Spike's Redemption—Subverting or Supporting Canon?
by Barb Cummings
In the fifth season of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and the second season of "Angel", there's been considerable debate among fans of the show over the 'greying' of the Buffyverse. The stark good/evil contrasts of the show's first and second seasons have given way to more ambiguous situations. These changes, which seem intriguing and full of dramatic potential to some fans, are regarded as a betrayal of the show's original moral vision by others. The changes in the character of the vampire Spike are some of the most controversial of these.
I have to admit that I never saw the 'original vision' first hand. I didn't start watching "Buffy" until season four. Via the magic of video tapes I later caught up on the important events of seasons two and three. Coming in at that late date, when so many important events in the history of the show were already just that-history-gives one a different perspective on things. If you don't have any expectation as to where the characters 'should' be going, or how fast they should be going there, you can't feel betrayed when they go somewhere else at a completely different pace.
I never got to live through Spike's stint as the Big Bad. From what I have seen of his previous appearances ("Becoming" and "Lover's Walk") I can understand the grumblings of those who felt that season four turned him into comic relief. For me, though, season four Spike was simply the way the character was. The glimpses I got into his past were intriguing, to be sure. He was a brilliant villain, but that appeared to me to be largely because he wasn't quite as unrelievedly villainous as those around him. Pure evil and pure good both tend to be extremely dull. Spike's 'humanity'-the snarky sense of humor, his devotion to Dru, his unabashed relish for dog races, Buffalo wings and Manchester United-was what made him interesting.
Those aspects of the character continued into season four. I took the introduction of the behavior control chip as a necessary plot device for keeping an interesting character around without having to worry about why the heroes aren't staking him. OK, he couldn't go 'round tearing out throats any longer, but if that's what you want, any old vampire will do. As "The Yoko Factor" demonstrated, Spike was still a force to be reckoned with. I found myself getting involved in his struggle to deal with the effects the chip on his unlife. Be you black hat or white, what do you do when your reason for existence goes away? Spike's despair over not being even remotely scary any more paralleled the struggles the other characters were having with their own changing lives very nicely.
Never having lived through Buffy's relationship with Angel, I was also perfectly happy with Riley as Buffy's romantic interest. In fact, I was quite annoyed at them for phasing him out just when his character started getting really interesting. It's been a long-standing pet peeve of mine that most TV writers don't want to deal with the difficulties of portraying a stable long-term relationship. Angst is easy, domesticity is hard. I'd expected better of "Buffy." But Spike's horrified realization that he was in love with Buffy at the end of "Out of My Mind" introduced an interesting wrinkle into Riley's probable departure. For several episodes after, Spike's crush was just a minor humorous element. "Fool For Love" changed all that. Spike has always been the most 'human' vampire on the series, and with this episode he became even more so; he took on an irresistibly tragic dimension. (And y'know, since then I haven't missed Riley a bit.)
I've always been a sucker for stories which explore the grey area between good and evil, and for characters who are pitted against themselves as much as against any external enemies. And boy, is Spike pitted against himself, far more than any human character in a similar situation could be. Drusilla made William a vampire; William remade himself into Spike. Throughout season five, in the face of considerable contempt and discouragement on the part of the Good Guys, Spike's been remaking himself again into-what? We're not entirely sure yet; the work is still in progress.
Sometimes it's instructive to compare the progress of two characters in similar circumstances. Both Spike and Angel spent a hundred and twenty-some years as vampires before having their lives derailed by an outside agency which forced them to radically change their ways: Angel by being cursed with a soul, Spike by being implanted with the behavior-control chip. Neither of them wanted the change. Both of them would have been much happier to get rid of the damned thing. Two years after being ensouled, Angel had retreated from the world and was embarking on a century-long guilt binge during which he was indirectly responsible for quite a few more unnecessary deaths. Two years after being chipped, Spike has burned his bridges with the demonic community by becoming a vampire slayer himself, and is making a dogged effort to gain acceptance from a new human 'family' and to do, if not be, good.
Angel, of course, feels remorse for his past actions, and Spike doesn't. On the surface of it, this difference is in Angel's favor. However, guilt in itself is not a useful emotion if it doesn't prompt one to make amends. Spike feels no guilt, and yet, ironically, he's doing more practical good for humanity (by destroying other vampires) than Angel was at a similar point in their lives.
