There are periods you go through where it’s, “My God, nobody’s watching and we can do whatever we want.” Giles had been fired and was completely at loose ends. The man had a sombrero on, for God’s sake. And the group kind of got torn apart by it. Plus the introduction of Riley into Buffy’s life, something that, no matter what, we knew was going to be difficult and strange. Add all that to, “Let’s play our James Bond fantasies” with the whole idea of the Initiative.
DAVID FURY
It was weird. I remember writing a scene in “The I in Team” where I directly ripped off From Russia with Love where it’s obviously a training exercise and the lights kind of come on. We think it’s Buffy, but it’s actually just a training exercise. I’m a Bond fan. If we’re going to have a secret-agent organization, I’m going to do a little Bond homage.
JOSS WHEDON
That’s pretty much season four. Let’s have the cool night-vision goggles. Of course with our budget we had, like, three walls and a shrub—but it was cool in our minds.
DAVID FURY
It was exciting for Joss to challenge himself. For the rest, it became trickier because high school was the perfect allegory for the show. Once we blew up the high school and moved to college, things became less universal. A lot of people don’t go to college, so trying to find that allegory in the stories became a little bit more challenging. We were able to latch on to a few things. One of the things was Xander being the one friend who doesn’t go to college and feels left behind. But trying to find what is the commonality in college was trickier.
I got to do a haunted frat house. This was about Buffy and her friends venturing into adulthood, which eventually led to Joyce’s death and all these other things that were not part of the show’s makeup initially. That said, the creation of the Initiative that Joss had brought to the show, we were somewhat confused by initially. We were trying to figure out what was the allegory. What we came around to believe is there are forces beyond us and as we get into adulthood, we start to understand how complex the world really is and how governments work and it’s not about petty little things. It’s about a much bigger world. That’s sort of what we latched on to.
MARTI NOXON
(supervising producer)
When they read my first script for season four, Joss and David left a message on my answering machine saying my script “didn’t cut it,” before revealing they were joking and loved it.
Significant additional changes came from the fact that Charisma Carpenter’s Cordelia Chase and David Boreanaz had departed the show for the Angel spin-off, with the titular hero now seeking redemption on the mean streets of the City of Angels, far from Sunnydale.
JAMES MARSTERS
(actor, Spike)
What changed Joss’s mind about bringing me back is he needed a new Cordelia. He needed a character to come in and tell Buffy, “You’re stupid; we’re all about to die.” Cordelia went off to the Angel spin-off, so they needed a character to fill those shoes. Joss told me that Sarah actually said, “What about Spike?” Joss thought for a second, “That might work.” So, yeah, I was the new Cordelia. In fact, that’s why I think I eventually went over to Angel, because they lost Cordelia and they needed a new one. I’ve been following in Cordelia’s footsteps ever since.
A major plot point that would reverberate for the rest of the series and set up a far more substantial character arc for Spike in season five was that chip inserted by the Initiative that would prevent him from harming a human (a la Isaac Asimov’s three laws of robotics in automatons). Only this chip kept bloodsuckers from biting down on humans like Big Macs.
JAMES MARSTERS
Spike was designed to be a villain, but they decided to keep me around, so they needed to find a way to make Spike a little more recognizable, to put him through experiences that people might actually identify with and kind of take him down off that pedestal of super villain. It was really important to stop trying to kill Buffy, because if he kept doing that, he was going to either be killed himself or he was going to become pathetic in failing so many times. That was my worry. I didn’t see how they were going to fit me in. My fear was that they were going to have to soften him so much that it wouldn’t work. But in a way, the situation heightened his frustration and he was even more evil now because he was mad about it.
