<Episode 85: Fool for Love>

Buffy digs up past uglies with Spike.

Plot Highlights:

Buffy gets skewered. Riley patches her up. William (pre-Spike) waxes poetic (1880). Cecily drop kicks William. Dru sires Spike. Angelus & Spike clash. Spike kills his first Slayer (China,1900). Riley torches a vamp nest. Spike kills his second Slayer (New York, 1977). Buffy doesn't want to dance. Spike gets his gun; he finds Buffy crying about Joyce's illness and changes his mind.

Quick Review:

This is the kind of thing people mean when the say "instant classic". It's hard to resist the temptation to gush, it was just that good. We get LOTS of intense, balletic fighting, heart strings twanging left and right, quality back story that illuminates and deapens everything we've seen and everything that is to come, off the charts chemistry, the list goes on. And of course, in typical BtVS fashion, a killer ending scene that manages to top everything that came before it. Rewatch potentional galore.

Memorable Moments:

• Giles admitting that if Buffy were to die, like Watchers past, he too would be too distraught to keep good records of the event.
• 1880: William (pre-vamp Spike) declaring his love to Cecily only to have his heart broken when she tells him "you're beneath me".
• 1880: Drusilla finding William tearing up his poems to Cecily in an alley, seductively mesmerizing him & finally vamping him to a chorus of "Ow!"s.
• 1880: Angelus and Spike already at each others throats, with Dru & Darla watching in amusement.
• 1900: Drusilla bragging about Spike's first Slayer kill & Spike offering to give Angel first crack at the next Slayer they come upon.
• Flashing back & forward with Spike demonstrating to Buffy how he killed his second slayer in a New York subway in 1977 (sporting a Billy Idol look) and explaining the Slayer deathwish.
• Buffy shoving Spike away with the declaration that he's beneath her and him scrabbling after the money she's thrown at him (much as he had his torn Cecily poems).
• Spike walking up to Buffy's house with a shot-gun, ready to put her 6 feet beneath him, until seeing her crying about her mother's illness prompts him to ask if there's anything he can do to help instead.

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Transcribed by Joan the English Chick (pisces@englishchick.com).
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