Slayers and Vampires

by Edward Gross,Mark A. Altman

  DAVID FURY

  The Buffybot thing initially came out of the robot episode “I Was Made to Love You” [in which Spike asks Warren to make a robot Buffy for him]. We were told that Britney Spears was a huge fan of the show and we got word from her reps that she wanted to guest-star on Buffy. So the story that was conceived ultimately by Joss, “I Was Made to Love You,” was meant for Britney Spears to play the robot. I had a little daughter who was a Britney fan. I took her to the concert and she begins the concert with her face on screen, speaking in almost robotic way, along the lines of, “I want to please, I want to make you mine.” And robotically. I think Joss saw it, too, or he heard about it, but he got this idea that if Britney is going to be on the show, she is going to be a robot, a sex-slave robot, because that’s what she presents to her audience when you see her.

  He presented that to Britney’s reps and she balked, because she wasn’t looking to do that. I think she was more looking toward being with the Buffy gang as opposed to being some kind of sex-slave robot. The obvious thing that came out of that was Spike making a Buffybot using the same technology from that and having a Buffybot made for him.

  I always like when things from the past feed events and ideas into stories. You pull from some other past ideas, because it all feels much more organic that way. It came out of that; it wasn’t just random. It was pretty odd to see our heroine Buffy be reduced to that with Spike. But Spike recognizes it is not good enough for him; he is telling us it isn’t just external. It’s just infatuation, because he was getting that from the robot, but he wasn’t getting her real love.

  JAMES MARSTERS

  (actor, Spike)

  That was perfect! That was in the vein of my idea all along of—This is it! This is exactly it! He should be in love with Buffy and just making an idiot out of himself in pursuit of that. The Buffybot is just so much more obscene than anything I could’ve thought of. It was the most pathetic stalker move imaginable.

  DAVID FURY

  To me, it’s all about a Hellmouth and the things that have come out: the demons, the ghosts, the monsters of your youth that you have to battle. When it become robots, you start going, “Wait a minute, how does that fit into the show?” Joss would say, “You’re just way overthinking it. The Hellmouth should be able to provide us with anything we want to do; the energy that comes out of it makes mad scientists out of humans who then go ahead and create something evil.”

  MARTI NOXON

  We had talked about the Spike-Buffy romance toward the end of season five. Joss and I were, like, “You know, this is what has to happen. We’ve got to take this seriously, because he is by far the most sort of screwed-up guy around.” We just felt like that’s whom she’d be drawn to under the circumstances. Also, you know, he’s not unsexy. So we wanted to take advantage of that.

  DAVID FURY

  It became, “Does Buffy need a love interest?” Of course, it eventually came around to Spike, which was an unusual choice. It was one many of the fans embraced. I was a little less enthusiastic since I knew the vampires were demons essentially. The demons possess someone once they die. So the idea that Spike could love genuinely or Buffy could fall for Spike in any way was tricky for me. We were able to get there once Buffy came back from the dead and she was all messed up. Then she could become Spike’s love interest, because it was self-destructive. A lot of people still romanticize that. I myself had to come around to it as I eventually started writing episodes about the relationship and I had to believe in it. Those were the challenges that came when we removed Angel. Joss loved those challenges more than he would have loved keeping them together and keeping everything safe and letting the fans dictate, “Oh, don’t ever break them up; we love them.” He was all about pain.

  SARAH LEMELMAN

  After Buffy comes back from the dead, Buffy gradually spends more time with Spike, which comes to a climax in “Smashed.” She continues her demeaning treatment of Spike by yelling to him, “Look at you, you idiot. Poor Spikey. Can’t be a human, can’t be a vampire. Where the hell do you fit in? Your job is to kill the slayer, but all you can do is follow me around making moon eyes.” The two engage in combat before Buffy kisses Spike, and after he declares his love for her. This results in a night of hard-core bondage and discipline / sadism and masochism (BDSM) sex between the two, which Buffy rushes to get away from in the morning, describing their engagement as a “freak show.”

