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Spike and Season 8
I’m under the impression that a lot of people assume that Spike will certainly not figure in season 8, and that Joss either never was interested in Spike (or Spuffy) or he views that story as settled and is just moving on. Of course, we won’t know until the tale is done, but it does seem to me that it would be very strange if the same writer who knew that Angel marked Buffy for life didn’t think that Spike, who played at least as major a role in Buffy’s story, could vanish from her story without trace. But all I want to argue for here is the proposition that based on what we have seen in the first 21 issues, there is plenty of room for Spike to enter the story, perhaps even in an important way.
Before getting to the text, it’s worth observing that Scott Allie has said (Slayalive Q&A #20, question 4) that Joss has the right to use the characters in Angel as much as he likes. There thus seems to be no contractual reason for Spike to remain offstage. All that will matter is what the story demands.
While I wouldn’t go so far as to argue that the story demands that Spike play a role, there is a fair amount of text at this point that would retrospectively set up his appearance.
1. Buffy is the main character of the series. (Duh). When last we saw her, Spike was arguably the most important person in her world – the one who was in her heart, the one with whom she shared the fiery hands of passion, the one whose name was the last word she spoke in the entire series, the one with whom she spent what could well have been her last night in the world, the one who stood by her when all her other significant folks kicked her out of her own house, etc. etc. etc. The status of Buffy’s relationship with the person who was so very important to her was left hanging at the end of the story. It matters how it is resolved. Really. Angel hung over her story for years. It’s unreasonable to think that Spike vanished without a trace in 18 months, or that the resolution of Buffy's story with Spike is insignficant.
And it’s not like the writers of season 8 are insensible of the fact that romantic story lines from season 7 need to be resolved in season 8. Pretty much the first thing we learn about Faith in #6 is that Robin ended up not surprising her – she’s still very much alone. It took a while, but we finally learn that Xander really did spend some serious time mourning Anya (#13). If Joss really wanted to close off the Spike/Buffy story line, he’d have done so much the way Faith/Robin got closed out. He didn’t.
2. On the contrary, one of the first things Joss tells us about Buffy is that she doesn’t know the significance of the Immortal to either Angel or Spike. It opens the door to the possibility that she does not know that they tried to track her down in TGIQ. Far from closing the story down, Joss offers a tantalizing detail that reminds us that we really don’t know where things stand between Buffy and Spike.
3. There is the mysterious absence of Spike from Buffy’s dream space (#3), where every other significant figure in her life is present. (With the possible exception of Hank). Angel is here, as is Riley. Tara, and Dawn, and Faith, and, Joyce, and all the major villains and the Scoobies. There are cubes from early in Buffy’s life through season 7 (Xander with an eye patch; Caleb). There are three ways I can think of to account for this fact. (a) The scenes and figures drawn were chosen by Jeanty and have no particular significance. But Enisy asked Allie about this, and Allie says that Joss did interact with Jeanty both about what should be there and about what should not be there (Slayalive Q&A #19, question 6). (b) Buffy really doesn’t see Spike as an important person in her life (beyond his usefulness in her erotic fantasies). That defies imagination. Whether it’s the fiery hands of passion or the bathroom scene, Spike has impacted Buffy enormously, both in good ways and in bad ways. (c) The absence is significant in a way that has yet to be revealed.
4. Buffy finally mentions Spike in A Beautiful Sunset sandwiched between Angel and Riley. As already noted, both Angel and Riley figured in her dream space. They’ve also both (now) appeared in the series. Angel in a nod to what lies firmly behind Buffy (#20); and Riley as either a villain or an undercover ally (#19). If two of the three major loves in Buffy’s life deserve a role in the series, it is even stranger that Joss couldn’t be arsed to close out a dangling thread about her most recent romantic involvement.
