the first silent scene the entire cast attempted was the Scoobies gathering in Giles' apartment following the discovery that all of Sunnydale's denizens had lost their voices. It took several rehearsals as the scene came out mistimed, with all of the actors having trouble playing off one another without the use of verbal cues, or all pantomiming over one another.) Without a common language to fall back upon the Scoobies are forced to depend on their shared history to help them recover well enough to be able to take action. The resolution to this isolation and ineffectiveness is speaking out: restoring the voices of the people of Sunnydale. Shade states that this facet of the episode gives it a political overtone. Noel Murray from The A.V. Club writes that the silence imposed by The Gentlemen is a metaphor for how evil spreads: "When dissent is stifled, or people fail to tell the truth, or when we’re just distracted by other concerns, things can get out of hand." Authority figures in the series, such as the school principal, the mayor's office, and the Sunnydale Police Department, repeatedly either abet the town's endemic evil or choose not to hear about it. During "Hush", at Giles' apartment the Scoobies listen to a newscaster reporting that authorities in the town attribute the silence to a flu vaccine gone awry, causing mass laryngitis. Wilcox writes, "[H]ow many times will we see those in power maintain such a silence while evil proceeds? It is not surprising that [The Gentlemen's] attendants wear straitjackets; their garb suggests the insanity of such behavior—the pretense of civilized politeness while killing is accepted is a matter of course." Fairy tales Two other episodes in the Buffy canon are also based on, or have elements of, fairy tales: "Killed by Death", where only sick children can see a demon who sucks away their lives, and "Gingerbread", where a demon takes on the forms of Hansel and Gretel to create a moral panic in Sunnydale. "Hush" is often compared to these episodes because they contain similar elements. Whedon intended The Gentlemen to be Brothers Grimm-like monsters, with Giles playing the role of the wise man, Buffy the princess, and Tara the "little girl wandering through the woods". In this incarnation, however, Buffy is a swashbuckling princess whose scream saves the town. (Joss Whedon reported in the DVD commentary that the actual scream was