'Deep' may not be the first thing to come to mind for most fans, though, when they think of "Earshot". The episode was delayed for months by the network because its airing would have followed close on the heels of the very real tragedy at Columbine High School. Unintentionally, "Earshot" mirrored the actual events somewhat, with the school under threat, presumably by a student, and themes of guns in school and teen suicide. While fans were angry about the postponement, Espenson takes a more tolerant approach.

"I sort of understood it, and even as the writer of the episode, I knew that stuff I had written to be comedic wasn't going to play comedically a week after the tragedy. It would seem incredibly callous. I wasn't too disturbed by the fact that they delayed it. But it is very frightening any time you feel creative control slipping out of your hands. There's something very wrong and alarming about it."

Working on television does often give Espenson smaller details to worry about, though.

"I'm always surprised by what words we could say and can't say," she muses. "I just recently learned that we can't say 'goddamn'. You can say 'damn' and you can say 'oh God', but you can't say 'goddamn'. And to me that's a very subtle difference. I really don't understand why 'damn' is okay and 'goddamn' isn't."

But it's not just "Earshot" that's been under fire. One of Espenson's more recent episodes, "The Harsh Light of Day", was the first part of a Buffy/Angel crossover, and featured three couples having sex: Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Parker (Adam Kaufman), Xander (Nicholas Brendon) and Anya (Emma Caulfield), and Spike (James Marsters) and Harmony (Mercedes McNab). But it's not the network that had a problem with that one -- it's some of the fans.

"I don't understand that," Espenson says, sounding baffled by some of the comments that have been posted about the episode on the Internet. "I really am so confused by that, because some people are saying Buffy was slutty. But she wasn't... I didn't consider her to be slutty at all. And then they said she wouldn't be hurt by his [Parker's] rejection, that she was rejected by Angel, didn't she learn anything from that? Who learns that? It always hurts to be rejected. And they say, 'Well, she's the Slayer.' But she doesn't have a hard heart, she's still a person. And we've seen her be very human. These are three couples who it made sense to us would be having sex at this time. And Spike just for the hell of it, but the other two because of actual developments in their relationship."

Espenson even acknowledges a pattern that many fans have noticed:

"It seems to me that if you want a moralistic message... you couldn't have a show in which sex has had more negative consequences than Buffy the Vampire Slayer."