5. There are plenty of places where one can read resonances with Buffy’s history with Spike, things that could take on different shades if Spike turns out to be part of this story. In the first battle we are shown, Buffy is in a church killing a demon with a cross. The last time we saw Buffy in a church with a demon, the demon was draped on the cross in one of the most arresting images of the entire series. General Voll points to the crater at Sunnydale and says “look what she did to her hometown”. But when Buffy last had anything to say about what caused that crater, her answer was “Spike”. In Buffy’s dream about Xander, she promises to be gentle “this time”, yet knocks off Xander’s head and worries about being dark. There are resonances here with her not-so-gentle relationship with Spike, which was epitomized in the alley scene in Dead Things where she didn’t quite knock his head off. Buffy even says “oh balls” here, which is a line that comes from that scene in DT. Ethan’s entrance into her dream is teased as Spike (we just see his Spike-like clothes at the end of #2) and Buffy explicitly objects to him calling her “pet”. Skipping ahead, and going in less detail: Dracula’s relationship with Xander mirrors in some ways Spike’s relationship with Buffy (evil vampire crossing lines to help the good guys because of love); Willow tells Frey that the most important men in Buffy’s life are lurks (and that that fact makes it too simple to say that Buffy’s life is about eliminating them); and in the most recent issue we have Clem and Harmony allied, the two demons who were friendly with Spike during his time in Sunnydale. None of these allusions or references have to mean anything. But they are available to mean something if Spike turns out to figure in the story.
So we’ll see. It’s true that we’re nearly two years into the comics. But we’re also just over half way through the “season”. And in many of the seasons on Buffy, the real contours of the season aren’t revealed until the second half. It’s too soon to claim that Joss is going to pay no attention to Spike. Indeed, I tend to think that the strange absences and silences point to a larger role rather than a smaller one – since the failure to close out Spike/Buffy quickly seems to demand some sort of pay-off when the story finally is continued.
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1. Lorne got his groove back. In the notes he says that he just needed to figure out that it's better to help people than to mope around when you've done something wrong. The last we saw Lorne he was shattered. He was executing someone in cold blood. Moreover, he was executing *Lindsey* on behalf of *Angel*. Not only did Angel use Lindsey for his own purposes before disposing of him; he was giving up on Lindsey's possibility of redemption. That's either hypocritical (since Angel has needed and still needs a ton of forgiveness and room for redemption) or its despairing (he's identified with Lindsey and is giving up on himself by proxy). Either way, Lorne gets it, I think. Which is why he is in such despair. The little message "you get over this stuff by helping people" doesn't seem to fit the dimensions of where we were. I read it as trivializing. Of course it's good to help people, and it's better than brooding. But it loses the commentary on Angel. And it seems to violate one of the principles of the 'verse which is that you don't just shrug stuff like that off.
2. Does Lynch see Angel's tragedy as externally driven or internally driven? The fact that Lindsey and Drogyn have disappeared from AtF, makes it at least possible that Lynch thinks that Angel's mistake here was to not see that the senior partners could retaliate by damning an entire city. But in the series Angel's participation in the evil of W&H was far more problematic. He was there in the first place because he sold himself and his friends out to W&H to save his son. He might be telling himself now that the idea was to fight evil from the inside; but at the time, when Lilah tried to tempt him with that he KNEW it could never work and rejected it. Lilah only got him with the promise of saving Connor. That's an internally motivated tragedy. Angel made a trade which we can understand, but which was still wrong. It violated his own integrity. And the mindwipe violated his friends. And we could go back further. Connor was in a mess because Angel couldn't figue out how to deal with him; he was unreachable or difficult because of his experience in hell with Holtz, but Holtz was motivated by the very terrible things Angel had done to him and his family; Connor himself exists because Angel despaired of his own redemption and sought to lose his soul by sleeping with Darla. It's all character-driven. This is not to say that Angel isn't doing plenty of good as well. But the bad stuff does not just randomly plop on him. But Lynch seems to think so. Read his opening remarks in the first TPB. Poor Angel had all this bad stuff happen; but no mention of why it was happening. And here he delivers Angel a "happy ending". Even if it is ironic in the ways you see, it's not at all obvious that the irony has anything to do with the fact that the tragedy has been driven by his own character all along.
3. In Home Connor tells Angel that you can't save someone with a lie. Angel proceeds to try to save him with a lie. Of itself that's problematic. But now we have a saved Connor, and no sense that there's an underlying dilemma. Further, there's a real question of identity. How is post-Home Connor related to pre-home Connor? Angel killed pre-Home Connor, and replaced him with post-home Connor. So who, exactly, got saved here? Lots of very interesting stuff to be done on personal identity, and on whether Angel's motivation was to save Connor, qua Connor, or to save his son, who happened to be named Connor. We know at a minimum that he did not save the Connor who was standing before him in the sporting goods store.
Continued...