I Robot, You Jane

"I Robot, You Jane" episode, Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. Mutant Enemy, Inc., prod., WB (Warner Brothers) Network: season 1, episode 8, 28 April 1997. Stephen Posey, dir. Ashley Gable and Tom Swyden, script. As of December 2019, available on DVD from Netflix and elsewhere, Season 1, disc 2.

As noted by Mitch Persons in the "Buffy, The Vampire Slayer Episode Guide" in Cinefantastique 29.11 (March 1998), the demon Moloch was imprisoned in a book in Italy in the 1400s. "When the book is scanned into the computer of Buffy's high school, Moloch goes with the text. Apparently passing itself off as one "'Malcolm'[,] . . . trapped in the computer," Moloch is exorcised by the continuing character Giles (the Watcher and school librarian) and Ms. Calendar, the new computer teacher [and a "Technopagan" who knows about the occult — RDE]. Through the efforts of a supposedly defunct high-tech company, the demon is embodied in "a metal clad monster who claims that he is Moloch in solid form." After exorcised from the Net, the robot-Moloch attacks Buffy, but "misses and plunges his arm into an electrical switch box. In a blaze of sparks and lightening [sic], he sizzles out and dies" (36).

Persons labels the story a "supernatural mystery" and adds that it is "also a discourse on the old versus new: books versus computers. Giles's arguments for reading make a great deal of sense, but so does Ms. Calendar's insistence on keeping up with technology," and her noting that it was (what we'll call the low-tech of) a book that brought their immediate dangers.

Inside the computer, Buffy's Moloch is a textualized/digitalized demon, relatively free inside the cybernetic and digital (cf. and contrast J. Sladek's The Müller-Fokker Effect).

Visually, Moloch in its released, free-standing form is a combination of postmodern robot and horned demon, for the embodiment of the demonic in the cybernetic and mechanical. He is still in communion, let's say, with the Internet and has a sort of god-like omniscience, and enough of the Satanic to claim to love the character Willow (who scanned him into the computer) and offer her the world. When refused, the robot-Moloch threatens Willow, with death — "he" has already killed a character — and we might infer, with a different TV show, sexual assault.

Note also, among other things

"Moloch" as a god offered child sacrifices in ancient Israel during the monarchy (also spelled "Molech," and which might really be Melech = The King = Yahweh himself, in a recent theory for the name as a way early biblical editors cleaned up a story of appalling behavior by their ancestors). The name "Moloch" is applied to a large, Modernist machine in an expressionist sequence in F. Lang's METROPOLIS.

A horror/comic riff on the theme of the risks of on-line dating. 

The theme of enslavement to a personal computer, literalized in obedience to the digitalized Moloch and emphasized by the repeated line by the (pretty literally) enthralled computer-geek Fritz, "I'm jacked in."

Surveillance from the computer and user p-o-v, with direct observation via what in the 21st century would be a "webcam," external to and jacked into a desktop computer[1], and more formal surveillance, hacked into by the enthralled Fritz and later by robot-Moloch.

Computer-generated (or synthesized) voices, not as sophisticated as HAL in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (film) but well beyond "You have mail" and notable in 1997 with desktop computers at a high school.

In the computer, Moloch is in the computer he was scanned into and, as Buffy notes, every other computer connected to that computer by a modem: so there's the implied image of a demonic force surrounding all those "inside," so to speak, the local in-school network, plus all connected beyond in the Internet/World Wide Web.[2] The dangers of such a hacked larger network are made explicit in the dialog, listing threats culminating in computer-launched nuclear attacks; cf. and contrast COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT et al. As the episode progresses, some less apocalyptic but serious threats are reported, making clear "There's a demon in the Internet," infecting cyberspace — the term is used — and the need for exorcism becomes all the more pressing; cf. and contrast such works as Count Zero.

When the exorcism is complete, Ms. Calendar pronounces, "He's out of the Net; he's bound," and we look to see Moloch trapped again within the covers of the original medieval book, with the text restored. We don't; Moloch is back in the "demon robot" (Willow's term later) but with only brute strength and local power, although still a threat to Buffy and her friends — until he punches out that electrical power box and is destroyed (cf. and contrast final killing of the alien monster in THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD [1951][3]).

Discussed succinctly in Wikipedia entry for the episode.[4]

RDE, Initial Compiler, 31Jan98, rev. 29Dec19