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
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