Covering
“Fool for Love,” in which I know that my life makes you nervous, but I can tell
you I can’t live in service.
Over
the years, so many rumors of further BtVS
spinoffs got passed around. Everything from Faith the Vampire Slayer, to a Ripper miniseries, to a cartoon
revisiting Buffy’s high school years with Dawn now added to events. But one
that never got rumored about was a spinoff centered on the Whirlwind, the
grotesque vampire family so central to so much of the show, and the bloody
swath we’re told they carved across Europe and Asia. Would it have been hard
and expensive? Undoubtedly. But it also would have been fucking awesome. Darla,
the cruel and imperious matriarch. Angelus, evil’s greatest artiste. Drusilla,
mad mystical wildcard. And Spike, the lustfully violent anarchist. How amazing
would that have been? Sure, a show devoted to the four taking their dark
pleasures across the late 19th century globe might not be terribly
sustainable, but, hell, give me as many episodes as could have been managed,
I’d have loved it.
The closest we get is “Fool for
Love” and its Angel crossover,
“Darla,” which isn’t half bad as compensation. If “Hush” is the best (which it
is), “Fool for Love” surely is second best, a sweeping epic spanning continents
and centuries ostensibly telling a story we’ve wanted to see since Giles set it
up way, way back in season 2—how William the Bloody fought two Slayers in the
past century, and killed them both.
It went down like this: they fought.
He won. The end!
The end of season 4 and start of
season 5 set up the story of Buffy digging deeper into Slayerdom, exploring its
origins, mechanics, and meanings. Unfortunately, the show really didn’t get
into this story all that much, as the Dawn business ends up taking primacy, so
in hindsight, it’s really just an excuse to restore Giles’ position, which, you
know, good idea there. “Fool for Love,” though, could well be taken as the
capper of that story, or at least its season 5 iteration. So Buffy is nearly
defeated by a vampire who doesn’t seem particularly special (though, perhaps
significantly, he has Ramoneish hair and a leather jacket to match, and a Clash
t-shirt), so she seeks out Spike in the hopes of divining why those other two
Slayers died. And as Spike can be reliably counted upon to do, he tells at
least one absolute truth, the statement above. They died because he won, and
that is the end. As much as Buffy might wish otherwise, there truly is no
greater secret or significance—Spike had a pair of really good days, and
eventually some other beast will again, if not something else. That “something
else” takes on a particularly relevant cast when Buffy returns home to find
Joyce packing for a night of observation and MRIs in the hospital. Despite her
success and accomplishments, she’s still probably destined to be a footnote
some Slayer three centuries hence will complain lacks details. A fairly bleak hypothetical
conclusion to this storyline, by then again, the show has never exactly shied
away from the bleakness of the Slayer’s plight. Spike, in another truthful
moment, frames that plight not necessarily as an exercise in futility, but
certainly one in stasis, where real headway or progress is impossible.
What we learn in “Fool for Love” is
a great deal about Spike, as between it and counterpart “Darla,” we take our
deepest dive yet into vampire mentality, and Spike’s (also Darla’s, which is
just a bit outside the scope of this project). Mostly, being a vampire is
everything obnoxious Ford was hoping for back in “Lie to Me,” and a complete
immersion in horror, best epitomized by the grandiose march of the Whirlwind
through the chaos of the Boxer Rebellion, a shot featured in both episodes as a
dark triumphalist strut in “Fool for Love,” and something decidedly more
ambivalent in “Darla.” And in this context, where becoming a vampire may be a
horrific loss, but is also described by Spike as a profoundly transformative
experience, things like his avowed thoughts on turning Willow into a vampire
once take on a new meaning. Wouldn’t this, by his twisted thinking, be doing
her a great favor? Sex and violence being inextricably smashed together in
vampire thinking (or, uh, you know, American) isn’t earth-shaking revelation,
it’s sort of their whole point. But we see how, for Spike, Dru’s wisest and
bravest knight in all the land, they are perhaps even more inextricable than
normal, given how his discovery of love is so inextricable from his death.