  Spike tries to make the previous night seem momentous, but Buffy downplays its importance and takes on a “man’s” role in the conversation, stating it was nothing more than “just sex,” because Spike is “convenient.” This degrading conversation makes Spike clearly uncomfortable, and he has to assure himself that he is evil and dangerous, which points to the beginning of his confusion over his identity.

  In his frustration over Buffy, Spike also became involved with Harmony, now a vampire, whom he remained disdainful of throughout their short and tortured relationship.

  MARTI NOXON

  A lot of times when we’re searching for a character to serve a function in an episode from week to week, we’ll think of our cast of characters and see if there is someone from our ensemble who we can use as opposed to someone you’ve never seen before. Especially if you’ve had a good experience with an actor and you feel that they can pull it off. And we’ll go back and see if we can figure out who that person can be. If we can weave it back into the world, we try to do it. Harmony was a great example of that. So was Anya; she was supposed to be a one-shot; she moved up to that bar and yelled at that bartender about being two hundred years old or something, and we thought, “Oh, that’s kind of funny.” And she’s amazing.

  MERCEDES MCNAB

  (actress, Harmony Kendall)

  He was really nasty and there’re times when you are an actor and sometimes you are not really feeling 100 percent committed or whatnot. Every moment is 100 percent genuine. But with those scenes in particular, it felt really in the zone. I felt he and I were both super in the zone and the scenes really translated well and we worked well together. For me, it was just that he was the bad boy, the unobtainable male that every girl tried to turn good, eventually. Which generally never works out.

  MARTI NOXON

  There was a lot of discussion of how we could get Buffy and Spike to the next phase of their relationship. We had talked about lots of realistic ways it could happen, and Joss was, like, “It just has to be epic. It can’t be a little thing.” The whole notion there was that it was going to come out of the dramatic dynamic they had, which is as much about violence as it is about anything else. In my mind, Spike was always self-centered in his goodness. It’s always about his wants and needs. He’s not a moral guy and he is good when it serves him to be good. But I don’t know if we put enough emphasis on that. He was a little less ambiguous and a little bit more the hero. But he’s not a hero. People came to think of him as this softer, more righteous guy, but at least in my mind at his core, he did not have a soul. We still thought of him as a sociopath in the sense that he acts the way he thinks people want him to act in order to get what he wants. But if you’ve lived in the Buffy universe for years, the dude is just bad. It was the chip that kept him from being really bad.

  JAMES MARSTERS

  What I said to them actually was, “I know at the beginning of the season I was a little bit freaked out because you were taking Spike in different directions. I feel like I’m on a roller coaster, where like, you get kind of freaked out the first hill you climb. As you start to fall, you start to scream, right? By the middle of the ride your head is back and whatever happens you just go with it. That’s where I ended up with Joss, “Just do whatever you want. I’m never going to be nervous. Do anything. Put me in a dress—I don’t care. The one thing I ask you is give me two weeks notice if you want to take my shirt off.” He kind of got cocky, “Oh, two weeks, huh? Follow me.” I ain’t like Angel and I certainly ain’t like Riley none, so it was very interesting and a wh
ole new thing.

  SARAH LEMELMAN

  When Riley returns to Sunnydale momentarily, Buffy reevaluates her life, as Riley reminds her that Spike is “deadly, amoral, [and] opportunistic” and that she is a “hell of a woman” who deserves better. Buffy decides to finally end things with Spike, and, for the first time, she treats him like a man rather than an object, when she closes their relationship: “I’m using you. I can’t love you . . . And it’s killing me. I have to be strong about this. I’m sorry, William.” Here, she uses his real name, instead of Spike, which puts the two on the same ground for the first time in their brief affair.

  MARTI NOXON

  It was the beginning of the most divisive story line we’ve ever had, which is Buffy and Spike boning. I’ve never seen such a strong reaction on both sides; people either loved it or hated it. To this day, people either truly believe that Spike is completely redeemed and he should be treated a lot better or they truly believe that Buffy was a fool for trusting someone who’s been so evil and how could she be so unheroic to let herself be caught up in this really sordid romance? So, you had the total Buffy-Spike shippers or the people or are, like, I just don’t respect Buffy anymore. And it was fascinating to see.