I was having such a fun time playing the Big Bad, so I was uncomfortable with them taking away my cool. But that’s the only way to keep me alive in that universe. In a lot of season four, though, especially the beginning, it wasn’t working. You’d see Spike come in in a burning blanket on fire. That was just to get me into the room with the Scooby Gang so I could deliver the line, “Buffy, you’re stupid. We’re all about to die.” It was very cumbersome to get me into the room. It took special effects and everyone was gagging from the fake smoke and I could tell that this just couldn’t go on that long. I was not going to be the new Cordelia. I thought, “You know what, they gave me a chance. It’s not my fault, but it’s not going to happen. I’m probably going to get killed off.”
DAVID FURY
Spike was off the show for a while and I don’t think there was any intention to bring him back until we wanted to mix things up. To do that, the interesting thing was to put Spike on the side of the good guys, but without selling him out at that time as being a vampire. He’s not Angel—he’s not the vampire with a soul. How does he become a good guy? So the idea of putting a chip in his head and forcing this creature that wants and needs to kill humans and can’t, so he can only get his kicks from killing other demons and vampires, was a way for him to be a reluctant ally and keep him in the mix. It was a very clever way to do that and it provided the means for him to eventually become a domesticated vampire, which would allow him to eventually realize he was in love with Buffy.
JAMES MARSTERS
I didn’t like the chip. I recognized that there was a problem to be solved: if you include Spike as a cast member, how do you get him to stop trying to kill Buffy? Because if he keeps trying and you have to fail, that’s going to become repetitive and the character’s going to be pathetic very quickly. Of course, he can never succeed, obviously. I wanted to have a way that Spike would decide himself to stop trying to kill her for some reason. I felt like the chip was a bit of a deus ex machina, a weak dramatic device and a cop-out. It’s an easy way out. I called it “deus ex chip” because there was this machine that was making the decision for us, which I thought was less interesting.
That was the point when I was convinced that it wasn’t working and the character was not going to be able to last very long in the show and that they were just cannibalizing him for cheap laughs before he was killed off. I was just in fear and paranoia, so it was horrible. It was all because of my own demons and my own weakness that I was in fear, but I was. I didn’t share that with anybody. I was just thinking, this is it. I just didn’t see it. It was wonderfully written and part of a great arc and it was all perfect. I was just too scared to appreciate it fully.
But that was a short amount of time, like a month or two. I am an actor who just loves his job. I’m the nerd on the set going, “God, guys, isn’t this fun? This is cool, huh?” Other actors couldn’t look at me and just say, “We’re tired.” Whenever they call action, there is a fun to that. So it was never all bad, but it was a little harder to have that fun in Xander’s basement.
DAVID FURY
That was not something that Joss knew he was going to do; it’s something that sort of came out of a lot of different things, including staff suggestions, Marti’s influence, and things Joss recognized long before things aired that he felt weren’t working as well as he hoped. And how do we mix things up? What could we do that would be really cool and surprising? The great idea was to bring back Spike and make him part of the Scooby Gang.
JAMES MARSTERS
My idea was that Spike should fall in love with Buffy. Of course, she never reciprocates because he’s way beneath her, but he should fall in lo
ve with her and he should try to be good and constantly fail, to comedic effect or to horrifying effect, whichever episode you’re doing. But you can go a lot of directions with that, and that will work really well. That wasn’t their idea. So, for me it became, How do you do severe migraine without messing up your hair? I stole a page out of William Shatner’s book. If you notice, we do “severe headache” very similarly which is we put our knuckles to the side of our head. We don’t put our hands through our hair. If you mess your hair up, it’s going to take another hour to reset that.
I guess about midseason, I was hungering for some swagger. I was, like, “Spike, is getting really soft here.” Even my brother, who is so supportive of everything I do, was, like, “Dude, you need to get some balls.”
DAVID FURY
The other big change was David Greenwalt was no longer around as Joss’s number two. David was a big part of the first three seasons. Joss relied on David very much to be his sounding board for him to test out his ideas. So on those earlier years where I was freelancing for the show, it seemed to be more directed through David and Joss’s imaginations rather than the staff. I don’t think until season three Joss started to rely on his staff a bit more and started to find some more surprises. Things that surprised himself for the season was through his staff.
