Opening shot: Angel paces the floor of his apartment, looking intense, pensive and distant. Darla taunts him. "You can’t deny what you are anymore, Angel." "Stop it!" he exclaims in a whine. "Admit it, Angel. Don’t you want to embrace it? Don’t you want to feel the power it gives you?" Angel looks at her with pain. "I can’t." Darla gets up in his face. "Say it, Angel. Say what you are. Say that you’re a...father!!!"

That’s right. Angel’s big secret is that he’s a father. Peck had so much fun playing the ‘is-he-or-isn’t-he’ game about Angel being a vampire that he decided not to let the cat out of the bag in the first season. And, for once, it wasn’t Peck’s idea.

David Peckinpah: I have to tell you, I haven’t had the best experience working with Weedon, but there’s one guy on staff that I see eye to eye with.

David Greenwalt: I knew right away that the ‘Angel as a father’ storyline would be killer, but I couldn’t get Joss to agree. I knew that if I had about five years to pester him about it he’d agree with me, but luckily the network gave Peckinpah creative control of the show and I didn’t have to.

David Peckinpah: Yeah, Greenwalt’s great. The fact that we’re on the same wavelenth really made up for the bad morale among the rest of the writing staff. That might seem harsh, but I’ve really had some problems with these guys. I mean, it seems cute at first, but you can only let Des Hotel and Batali poison your coffee so many times.

Angel and Darla’s baby fit into Peckinpah and Greenwalt’s story arc idea of "breeder" vampires who carry their offspring as part of the Master’s grand scheme to create an army of vampiric infants, who will use their eternal cuteness to distract humanity while he finds a way to escape his Heckmouth prison. When asked where ‘vampire babies’ fit in Peckinpah’s conception of a family show, the Peckster promptly faked a brain aneurysm.

When Darla decides she doesn’t want to have the baby after all, Angel stakes her, grabs the baby from her ashes and lovingly wraps it in his jacket. He then makes a tasteless joke about having the baby as a snack.*

Buffy, while reluctant at first, eventually grows to accept Angel’s condition, "so long as his brat doesn’t spit up on anything Prada." Meanwhile, an increasingly underused Xander and Willow both have fun hanging out with biker chicks.

* That one is too sick for me to make up, and is actually in an episode of the Greenwalt-run Angel series!

Peckinpah: This is a horror show, so of course we want to pay homage to as many of the classics as possible. This one’s like Alfred Hitchcock’s "The Birds", only with Clams.

Indeed, the plot of the episode involves Willow eating some bad clams who then possess her body and make her bid ridiculously high amounts for useless junk on eBay. One of the things she bids on is an ancient book that contains an incantion that when read in Pig Latin releases the ancient supreme Clam Demon, Mollusk.

Willow gives the book to Giles, and as luck (and Peckinpah’s bad scriptwriting) would have it, the Watcher’s tirade against computers (and the fact that he lost out on an Uatu wall calendar on eBay) happens to be in Pig Latin, which releases Mollusk into one of the school computers.

Mollusk unsuccessfully attempts to seduce Willow over the internet, perhaps because he continually refers to her as Clarice. At any rate, the computer possession comes to the attention of Sunnydale High computer teacher Miss November, a former Playboy playmate. (Peck claimed that he was afraid their audience would get tired of just looking at Sarah Michelle Gellar in short skirts).

As everyone in the audience with a brain dozes off, Mollusk takes robot form and fights Buffy, then escapes by peeling off a human’s face and attaching it to his own. This somehow fools the Scooby Gang, but Mollusk is foiled when he can’t get through the Sunnydale High metal detectors and Principal Snyder has him arrested.

From the script:

Willow: "Isn’t it funny how no romantic mishaps have occurred to us whatsoever?"
Xander: "Yeah. It seems like all of our relationships will probably end happily."
Buffy: "In fact, I’d go so far as to say that nothing eventful will happen to us at all."

And, in this universe, it’s the viewers who look depressed at the end of the episode.