama, no to mention the clumsiness of how Jonathan’s arc misleads us on who the villain of the week truly is, might it have been better in retrospect had this sub-plot been dropped altogether? Surely, she show could have rededicated that screen tie to fleshing our the lunch lady and the climactic fight scene, having more exposition about the inciting demons, or mining telepathy for a few extra laughs.

No, the show wouldn't have been better with that revision.

The truest value of this episode is not in its novelty, conceit, humor, or action sequences, but rather in the few moments spent in conversation between Buffy and Jonathan. From a contemporary lens, the moment arguably had uncomfortable ‘walk up, not out’ vibes--the oversimplified suggestion we can all "solve" school shootings by being nicer to each other as opposed to demanding gun control reform that might keep guns out of the hands of would-be shooters. Assuming the best intentions, though, Buffy's talk with Jonathan is a responsible meditation, amidst a show full of fist fights, that talking tends to yield better results than fisticuffs—particularly when the threat to squelch is no monster, but rather an everyday human. All the more so, the scene underscores the growth of Buffy as a character that she both wants to and is capable of resolving the situation by talking it through (besides making it all the clearer how far Faith has pushed her when Buffy finally brawls with her in an extended fight scene three episodes later).

“Earshot” is far from my favorite or most re-watched episode of Buffy. It’s deceptively good, though, and worth revisiting for fans of the show.