  You know, I slept with bad guys all through college and it was really hot. There were certainly a number of people who were like this who were really hot. I don’t even care who’s doing it or why. And neither of them are all good or all bad. It wasn’t black and white. I’ve taken a lot of heat from Internet folks, especially because I said stuff like, “You know that that relationship can’t work” or “with/without things changing” and other things that make them feel like we’re not responsible—or we’re sort of comparing it to the Angel-Buffy romance and saying that that romance was really idolized, and this one isn’t.

  But to me it’s much more real. It’s like, if these two crazy kids could make it work, it’d be a lot more interesting than kind of a perfect romance with obstacles not of their own making. At the end of the year, Spike went and did something radical, but the violence of it upset people. It’s hard to say you’re the most feminist show ever and have people beating each other up all the time.

  JAMES MARSTERS

  I was just terrified. Like, when you do a movie or a play you can read the script beforehand and decide if you want to put yourself through that or if you want to show that part of yourself or if you want to go through the rigors of filming that. Or you can pass. You can say, “I don’t want to do that.” When you do a TV show, normally once you film one episode, you know what’s going to be asked of you, because most television shows are fairly repetitive, which is not a good thing. But when you work with Joss Whedon, all bets are off. You’re contracted to do anything that he comes up with to anyone that he wants you to do it to and whatever he dreams up. I started to be terrified of the new script. I’m going to have to experience anything that is thought of. It was scary, but that worked, because I think that Spike was terrified by himself, and it all kind of works. But yeah, it was a horrible realization that all bets were off.

  In fifth season’s “Fool for Love,” a crossover with Angel’s “Darla” episode, it had been revealed the fearsome Spike was originally a meek poet from 1880s-era London named William, who was the object of scorn and derision from his contemporaries and rejected by the love of his life, Cecily. Shortly thereafter, Drusilla sired him and he joined with Angelus and Darla as they traveled the globe on a reign of terror before he killed two vampire slayers, a Chinese slayer during the Boxer Rebellion and a second in New York in 1977.

  DAVID FURY

  I bucked on doing “Fool for Love.” I had an opportunity to do the episode, but because I couldn’t buy into it, it went to Doug Petrie and he did an amazing job. He sort of almost kind of convinced me, because he did such a great job with that episode. I went “Gee, I wish I’d done it after all.” It still kind of weirded me out that Spike, a soulless creature, could fall in love. I kept saying, it’s just an infatuation. It’s only external, it’s only this, he can’t possibly be in love, he has no heart, he has no soul. But I came around; they beat it out of me.

  JAMES MARSTERS

  What that episode did for me is explain the dichotomy between someone who could truly love his girl and be completely sweet and loving to her and also be a soulless, spawn of Hell. That was always to me the most interesting thing about Spike. It was never really addressed. I have thought sometimes maybe it’s best not to. I think they did about as well as you could. Spike’s progression is the progression of a lot of males, which is early years, not really finding yourself, not really finding your strength, and then finding something that really hooks you and helps you become yourself.

  The thing I finally understood when I think about Joss and the way he worked, he and Marti, I don’t think the cool is that interesting to them. I think that they can set it up and achieve it effortlessly. I think that it was usually a setup for something much more fallible and much more human and much more goofy and pained and tortured and humiliated. That’s what really great writing addresses, the human condition and all its frailty and all its vulnerability. At first, when they started taking my character down from the height of cool that they had placed me, it was a little bit scary. Eventually, I understood why.

  And if the show hadn’t pushed the limits enough in the sixth season, in the episode “Gone” Xander uncomfortably walks in on an invisible Buffy having sex with Spike.