Violence gives him power and esteem,
and lets him hide and even forget what he was, and this rather is a revelation,
how much Spike self-aggrandizes, self-mythologizes, and outright lies to hide the
embarrassments of his humanity, and make himself seem more nefarious. And yet,
he is also strikingly truthful. “I’ve always been bad,” he says before
immediately being revealed as a fragile bespectacled fop who won’t even think
on ghastly business like a rash of mysterious murders and can’t find a word to
rhyme with “gleaming.” But he also declares, just after his transformation that
he “was done living by society’s rules,” which is totally true, as he even went
so far as to turn the japes and humiliations that society (pointedly, high
society) used to mock and reject him—William the Bloody Awful Poet preferable
to take a railroad spike through the head—into reasons that society should fear
him. One of the big take-aways from both “Fool for Love” and “Darla” is that it
enshrines in certainty that our four most compelling vampires transformed in
reaction to a society that judged, disapproved, refused,and rejected them so
that they could respond in kind (see? The
Whirlwind would have been an awesome series!). It is no coincidence that the
names three of them go by—“Darla,” “Angelus,” and “Spike”—are not the names
they were given at birth. Spike lies about himself, but they all possess an
outcast’s shame that would compel them to lie if they needed.
He needs to lie because he has to
impress the woman he’s been after for a century. Drusilla found him (and, you
know, I still check the wiki every once in a while to see if those crazy kids
have worked it out somehow), but the woman he pursued is the Slayer (notably,
his preferred way to reference Buffy), and suddenly Spike’s lust for Buffy,
which seemed rather arbitrary in “Out of My Mind” makes utter and complete
sense—she is the woman he’s been dancing with for a hundred years, or at least
she’s part of her. While Drusilla made William Pratt into a vampire, but the
Slayer made William the Bloody a legend, and when this woman finally proves
resistant to his violence, it seems only natural his thoughts would turn to
sex.
I’ve talked about “Darla” a little
bit, which I’m pretty sure is the last crossover episode and pretty inarguably
the greatest—not as focused as “Fool for Love,” perhaps, but still awesome,
giving us Darla’s origins as a successful but shunned Virginia Colony
prostitute, and centered on her efforts to save him from his inflicted soul in
the past, contrasted with his efforts to save her with her inflicted soul in
the present.
But the end of “Fool for Love” finds
Spike enacting one of his brilliantly blunt plans—after his death wish taunts
fail to get enough rise from her (or perhaps, too much of one), he’ll just
point a shotgun in Buffy’s direction and open both barrels, chip pain be
damned. Harmony’s doubtful, but, you know, it seems nigh on foolproof. Except
when he finds Buffy on her back porch, she’s a mess of tears from, as noted
earlier, finding her mother confirming the one truth to be gleaned from her
evening. A twisted gallantry has always been one of Spike’s central traits,
along with strong relationships with women (perhaps natural, given how central
women are on Buffy). In “Something
Blue,” he wasn’t sure he could protect Buffy, in “The Initiative,” he talked of
bringing Willow into his world, in “Where the Wild Things Are,” he commiserates
with Anya, and in “Family,” he allays Tara’s doubts by punching her in the
nose. Future episodes will see him deepening his relationship with Joyce, one
of the many delights of “Lover’s Walk,” and forging one with Dawn. But in “Fool
for Love,” he finds Buffy vulnerable, alone, and distracted, the perfect
position for his plan, the perfect chance to resume the dance he’s had with
this woman since 1900, but he sees her tears, and stops. He asks what’s wrong
and if he can help somehow. And when she doesn’t answer because it’s very
confusing, because why the fuck wouldn’t it be, he sits down next to her and
not sure of what else to do, awkwardly pats her on the back. Fumbling but
earnest, it’s his first fully human action in 120 years, and possibly the first
of his entire existence. And it’s probably his best.
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