“Great love is wild and passionate and dangerous. It burns and consumes.”
Wow. This is a powerful episode, to put it mildly.
Things are not well with the Scoobies, to the point where the only people who can help Buffy trace the Three Nerds are Willow, Tara (finally, and ominously, Amber Benson is in the opening credits) and Dawn. Anya is off being quite rubbish at being a vengeance demon while Xander, Who needs an urgent cultural awakening in real ale, is drinking bad lager alone. Buffy and Xander have fallen out over Spike- although it’s nice to see them make up later, like true friends- and the awkwardness about what everyone saw last week is palpable.
All of which contrasts with the lovely, joyous, wonderful and loving scenes between Willow and Tara; sometimes it’s so lovely to watch scenes of nice people being happy that you forget that this is a Josss Whedon show, and Joss Whedon is evil. Dawn’s squeeing joy at their being back together speaks for us all. Love hasn’t gone very well in Sunnydale lately, but there’s hope.
It’s touching to see Dawn visit Spike, who is unlikely to be around much now; she misses him, but is quite rightly angry at what he did to Buffy with his moment of weakness. And it’s amising to see the Three Nerds again, complete with Jonathan wearing a fourth wall-busting rubber costume to get this week’s Charles Atlas MacGuffin so an increasingly disturbed Warren can again play at being the alpha male.
Then it happens. Spike comes to demonstrate with Buffy, demonstrate with her... and tries to rape her. The act isn’t trivialised or minimised; it’s allowed to linger in its full horror, with a traumatised Buffy and flashbacks. When I first saw this episode, more than a decade ago, I thought this scene was misjudged, and the character of Spike was tainted by this act. But this time it feels different, because this is what rape culture is like; men who know their victim, and rape from an aggrieved sense of enlightenment. This kind of rape happens all the time, by “nice guys”, and it’s good to make that point, however upsetting. It’s also good to see Spike’s confused feelings of both guilt and continued entitlement, sadly realistic, and inevitable after this that he rides off into the sunset.
Buffy finally confronts the nerds on a heist and beats them, capturing Jonathan and Andrew. But Warren is still loose, and the last few seconds of the episode are harrowing, even when you know what’s coming. Tara’s death is deliberately sudden, shocking, and out of nowhere, and Williw’s red eyes are terrifying.
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