Crush is terrific.
Wherever you fall in the Spike spectrum of the fandom, there is a little bit of something
for you here: A smidgen of classic Spike bravado, if you’re
into that.
Mayhap a spot of vintage Spike and Dru for elevenses, if that’s your thing.
Or even a return of some rock-hard Spike humiliation, if that’s what gets you going.
I’m not here to kink shame.
The point is, this is a terrific AND important episode for tall, bleached, and handsome,
that also addresses some questions about the show’s lore that we’ve been talking around
in these videos since Spike first swaggered into Sunnydale.
After the troll’y events of Triangle, the owners of the Bronze have dipped into their
Hellmouth insurance…again and rebuilt.
Not my fault insurance doesn't cover act of troll.
Now I wish there was a bottle episode about The Bronze owners.
Wonder if they could have been a future big-bad Mayor style?
The gang is having a dance-a-bration, presumably to celebrate their isolated battle triumph
over Glory from the previous episode.
But the camera pans around to find Buffy isolated and on her own.
For some reason, I was distracted this time by the two young guys standing behind her,
trying way too hard to look casual as they scan the room for potential rejection.
I have been at various points BOTH open Hawaiian shirt, hands-in-his-pockets, “I’m just
chillin,” guy.
Along with slightly overdressed, wearing those new dress shoes his mom just got him today,
“Where are the ladies?!?”
guy.
Definitely a vibe with those two.
Bronze-isolated Buffy is always carrying some melancholy weight.
And…uhh…coincidentally (?) that is the moment that Spike chooses to approach.
He is out of his super-villain outfit for the first time in the series.
Buffy spurns Spike’s attempts for a genial connection.
It looks as though, in the shot where he attempts to storm off, James Marsters accidentally
knocks over the beer bottle.
Given the way Sarah jumps it appears unscripted.
James recovers and sulks off, and the accident actually makes Spike look more pathetic and
rejected.
Will is still having headaches from the Glory fight.
No more teleportation spells.
I suppose like maximum combo-breaker Buffy from Primeval, the teleportation option was
something the writers were going to have to nerf for the sake of the storytelling.
Big Bads aren’t that scary if Will is just able to teleport them away every time they
come running.
Across town, an empty train rolls in, and something onboard eats the yardmaster.
At home, Giles tells Buffy not to treat Dawn in any other way than she’s used to and
I laughed at the sibling vibe of Buffy immediately jumping on her.
“DAWN.”
I love the “What came first?
Dawn or the Egg?” reference that Dawn’s shirt is making.
The costume designer, Cynthia Bergstrom, must have had a lot of fun dressing Dawn this season.
Back at Crypt Von Spike, Harmony is feeling frisky but Spike isn’t interested until
she offers to try anything.
He suggests some cosplay.
“Oh, I’m gonna stake you.”
The next day Tara, Willow, and Buffy are having a chat about the Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Willow is wishing that Quasi Modo and Esmerelda ended up together.
“It can’t end like that because all of Quasi Modo’s actions were selfishly motivated.
He had no moral compass.
No understanding of right and wrong.”
It’s a nice aside from David Fury, directed towards any fans watching this season feeling
hopeful that Spike and a newly single Buffy might hook up.
As well as, perhaps, an accidentally ironic interpretation of Hunchback, given that by
another, Esmerelda’s compassion was the inciting incident to bring about Quasimodo’s
change.
Dawn stops by to visit Spike and I love her call back to Spike’s lurking line in Blood
Ties.
“I wasn’t lurking.
I was standing about.”
“I’m not lurking.
I’m looking.”
Buffy finds Dawn there later, being told an inappropriate story by Spike.
Dawn outs Spike’s crush on Buffy.
“Hunh?”
That night Spike stops by to invite Buffy to team up and clear a vamps nest.
The activity does not go as he’d hoped.
“Is this a date?”
“Do you want it to be?”
“Are you out of your mind?”
Nice reference: the episode Spike discovered his crush was ‘Out of My Mind.’
This is SUCH a terrific scene between the two of them.
Spike’s little vulnerable line reveals just a hint of William in it.
