Throughout its seven-season run, Buffy the Vampire Slayer tackled the major holidays. “Amends” gave a twist to It’s a Wonderful Life for Christmas, Halloween was celebrated in at least three episodes over the series’ run, and the show even managed to make a musical event not seem so silly. Any other show would’ve stopped there; their checkboxes for holiday tributes considered completed. Series creator Joss Whedon had been sitting on a Thanksgiving-themed episode idea for a while, though.

In season four, he gathered the Scooby gang together for a Friendsgiving dinner complete with the angry spirits of the holiday. Originally airing on November 23, 1999, “Pangs” remains one of the few Thanksgiving episodes of genre TV and also one of the more controversial.

By season four, Buffy’s (Sarah Michelle Gellar) former flame Angel (David Boreanaz) had departed Sunnydale for his spinoff series, and she’d graduated on to college. Willow (Alyson Hannigan) is mourning the loss of her relationship with Oz (Seth Green), and Xander (Nicholas Brendan) is exploring a new relationship with Anya (Emma Caufield), a reformed demon. Even Giles (Anthony Head) is struggling to find purpose. The major upheaval in their lives finds Buffy desperate for some nostalgic comfort in the form of Thanksgiving, especially with her mom out of town. She convinces the gang to pull together for a makeshift holiday gathering.

“Pangs,” the eighth episode of the season, kicks off its madness with a groundbreaking ceremony for an Anthropology building on Sunnydale’s college campus. Xander happens to be working construction on the groundbreaking, and when the ground shifts, he falls into a forgotten historic site where he accidentally frees a vengeful spirit. The spirit, Hus, is a former Chumash warrior that wants revenge on behalf of his people. As such, he begins hunting and slaughtering any that he deems a leader of current society.

A vengeful spirit slaying people left and right sounds like a black and white definition of evil that must be defeated, right? Except for the first time Buffy battles Hus, she’s caught dead in her tracks when he tells her she must be so thrilled to conquer and snuff out the Chumash once again. It sparks off an episode-long debate between Giles, Willow, Spike (James Marsters), and the gang on historical guilt and past oppression. Whether or not certain types of evil should be allowed to exist. Hus may be killing people in the present day, but his wrath on behalf of his people is understandable. The group spirals into infighting over the matter, and the origins of Thanksgiving itself.

Making things even more complicated, Xander was stricken with magical syphilis. It’s played for laughs in the episode, but Spanish explorers did bring many diseases with them to California centuries ago that decimated Native Americans. Including syphilis. Bringing ethics and race into an episode is always a target for controversy, and trying to balance it out with humor fuels the fire. But twenty years later, these same discussions still feel timely. They always elicit raw feelings and heated debate. There are no easy, comfortable answers. Not then, not now.

The episode climaxes in a major battle over the Thanksgiving dinner table, arrows flung and resurrected warriors battling it out with the Scooby gang. When Buffy proves too formidable for Hus, he shapeshifts into an actual bear. A moment that also offers up some humor. Homicidal spirits must be stopped to prevent further bloodshed. The episode concludes with the friends finally sitting down to eat dinner.

It wasn’t the traditional holiday Buffy envisioned, but it wound up being the one she needed. A makeshift family made up of a Slayer, a neutered vampire, a reformed demon, a father figure, and her two closest friends provided the support they all needed to ease the growing pains. More importantly, it’s a perfect way to demonstrate that sometimes tradition is meant to be bucked.

As a whole, “Pangs” is a complicated episode. It’s trying to set up a crossover event between Angel and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, juggle the various character arcs of the season, move forward the season-long plot, and dig into the meaty origins of Thanksgiving and all its social implications. That it shifts tone between seriousness and humor only complicates it further. Whedon and episode writer Jane Espenson created one ballsy episode. One that still elicits debate among scholars and critics twenty years later.

But through it all, it still serves as a heartfelt holiday reminder that sometimes you need a good meal among those you love to get you through a rough patch.