At first Spike's 'good' actions are motivated purely by a desire to feel better about himself, to restore a sense of being in control of his unlife. The chip prevents him from killing humans; if he can't kill humans, he'll by damn kill something, and other vampires are handy. Spike is unnerved to realize that he's in love with his arch-enemy the Slayer, but true to his words to Buffy and Angel in "Lover's Walk," he's man enough to admit he's love's bitch. After this realization and his acceptance of it, his motives for 'doing good' progressively broaden, as does the 'good' he's willing to do. At first he acts because he desires to impress Buffy. Then he acts because he cannot bear to see her hurt, and by the episode "Spiral" there's considerable evidence that he doesn't want to see her friends hurt, either. At the same time, he develops a genuine fondness for Dawn and Joyce, which is in many ways far more remarkable than his feelings for Buffy. Spike has always been obsessed with Slayers in one way or another, but when before this has any vampire shown any liking for an ordinary human?
Spike's character development over the last season has been fascinating and (despite the IMO very understandable back-and-forthing by various Scoobies over whether or how much to trust him) to all appearances well-planned. (If the rumors of dissension among the writing staff over the proper way to handle the plotline have a grain of truth in them, I congratulate them on arriving at a fairly seamless compromise.) Spike's moral development has been consistently engrossing, leading from his awkward, embarrassed mooning outside Buffy's door in the first few episodes, to the wonderful scene of Buffy's misery deflating his rage at the end of "Fool For Love", Buffy's rejection of him and Spike's narrow escape from falling back into real darkness in "Crush," his bringing anonymous flowers for Joyce, and his "rebound relationship" with the Buffybot. In "Intervention," after Spike endures Glory's torture to keep Dawn's secret, Buffy finally accepts that his feelings are real, even if she doesn't return them. Or does she? A kiss on the forehead is a reward for a job well done; a kiss on the mouth is . . . the crumb Spike's been looking for?
The "Spike as dangerous stalker" interpretation of events certainly has some validity, up to a point. Spike's behavior was rather stalkerish, especially early on. Seeing it as dangerous, on the other hand, becomes increasingly difficult as the season progresses. For one thing, Buffy can kick Spike's ass from here to L.A. even when he doesn't have the chip. For another, the writers have taken care that Spike's behavior, however obsessive, is always leavened with enough humor to keep it from getting really creepy. In the one instance where Spike appeared to be a real menace (the climax of "Crush") he proved completely unable to follow through on his threats. (Dru's characterization of him as 'lost' to her is extremely telling.)
Saving Buffy from Dru is a watershed; after that, Spike loses all credibility as a threat to Buffy's safety. The creation of the Buffybot is certainly a questionable action, but the Buffybot's programming is so over-the-top-bad-Harlequin-Romance-novel that Spike's interaction with it comes off as pathetic, funny, and even weirdly endearing rather than seriously icky. Further, when Buffy confronts him about it, he is ashamed. Spike knows he's obsessing, and on some level is just as appalled about it as Buffy is.
Despite the intensity of his belief that there is some real connection between them, Spike respects Buffy's desire to close the subject. Although he doesn't get the hell out of Dodge as Buffy orders him to, after "Crush" he never again mentions his feelings to Buffy, hangs around her place, or makes any attempts to follow up on his (entirely reasonable!) desire to talk to her about whatever is or isn't between them. That's a fairly well-behaved stalker, as soulless creatures of pure evil go. Not to mention that his great sacrifice in re: Glory comes well after he's lost any reasonable hope of Buffy reciprocating his feelings for her.
Of course, much of this favorable impression depends upon the nuances James Marsters brings to his interpretation of Spike. In several cases, especially in mid-season episodes, differences between the shooting scripts and the aired episodes make it obvious that the director and the actors are putting the best possible light on words and actions which might otherwise be pretty creepy, and/or using reaction and framing shots to convey character and mood not specified in the script-witness "Spiral," where in many scenes where [delete duplicate where] Spike has no lines but remains prominent in the background, watching over Buffy and Dawn like a guardian-well, I won't say angel.