Then, seeing he is in this moment some kind of bottom for Buffy Spike tries to protect
himself by summoning up some swagger.
Great stuff by James.
After Buffy shoots him down, Spike mopes back to the ol’ crypt-stead and finds…
Spike evicts Harmony, and Dru takes him to celebrate with some takeout.
At the behest of Joyce and Willow, Buffy goes to reiterate to Spike that the two of them
are never going to happen.
She discovers his shrine to her.
Are those…Angel’s drawings?
Spike handles Buffy’s rejection the same way he has always handled romantic rejection:
assault and threats of murder.
He gets triple-shot down and the episode ends with him officially uninvited from Buffy’s
home…and me…somehow…feeling sorry for the sexist assault’y undead murderer-guy…AGAIN.
HOW do they keep pulling that off?!?
Anyway, I think I’d probably put David Fury second on my personal scale for delightful
Buffy episodes, just behind Jane Espenson.
Sure, every mutant enemy writer has a Go Fish on their resume - an episode that, for one
reason or another didn’t gel completely together (22 episode seasons are long.)
But David Fury’s best episodes just feel effortlessly entertaining.
Crush unfolds so easily and cutely.
Between this one and Real Me, he also may have the best handle on what Dawn’s voice
is at this point in the series.
It doesn’t hurt that ‘Crush’ is Spike-centric.
I really love Spike and Dawn’s developing chemistry.
Dawn’s crush on Spike makes sense for her.
He is the kind-of-person who helped her discover the truth about herself and his facade is
built around rebellion.
It makes sense that Dawn would see him as a person to trust at this point in her life.
“I like how you talk to me how I understand things.”
Something about the episode also feels like the show’s budget got a bump.
From the screen wall in the Bronze to the use of the train station location.
Sadly, after having appeared on Buffy since the two-part pilot, this is Mercedes McNab’s
last appearance on the show as Harmony, though she makes it as memorable a one as ever.
If you’re as much of a Harmony fan as I am and you haven’t watched Angel the Series
yet, you should do yourself a favor as she has makes some great appearances on that show.
The parallel season of Angel that was airing in the hour after Buffy back in 2001 was playing
with some of the familiar events from his time on Buffy to explore its arc.
Fitting, given that the influence of Angel’s character is actually felt all over this episode.
(quietly) Angel's different.
He has a soul.
Spike has a chip.
Same diff.
Please!
Spike, you're a vampire.
Angel was a vampire.
Spike’s actions in this episode are broadly modeled off Angel’s in season 1, episode
Buffy didn’t trust Angel.
Darla attacked and Angel dusted his ex to defend his new love interest.
Spike is trying to play those same notes here, but the music has no soul.
Sure he wasn’t around during season one, but it stands to reason that he and Angelus
might’ve gotten to talking, given the conspicuous absence of the fourth member of the Whirlwind
that season.
And, given Spike’s penchant for conflating love, sex, and violence, I was reminded of
something Angelus said to him back at the mansion.
“To kill this girl, you have to love her.”
In my mind Crush puts to bed a question we’ve been talking around since season 2 began.
Are vampires capable of love?
Buffy believes they aren’t.
You can’t love without a soul
And it makes a ton of sense for Buffy’s character to have adopted the perspective
she has here, given…
Angel’s turn in the second season was devastating and cruel.
How much worse might it have hurt if Buffy had believed that Angel’s love was…still
in there?
Worse, that Angel’s love for her was the thing actually fueling Angelus’ torment
and abuse?
Buffy’s perspective on vampires and love at this stage of her life strikes me as a
straightforward and necessary coping mechanism - An especially useful one after Angel came
back in Season 3.
But, after Buffy says that Drucilla uses some Shakespeare to make a simple distinction.
“Oh, we can you know.
Just not wisely.”
Man, do I love the symmetry of that line.
It is the second Spike and Drucilla reference to Othello.
Back in ‘School Hard’, when Dru asked Spike to kill Buffy for her, he responded:
“I’ll chop her into messes.”
When I first watched that episode it struck me as such a bizarre quote for Spike to use,
given it is something Othello said, in a rage, he would do to Desdemona, his wife.
Now, it’s some pretty fun foreshadowing of Spike’s crush.
