don’t try to defy convention, they dive into it and come out the other side in a weird world where Spike and Buffy can be lovers, a world so strange that it’s more familiar than anything else on television. That’s what makes Buffy, the show, brilliant – Joss Whedon and co. Spike is Buffy’s dark side – “the monster in the man” – as Spike tells Riley, the now-displaced good guy boyfriend.Īnd yet, their romance is real. But the Buffy/Spike romance will evolve because Spike’s essential wickedness reflects Buffy’s resentment of her responsibility as the slayer and what we are told are the “dark” sources of her powers. Granted, in a less imaginative show - The O.C., for instance - the bad boy would turn out to be misunderstood and fundamentally noble. Yes, he makes an effort at being a good vampire, but it never really works.
JAMES MARSTERS JOSS WHEDON TV
But it’s not going to be as simple as the TV conventions Spike tries to smash. Well, one might expect that Buffy and Spike are bound for romance. Viewers seeing the episode with no knowledge of the show’s future might have thought, “cute, weird, and foreboding.” And all three adjectives are on the mark, but not as one might expect. Spike, the buffoonish bad boy, both understands Buffy well enough to play her part in his mind and hates this impotent knowledge enough to react with psychotic rage.
But they’re also signaling a more interesting development. Spike has no difficulty imagining Buffy’s predictable responses his angry retorts are those of the show’s writers pushing back at the conventions of TV drama.
The scene presents a subtle mockery of Buffy and of television. He imagines her response, and answers imagines another response, and snaps at her again, and he smashes the chocolates over the mannequin’s head. In episode 11, he buys a box of chocolates and practices presenting them to the mannequin in preparation for an apology to Buffy, for revealing to her that her human boyfriend, Riley, is cheating on her with vamps. He puts a blonde wig on half a mannequin, dresses it up in a turquoise top, and begins developing a relationship. In season five, we see Spike becoming more and more infatuated with Buffy. Now, I think Spike may be the emblematic character of the new golden age of television, a character who simultaneously embodies the limits and the possibilities of sequential drama on a small screen. Like most nerdboys, my favorite character was Willow, the nerd-witch but the most interesting character to me was Tara, her shy, clumsy girlfriend. Of course, Spike was created to be the most interesting character but the first time I saw Buffy, back in re-runs on FX years ago, I resisted. There was no end to their "development," because there was no end to their lives (until, of course, there was).The character who interested me most in this regard as I re-watched Season 5 (and parts of the subsequent seasons) was the absurdly vain vampire Spike (James Marsters), a cartoon bad guy to begin with who slowly claws his way out of the grave of cliched villainy. By then, we knew all we were going to know what remained was to watch Tony and his associates come to the same realization.īuffy creator Joss Whedon and his writers (and actors) not only created truly complex characters, but also truly complex people. The Sopranos was brilliant right to the end, but it stopped seriously developing its characters after the fourth season. And yet, Buffy was a deeper character study than even that of Tony Soprano. Buffy's still much better writing about, you know, human beings, but the flab within it, the exchanges that are simply pedestrian means of transporting us onto the next interesting moment, is more visible. After Lost, the pacing seems positively stately, with impossibly long scenes for TV. To prepare, I returned to the source of the new golden age of television: Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There’s even another Flight of the Conchords coming.
The new season of Battlestar Galactica just launched, and Lost will soon be found again.
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