When it first aired back in 2001, Season 6 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer earned a pair of colorful nicknames from its famously devoted fans. The evocative “Season Sex” referred to the frequent, toxic, and often violent sexual clashes between the titular vampire slayer (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and her enemy turned lover Spike (James Marsters). Meanwhile, some called it “Season Sucks”—which, alas, was not a vampire pun. This was a dark, unpopular chapter in the show’s seven-year run. But with its 20th anniversary upon us and everyone in a nostalgic mood for the demon-infested Sunnydale, it’s impossible to ignore that two decades on, the show’s sixth season—once its most hated—has become its most important.

When I was trying to figure out how to celebrate the anniversary of the most personally important show in my life, I thought I should go big or go home. But as I approached my self-imposed assignment of ranking every single Buffy villain ever, I made a surprising discovery. The No. 1 slot didn’t really belong to either of Buffy’s boyfriends—Angelus or Spike—or even to my personal first-watch favorite, the Mayor. Looking back down the decades, it’s the unlikely trio of angry frustrated nerds—Jonathan, Andrew, and Warren—who still loom the largest.

There’s been a recent, fashionable reevaluation of Joss Whedon as “feminist” storyteller. Other audiences—thirsty for more female-centric stories told by women—have decided to re-cast him as a well-meaning but “problematic” father of fighters like Buffy Summers, River Tam, and Echo. (See, for example, the drubbing he got for the Black Widow story line in Avengers: Age of Ultron, which inspired Whedon to take a long break from Twitter.) But even those who insist on not giving Whedon full marks for feminism can’t deny him credit for being well ahead of his time when it came to the frustrated, angry young men of the social-media age. And it’s that examination of both the Trio and their impact on the women warriors of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that make Season 6 shine, even its darkest moments.

A number of behind-the-scenes factors contributed to Buffy’s rockiest season. The slayer had died dramatically at the end of Season 5, and—long before resurrections were all the rage in genre TV—some viewers thought maybe she should have stayed in the ground. Thanks to contract disputes, the show—cozily ensconced on the teen-friendly WB for its first five years—moved over to the less coherently branded UPN. For sticky legal reasons, Buffy could no longer play in the same pool as its spin-off series, Angel, either—and the lack of cross-over potential watered down the vampire saga. The slayer died, and came back to life . . . and David Boreanaz’s Angel—allegedly her soul mate—had to largely deal with it offscreen?

But the biggest handicap working against Buffy was that Whedon’s guiding voice had been spread thin over a number of projects. At that point, he was running both Buffy and Angel, and, in December 2001, he had just sold and started work on another show: the embattled-yet-beloved Firefly. It’s crystal clear, in retrospect, that Firefly got most of the fun Whedon (that show is wall-to-wall memorable quips), while Buffy made due with the grim leftovers. The rest of *Buffy’*s talented writing and producing staff stepped up to the plate, but as those writers themselves have admitted, it was always Whedon who had in the past come in to punch up every script and give Buffy a comedic lightness to balance the dark.