Later, when the deed was done and Iago’s treachery revealed, Othello asks Cassio and
company to describe him in a particular way:
…Then must you speak Of one that lov'd not wisely but too well;
I think between Spike and Dru, along with some other events from Angel there is a lot
of evidence that vampires are capable of love and that to over-fixate on the question is
to miss the very symbolic role that they serve in the series.
Season 2 was all about Buffy’s first experience in love and the ways in which its intensity
can lead us away from our authenticity.
And there’s definitely a familiar ring from it here.
You’re all I bloody think about.
I’m drowning in you Summers.
I’m drowning in you.”
“Angel when I look into the future, all I see is you.”
During that season I struggled to explain the distinction between particular varieties
of love in relationships that the show was modeling.
Adolescent vs adult.
Selfish vs selfless.
But that was all a little bit too confusing.
Too binary.
Maybe it is, as Spike says.
“Love isn’t brains sweetheart.
Its blood.
Blood screaming inside you to work its will.”
Really, love is more like a force of nature that springs up during a person’s life in
the form of a bright beautiful day, a storm, a devastating fire, or simple elegant gravity.
No one chooses a fire.
The choices come in what they do after.
For that reason, the important part of the discussion isn’t really in qualifying whether
attachment or affection is or is not love.
If love is just, as Whistler said, one of the big moments that comes and we can’t
help, then it’s what we do afterward that counts.
Buffy has some deeply philosophical underpinnings and, naturally, that bleeds into the show's
relationships.
Given existential freedom was tantamount for him, Jean-Paul Sartre believed that romantic
love was rife with either sadistic or masochistic potential outcomes.
Sadistic when we try and tie another person down in a relationship with us, denying them
the freedom to grow and change and manifest their authentic selves.
Or masochistic when we try and conform to what we believe our lovers want us to be,
abandoning our own freedom.
Spike is, in the conventional sense of the word, a prototypical hopeless romantic and
manifests BOTH varieties of Satre’s bad-faith love.
The sadistic expressions are obvious, attempting to force Buffy into loving him by chaining
her to a wall.
But the masochistic ones are present as well.
He doesn’t see himself as having the freedom to be the man he wants to be.
That freedom is endowed to him by Dru or Buffy.
“This is the face of my salvation.
She delivered me from mediocrity.”
In this episode, he keeps making little changes, trying to reframe himself as a good guy Buffy
might want.
“I love you Buffy, and if that means turning my back on the whole evil thing…”
In the opening, he dons a Riley-esque good guy outfit, not understanding the difference
between being something and just wearing it’s…
“Costume.”
Spike’s willingness to abandon aspects central to his identity (like evil…or Dru…or…evil)
shows he may have Buffy on the wall but, philosophically at least, he is keeping himself in chains.
He lives er…undead’s only for the sake of the validation he receives through his
romantic relations.
He is a void to be filled because without Buffy or Dru’s affections,
I’m nothing without her.
Personally, I’ve never completely fallen in line with the notion that we should ONLY
try and change for ourselves, otherwise those changes are in some way invalid.
Doing the right thing for the wrong reasons is still the right thing and one of the ways
we can celebrate a partner is by taking better care of ourselves.
But that mostly applies to things like…you know...doing more pushups.
Or…you know…Sart-ing less in bed.
Fundamental, long-term change requires a commitment to ourselves and clarity on our own motivations.
Still, Sartre believed in the importance of intimate relationships.
The people closest to us are mirrors, without which, we may never be able to fully understand
ourselves and unlock who we want to be.
As much as Buffy and Angel gave us Sartre’s bad faith version of intimacy in Season 2,
their relationship in Season 3 is mostly the authentic one.
Where they empower each other…
“I think that you should leave.
This is a good opportunity for you.”
“Angel you have the chance to do real good.
To make Amends.”
“I do know that it’s important to keep fighting.
I learned that by watching you.”
And eventually, without resentment or malice, say goodbye.
Because sometimes the freest and most loving thing two people can do for each other, is
to accept the ache and loneliness that will come and then let each other go.
Angel was Good.
I can be too.
I’ve changed Buffy.