So when we got to season four and David had moved on to Angel, it was just a different dynamic. Marti moved up into the second sort of position and Marti brought a different thing to the show. She brought a much more emotional angle to it. Often a more romantic angle to the stories that weren’t there in the earlier years. All the little heartbreaking things, whether if it was stuff with Tara and Willow or with Xander and Anya.
It was season four that Joss really took Marti under his wing. Joss wanted to mentor Marti into growing into that role. It was a different dynamic where he opened it up more as a staff in terms of relying on them to find some of the ways to get to where he wanted to go.
JOSS WHEDON
We did a lot of things in season four that were different. Some of them met with approval, some less so. Because we get bored. We didn’t want to watch the same show every week, and we don’t want to make the same show every week. Not having David [Boreanaz] anymore made it easier, because it meant we had new places to go. What had become tough was how could we wring any new changes out of that relationship? Well, we no longer had that problem. Then they were going to college. It was actually an embarrassment of riches.
DAVID FURY
I know it was creatively freeing for Joss. Joss really likes to keep things moving. He likes to challenge himself. The Angel-Buffy relationship had played out. He went to the place where she kills him. That’s really more or less what you can do with him. You certainly have the fans and stuff saying this is the love of her life and how can the show go on without Angel? But I’m sure Joss just felt it would open things up in so many different ways.
SARAH LEMELMAN
After Buffy’s heartbreak with Angel, it is a long time before she lets anyone in again. It is clear that no other relationship affects her and is as meaningful as her relationship with Angel, but she still strives for some semblance of love in subsequent seasons. Once she graduates high school and enrolls in college at Sunnydale, she meets Riley, who appears to be the perfect all-American boy. They begin a relationship, and it is quickly discovered that Riley is not just an ordinary college boy, but he works as a soldier for a secret government organization known as the Initiative, which hunts down and experiments on demons. Still, he is a far cry from Angel, and Buffy is seen as straddling the fine line of trying to maintain a normal human relationship while still being a powerful slayer. This puts the two of them in several awkward situations, as Buffy is seen as a stronger and better soldier in Riley’s eyes. As a result, a crisis of masculinity is presented where Riley often sees his male status threatened by Buffy.
DAVID FURY
Obviously, the one thing you want to do is make Riley the new love interest for Buffy, but it became kind of clear that the fans weren’t reacting. We weren’t finding him as interesting a character as we would have liked. Marc Blucas is great, but the chemistry wasn’t entirely there. Initially, the excitement of bringing in this cool secret agent to be Buffy’s love interest was something Joss was really thrilled with. Marti also had something to do with Marc’s casting. I think she just went gaga over him. But the character never quite gelled in the way we wanted.
MARTI NOXON
For my personal taste, and this says a lot about me and my dating history, I liked Riley a lot better once he started to get fucked up. I liked him much better once there was stuff going on with him that I didn’t understand or couldn’t put my finger on. When he was soldier guy, he just lacked that darkness that is so appealing in our characters. Most of our characters have two sides to them; they’re relatively complex. Part of what we were playing with him is that he is presented as the anti-Angel. He was supposed to present kind of a problem to Buffy because he wasn’t the scary guy, and could she deal with that? Could she deal with someone who was really there for her and not dangerous?
At the same time, unfortunately, for the audience that was not as interesting. So even though it’s a real-life dilemma, it didn’t work for some people. Some people loved him unabashedly, as they should have. He’s a fine actor and a great-looking guy, but if you’re a little twisted like me, it didn’t get interesting until he was cheating on her, basically, and going to the dark side of town and getting bitten. That’s when I started to feel, “Now I want to know more about him.”