  DAVID FURY

  I got to direct my first episode, which allowed Sarah a little break from all the angsty things and to get giddy about being invisible, about the fact that she didn’t have to worry about being back in the world, because no one could see her anymore. That was a little attempt to lighten the mood a bit and take us out of being completely somber and to have her having a fight scene with the three invisible nerd villains. It was part of season six which was a definite shift, which unnerved a lot of people. They just didn’t understand what we were going for in season six. Buffy was always funny and you’re trying to work in the funny, but Buffy is not getting any of the funny. She’s not going to be the one quipping. It was a lot trickier to do.

  That episode was fun to do, because it was so ridiculous to stage a ridiculous fight with invisible characters. It was a bit of an attempt to find something more fun and to go a little more comic. It was Joss’s idea and it needed to be there to cleanse the palette from all the darkness. Her feeling that her invisibility allowed her to be who she was, to be a little bit more lighthearted and reckless, but reckless in a much more fun way.

  MARTI NOXON

  Yeah, that was something that Joss and David Fury just got all excited about and I was just, like, “Ewwwww!” It was disturbing to me . . . and still is. It just shows you that even I have my limits.

  JAMES MARSTERS

  In a way every year I felt he was so completely different. When they brought me on the show, the two things that I thought were the linchpins of the character was, one, an extreme pleasure in hurting people; and, two, real love for my girlfriend, Drusilla. When they brought me back on the show [in season four], I had neither one of those and I was, like, “What are we going to play?” And they found it.

  MARTI NOXON

  He would’ve hurt people if he could, in certain circumstances. But, you know, if you’ve sort of lived in the universe of Buffy for years, the dude is bad—and it was the chip that kept him from being really bad. This guy is not to be trusted. If I were Buffy, I could trust him with anything sort of related to me, but I wouldn’t trust him in the big scheme of things. In my mind, Spike is always self-centered. It’s always about his own wants and needs. It’s always about Buffy or doing something for Buffy. But any place else, he’s pretty much amoral. He’s not a moral guy. He’s good when it serves him to be good. He’s not really a hero. He would never eat Dawn. He probably wouldn’t eat any of the Scoobies . . . maybe Xander. But, and I feel that this could be the fault of us, people came to think
of him as a sort of softer, more kind of righteous guy.

  JAMES MARSTERS

  I remember one time we were blocking a scene in Buffy’s house and Xander was bleeding out in the corner, having been mauled by some demon or something. The cast was gathered around him, gnashing teeth and wailing and keening. I was over in the corner, up against the wall looking bored. The director came up to me and goes, “James, you gotta go over there and care. I know it’s early in the morning, but you’re a cast member, he’s a cast member, he might die. You gotta go over there and express concern.” I was, like, “No, I don’t.” And he was, like, “Don’t you care about Xander?” “Nope, don’t care at all. Could live or die—check with Joss. I don’t care at all.” He was, like, “Really? What about the rest of them?” I was, like, “Buffy, definitely. Buffy’s mother, yes. But the rest of them, no, not at all.” So yeah, if you were Buffy or if you were part of her immediate family, then I cared about you. If you weren’t, then you were on your own.

  Dawn was effectively Buffy’s daughter, I think. As far as Buffy’s journey, you know . . . her mother dies, and very quickly she gets this little sister whom she now has to take care of. So she’s just quickly a single mom. Since I love Buffy, Dawn becomes my stepdaughter, emotionally speaking. I kind of approached it that way.

  MARTI NOXON

  It got so dark and so intense and then even darker still when Buffy just beats the hell out of Spike. Some people had a real hard time with that and I dig on that one. I understand where they’re coming from. It was something that, you know, just went to a real dark place and this is where people started to feel, like, “OK, like the episode, like the show, but what’s going on?” You know, what’s going on with Buffy? What’s going on with Spike? I get that. She beats the crap out him. I can understand why people were starting to wonder. I wouldn’t say that we were floundering at all, but I would say that at that point in the relationship we didn’t know where it was going and all we had was just her raw emotion. That’s what got expressed: just complete confusion and the fact that she kept taking out her pain on him and that he would take it.