“You’re like a serial killer in prison.”
The whole point of the Clockwork Orange’ing Spike in Season 4 was to make a thematic comparison
between the chip and the social conditioning the panopticon’ic Initiative did to Riley.
“I am how they trained me.”
And one of ‘A Clockwork Orange’s’ main themes was that good and evil are BOTH aspects
of human nature.
However, perhaps the defining aspect of our humanity is the freedom to choose one vs the
other.
Spike isn’t choosing anything.
The chip gives him no other way of operating.
And without the spark of his moral compass, he doesn’t have the ability to understand
the morality underpinning his actions anyway.
From what I’ve read, the original plan for the show was to off Spike in What’s My Line,
but James became something of a writer and fan favorite.
In theory, keeping Spike past season 2 may have created a problem for the show’s original
conception of vampires.
If the soul is the moral compass and vampires are soulless creatures that don’t age, then
vampires by their very nature were intended to be a little one-dimensional.
The lack of any moral or ethical development was the idea they were supposed to be symbolically
representing.
Problem is, for a long-term recurring character in a series…lack of any development just
isn’t that interesting.
And if the chip were to TEACH Spike morality it might undermine some of the intended themes
from Season 4.
But vampires aren’t incapable of actions that may appear to be moral.
It’s just that the action more likely served other desires they already had from the beginning.
Spike COULD have fed on troll’y disaster victims but didn’t.
True he pointed it out to Buffy that he didn’t but that’s exactly my point.
In a bubble, comforting disaster victims could still be seen as a moral action.
Spike escorted Dawn to the Magic Box in ‘Blood Ties.’
Maybe, he likes Dawn.
It’s not outside of the realm of possibility.
Being a vampire doesn’t mean you can’t like a person.
Only that you are undead, have no moral compass, and drink people-fuel to survive.
And, since chipped Spike can’t eat Dawn and Dawn also represents future potential
access to Buffy, why not keep her safe?
Spike also didn’t shotgun Buffy in ‘Fool for Love’ but, instead, did something the
other Scoobies sometimes fail to do: sat quietly with her.
Was that moral?
Well, since vampires can love, and Spike thinks he’s in love with Buffy, then he also happened
upon her in a moment when she’d been uncontrollably stricken by something that he’s deeply craving
from her anyway: emotional vulnerability.
Whether his story remains thematically consistent in the coming seasons we’ll just have to
wait and see.
I’ll be honest, as a fan I find myself seeing both sides of it every time I rewatch.
But either way…Spike’s arc, with all its ups and downs, triumphs and missteps, all
anchored by James Marsters’ effortlessly charismatic performance may be one of the
most interesting aspects of the entire show.
“That doesn’t prove anything.
Except that you’re a sick miserable vampire I should’ve dusted a long time ago.”
But, the whole fan and writer favorite thing aside, I have to admit that the more times
I’ve run through the seasons, the more I’ve started to wonder…why the hell hasn’t
Buffy staked him yet?
For real.
Since his realization in Doomed that he can do damage with things other than his fists
and teeth, Spike has proven himself to be an absolute menace.
He aided Adam’s plan which was instrumental in the deaths of a bunch of human soldiers.
He got Harmony to nearly kill both Riley and Riley’s doctor.
And who knows how many kills Harmony brought home while they were living together?
She had to have been eating something.
In this episode, Dru feeds him two people that arguably would still be alive otherwise,
something he conveniently never brings up with Buffy.
If anything, he’s shown he can do MORE damage via that liquid stupid sexy charisma of his
than with just his normal weapons of choice.
But maybe, on some level, Buffy feels some kind of weird kindred connection to him that
even she hasn’t sorted out for herself.
There was some visual evidence of that in the second season.
They both recovered from their injuries around the same time in that arc.
Allied with each other against their exes in the finale.
Because of his chip, Spike, is neither human nor monster, and that leaves him isolated
from both worlds.
As we see in the opening, more and more Buffy’s Slayer power isolates her from her own.
And then there’s…
“I’ve been going out every night.”
“Patrolling?”
“Hunting.”
You’re a killer, Spike.
Okay, killer…you’re on your own.