Gingerbread is an episode penned by Jane Espenson. Espenson has a predilection for structuring her episodes like farce, or a Three's Company episode--the first three acts are really just set-up, and the final act is nothing but payoff. Season four's Pangs follows this same structure, but more gracefully.
Gingerbread is kind of a dull episode for a long stretch. It's about Joyce falling under a spell that causes her to get so carried away with "taking back Sunndydale", ostensibly for the sake of the children, that she paradoxically endorses child murder to accomplish this task. The adult world tends to cast a short shadow over the events of the series, and this episode does raise an intriguing question--what happens when the parents of Sunnydale finally become hip to the supernatural events all around them? It's an interesting question to explore, but for the purposes of Gingerbread, it's just another monster-of-the-week MacGuffin, so in a philosophical sense nothing really progresses; the genie gets put back into the bottle. This leaves you with a sense that the teleplay is just spinning its wheels since there will be no lasting consequences after Buffy inevitably defeats the demon at hand.
I'm also ambivalent about the "Mothers Opposed to the Occult" jokes throughout. On the one hand, MOO is a funny acronym. On the other...what is it trying to say about organizations like MADD? That parents who lost children to drunk driving are just on hysterical witch hunts, trying to find scapegoats? It's an uncomfortable equivalency.
Anyhow. As I said, after the work of setting everything up is done, the last act is nonstop delight. Pound for pound it might be one of the best acts of any Buffy episode from the entire series. There's so much wonderful stuff, from Cordelia's buddy-cop dynamic with Giles, to Xander and Oz ineffectually mounting a rescue mission, to Amy's show of power on the witch-burning pyre, to Buffy's adorable vanquishing of the enormous demon at the end. The writing here is so sharp and specific and motivated and clear and purposeful--emblematic of season three as a whole, and a quality that will never be recaptured with such consistency in any of the seasons that follow.