This isn't an accident, I think. It seems to me that the writers are trying, and for the most part succeeding, to walk a tightrope between never forgetting that Spike is a potentially very scary and dangerous creature, and making it very clear to the viewers that his feelings for Buffy and her family are real, and that he really, truly is changing as a result of them.
Impressive as those changes are, I'm convinced that Spike could never have come as far as he has without the chip. Forcing him to deal with humans as something other than Happy Meals on legs is the only way to get him to relate to them as people rather than food. Seeing Buffy as a person was the only way he could ever make the realization that his obsession with her was (or might become) love. And most importantly, coming to see humans as people will be the only way for Spike to forge connections with "people who aren't us." Without a soul, I imagine this will always be the most difficult thing for him; a long, slow journey, one which is by no means finished and may never be finished. It's very difficult to tell what that agonized look he gives Dru just before feeding on the girl in the Bronze means. Regret, worry, fear-we'll probably never know for certain everything he was feeling at that moment. But the one thing it definitely was not, was happy.
The chip is still necessary. At this point, if the chip went poof, I could honestly see Spike tipping either way. Even Angel, in "Disharmony," gets that "Mmmmmm, blood . . ." look when Harmony goes on about how awful it was he couldn't get the real stuff. But sooner or later the chip will have accomplished its purpose, story-wise, taken Spike as far as it can go. From then on out, the only way to tell if Spike's change is a lasting one is to allow him free will again-either to remove or disable the chip, or (possibly) to have him realize that he needs its restraining influence and voluntarily decide to keep it.
The lows of "Crush" and "I Was Made to Love You" are absolutely necessary if any future highs are to be believable. To make it simple or easy for Spike to deny his nature, even for True Love, would be to trivialize the struggle. I'm perfectly willing to grant that without a soul he can never wholly become a creature of good, but how many wholly good beings do we meet up with on a daily basis, anyway? When we argue about whether or not Spike can be redeemed, what exactly do we mean by redemption? Does he get issued a soul? Be allowed to go to some theoretical afterlife reward, or avoid some theoretical afterlife punishment? While the Buffyverse uses the superficial trappings of Christianity on a regular basis, there's no evidence that the Powers That Be equate in any meaningful way to the Judeo-Christian God. Until Buffy's return from the dead, the characters never mentioned any equivalent to heaven; and hell, it seems, is just a catch-all name for assorted unpleasant other dimensions. Angel's promised redemption is hinted to be the gift of living and dying once more as a human being; is this what Spike is headed for?
I would argue not. Spike's 'redemption' is more likely to be a pragmatic, conditional one, de facto rather than de jure: I'm not good, but I'm okay, and I will not do evil today. From a storytelling standpoint, I think it would be a cardinal mistake for the writers to give him a soul. That story has already been told. We know what happens when a vampire gains a soul. The reason Spike's story is so fascinating is that we are exploring just how far a being can go in the direction of good without one. Even more importantly, we are exploring the question of whether the quest to 'become good' may not be a worthwhile pursuit in and of itself, even if the ultimate goal proves unattainable. Does this exploration, as some have claimed, vitiate the entire moral framework of the show? I don't think so. "Buffy" is, and always has been, about hard choices and difficult tasks, and I can't think of any task more difficult than the one Spike's taken upon himself.
The 'new' Spike is still a very fragile construct. In the new Spike's favor, though, is the fact that he's been built up under the most adverse conditions possible. No one thinks he can do it, or should even make the attempt-who does he think he is, Angel? Vampires without souls better not get uppity. This makes Spike's small victories all the more remarkable, and the longer the 'new' Spike lasts, the stronger he gets. It's possible that this entire season is simply setting Spike up for a spectacular fall, playing out the message of "Disharmony"-that soulless vampires can never rise above their evil natures no matter how they strive-over the course of a season instead of an episode. If so, I'll be disappointed. I'm getting awfully fond of our Vamp of La Mancha and his impossible dream.
I conclude with this thought: In the end, if Spike does manage to keep his evil nature under control, it may be as much as his obstinacy ("What do you mean, CAN'T be good? Bollocks, I'll be any way I damn please!") as his love for Buffy which allows him to do so. Sometimes, obsession can work for you.