Though it has been decades since Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s final episode aired, the show’s lasting cultural impact can still be felt through the stories being told by people who were impacted by it. Netflix’s Jentry Chau vs. The Underworld feels like the kind of show that might not exist if it weren’t for the way an entire generation of kids grew up watching a teenage girl fight monsters from week to week. The new Titmouse-produced animated show’s world of magic, and its focus on a young warrior who just wants to be a regular high schooler, makes it impossible not to see it as a tribute to Sunnydale’s finest.
But as often as it riffs some of Buffy’s signature beats — teen angst, supernatural love triangles, a town full of normies who kinda know something weird is going on around them — Jentry Chau vs. The Underworld uses them to tell a much more dynamic tale about who gets to be an “all-American girl.”
Jentry Chau vs. The Underworld tells the story of how its titular Chinese American teen is yanked out of her boarding school in South Korea and dragged to a small Texas town to fulfill a destiny she doesn’t want any part of. Things are good for Jentry in Seoul, where her friends have basically become her family and people that she can trust with some of her dark secrets. They know about Jentry’s uncontrollable ability to start fires and that it is part of why her feisty elderly aunt Gugu (Lori Tan Chinn) sent her to study abroad. But as dangerous as Jentry might be, her friends don’t care because they, like Gugu, love her. And with Jentry’s powers having seemingly gone dormant since she left the US, she assumes her days of literal bridge-burning are all in the past.