DAVID FURY
The fact of the matter is characters become far more interesting when they go dark anyway. Riley was such a good guy, a nice pure Captain America kind of guy and it didn’t seem to fit in that world. It didn’t make us go, “Wow, what a cool guy.” It was “What a Boy Scout.” Kind of dark was a way to give Marc more to play, to make the character more dimensional. The whole Initiative thing was always a tricky thing to play and the idea of that super-secret-agent monster killer. You take Buffy, which was such an intimate show about friends and family, and you start to make it a little too big. Riley was outside of that world and we were trying to bring him into it, but it just never quite worked.
CHRISTIAN KANE
(actor, The Librarians)
Poor Marc Blucas; he’s a great guy. I can’t say enough about Blucas. He’s another one of the nicest guys in Hollywood. He’s a dear friend. Nobody in America was ready to accept the fact that Angel was gone. It had nothing to do with Blucas. Nobody was ready to accept that Angel was gone and Angel and Buffy weren’t going to be a thing. That’s why Blucas got hammered. I don’t think that anybody in that role stood a shot. You could’ve cast Brad Pitt. OK, maybe that would work, but other than that I just don’t think anyone would’ve had a shot, because America loved Angel.
MARTI NOXON
When challenged as an actor to go to more dramatic places, Marc stepped up. He’s really fine in dramatic scenes. Once he got a little twisted, I was in. The irony of that is we used getting him twisted to sort of launch him out of the show. Ultimately, does the character work? Yes, because we knew where we were going with him and we knew that it wasn’t going to go well. I think that maybe there was a long period of time where he was just sort of there, being her sidekick. Some people didn’t respond to that and I could understand why. I think people missed him more when he was gone, as you often do in real life when that happens. I felt like in terms of Marc’s contribution, he did a tremendously fine job and if there was ever any problem with that character, it was the fault of the writers and not him.
SARAH LEMELMAN
Time and time again, Riley is seen as dented by Buffy’s immeasurable strength, from nearly knocking him unconscious in a spar to making him look like a foolish child at a demon bar. When Riley begins to see that the Initiative may not be all the good he believes it to be, he is then faced with not only a crisis of masculinity with Buffy but al
so an identity crisis, as his whole life’s mission is turned upside down. Once again, Buffy is put in a more powerful position, as she is seen comforting Riley while he is sick from the steroids that he had been taking unknowingly from the Initiative. At 6'2"’, he is seen as utterly helpless, as he is curled in the fetal position, shivering and whimpering.
Buffy’s slayer strength and speed is not the only way in which Riley feels inadequate and emasculated next to her. He also feels that he cannot measure up to Buffy’s ex, Angel, and that he does not truly satisfy her physically and emotionally. In “The Yoko Factor” Angel makes an appearance, and the viewers see a huge standoff between the two men. When Angel says he is “going to see an old girlfriend,” Riley attacks Angel, but Angel easily knocks Riley out. Despite the fact that the fight is clearly uneven and Angel pulverizes Riley, Riley still comes after Angel to stop him from talking to Buffy. When Buffy, Angel, and Riley all end up in the same room, Angel and Riley engage in what Buffy calls a “display of testosterone poisoning.”
JOSS WHEDON
I actually think it was a very strong year. There were things that were difficult. The Initiative, budget-wise and figuring out motivation-wise, you’re dealing with a lot of people who aren’t your core group. Ultimately, my heart is always with my core group, so that was sort of tricky trying to get the feeling of a huge government conspiracy when we have a shrub and people are saying, “We’re going to patrol past the shrub!” Eventually you begin to feel that you’re just playing dress-up, but we did manage to pull some epic scope on that.
Some people also got kind of twitchy that Buffy was involved in a happy relationship, where she actually gets to have sex. For some reason, that made people very nervous. By and large, the more nervous I make people—as long as they’re still watching—the better I feel, because that’s what the year was supposed to be about: “We’re all redefining who we are, we’re sort of falling apart, we’re doing what you’re supposed to do in the first year of college. We’re experimenting.” I think some of the best single episodes we’ve done were fourth season, and we ended so bizarrely.
Slayers and Vampires Page 19