Welcome to Rewatching Buffy, the part of the blog where I rewatch Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Each Tuesday evening, you’re invited to join me as I attempt to rediscover what made me love this show 21 years ago.

Fool for Love

• Things aren’t starting out too well for the Slayer when she’s fighting a vampire who stabs her in the gut with her own stake.
• Riley arrives just in time to chase away the vampire and gets Buffy to safety.
• He has a hard time believing that a regular vampire got the upper hand.
• He agrees to take the gang out on patrol that night to pick up the slack while Buffy heals.
• Riley’s still military guy while the others just hang out eating chips. Loudly.
• Giles and Buffy research Slayer deaths throughout history. They aren’t finding the details that Buffy’s looking for.
• She wants to know why a Slayer loses.
• Giles points out that the Watchers’ journals aren’t helpful because, if previous Watchers are anything like him, writing about a Slayer’s final battle would be painful.
• Then they realize they have a pet vampire who’s killed two Slayers in the past: Spike.
• We see Spike’s beginning. When he was still human. Kind of a namby pamby one at that.
• William is a bad poet who has a crush on a girl named Cecily. Turns out his peers call him William the Bloody because of his bloody awful poetry.
• Cecily breaks William’s heart, telling him he’s beneath her.
• And he runs away. Straight into the waiting arms of Drusilla, who’s ready to turn him into a vampire the moment she sees him.
• Back in the present, Riley finds the vampire that stabbed Buffy hanging out in a nest of vamps. He tells the gang there are too many, so they should come back in the morning.
• In 1880, Angelus and Darla don’t exactly like William the Bloody… who now insists on being called Spike.
• Angelus warns Spike that his devil-may-care attitude about picking fights could land him in the sights of a Slayer.
• After first hearing about the Slayer, he was obsessed. He wanted to find one. He wanted to fight one. He wanted to kill one.
• During the Boxer Rebellion in China, Spike faces down his first Slayer. And wins.
• With her dying breath, the Slayer asks him to tell her mother she’s sorry.
• “I’m sorry love, I don’t speak Chinese.”
• Dru brags to Angel and Darla that Spike killed a Slayer. Angel seems less than pleased, but plays it off.
• Spike tells Buffy that all a vampire needs to take down a Slayer is one good day.
• Riley doesn’t wait ’til morning. He goes back to the nest.
• He stakes the vamp that staked Buffy, then drops a grenade to take down the rest.
• New York City, 1977 – Spike fights another Slayer on the subway.
• He compares the Slayer/vampire fight to a dance.
• Spike tells Buffy that every Slayer wants death, just a little bit.
• When he kills the Slayer in ’77, he takes her long black coat. The coat he’s been wearing for the last three years…
• Spike moves in for a kiss, saying he knows she wants to dance.
• She repeats Cecily’s line… “You’re beneath me.”
• Spike goes back to his lair to get a shotgun. He’s gonna take out the Slayer without a fight.
• Or a dance.
• In another flashback, middle of season 3, Spike and Dru argue about his obsession with Buffy… even back then it was clear that he couldn’t give her up.
• Joyce reveals to Buffy that she’ll be going in to the hospital for a night for a CAT scan and observation.
• The nothing that she’s been dealing with might not be nothing.
• Spike arrives, ready to kill her. But stops.
• He sees her crying and just sits with her on her back porch, saying nothing.
• Body count: Humans – 3 (yes, I’m counting William the Bloody); Vampires – 5