Buffy receives a serious wound from a vampire and asks her watcher Giles if there are any stories about past vampire slayer killings. Giles says that the watchers usually found the death of their charge too painful to write about, and then they both realize they have the killer of two slayers in their midst - the vampire Spike - rendered harmless since season 4 by a chip in his head that causes blinding pain anytime he attacks a human.
Thus Buffy takes Spike to local nightspot "The Bronze" and asks him to recount how he killed the two slayers, so she can learn how to prevent being killed herself. The audience does indeed get an accounting of the death of the two slayers - one during the Boxer Rebellion in China, the other in a New York subway in 1977. What the audience sees that Buffy likely does not is how Spike became a vampire and what kind of person he was before his death and transformation. This part is both funny and touching and explains much of Spike's anger, for in the Buffyverse, vampires are demons that retain the memories of the human body they are animating. It turns out that, as a human, Spike was an upper-class British gentleman, a mama's boy, and a very bad poet, laughed at by his peers. One night he declares his love to Cecily who rebuffs him by telling him "you're beneath me". Spike/William runs out into the night in tears, and then he meets Drusilla...the rest is history.
There is a key scene in the alley near the end of the episode that is very well shot - it shows the actual fight scene between Spike and the New York slayer he killed interspersed with a fight scene between Buffy and himself in the present. This is where Spike first half-way reveals to Buffy that he desires her physically. At first you think she just might reciprocate these animal passions - "Dancing" - as Spike calls their fighting that is really just vampire foreplay. But then Buffy tells Spike something that sets off the real violence in him - she says "You're beneath me" and walks off and leaves him there both tearful and furious, with him being brought full circle back to his last experience as a human being - that of being rejected by Cecily with exactly the same words.
The ending of the episode takes Buffy's life off in still another direction and I'll let you watch and see what that is. Let me just say that Buffy season five was a work of art as Buffy goes from the carefree world of a college student in episode one, to the dark world of facing adulthood and death itself, all in one 22 episode season. I consider this episode the turning point in that transformation from light to dark.
Do note that this is a cross-over episode with "Angel" - episode 2.7 entitled "Darla". If you notice that the scene during the Boxer Rebellion has Angel and Darla acting oddly you'll not understand what's going on at all unless you watch that episode.
Thus Buffy takes Spike to local nightspot "The Bronze" and asks him to recount how he killed the two slayers, so she can learn how to prevent being killed herself. The audience does indeed get an accounting of the death of the two slayers - one during the Boxer Rebellion in China, the other in a New York subway in 1977. What the audience sees that Buffy likely does not is how Spike became a vampire and what kind of person he was before his death and transformation. This part is both funny and touching and explains much of Spike's anger, for in the Buffyverse, vampires are demons that retain the memories of the human body they are animating. It turns out that, as a human, Spike was an upper-class British gentleman, a mama's boy, and a very bad poet, laughed at by his peers. One night he declares his love to Cecily who rebuffs him by telling him "you're beneath me". Spike/William runs out into the night in tears, and then he meets Drusilla...the rest is history.
There is a key scene in the alley near the end of the episode that is very well shot - it shows the actual fight scene between Spike and the New York slayer he killed interspersed with a fight scene between Buffy and himself in the present. This is where Spike first half-way reveals to Buffy that he desires her physically. At first you think she just might reciprocate these animal passions - "Dancing" - as Spike calls their fighting that is really just vampire foreplay. But then Buffy tells Spike something that sets off the real violence in him - she says "You're beneath me" and walks off and leaves him there both tearful and furious, with him being brought full circle back to his last experience as a human being - that of being rejected by Cecily with exactly the same words.
The ending of the episode takes Buffy's life off in still another direction and I'll let you watch and see what that is. Let me just say that Buffy season five was a work of art as Buffy goes from the carefree world of a college student in episode one, to the dark world of facing adulthood and death itself, all in one 22 episode season. I consider this episode the turning point in that transformation from light to dark.
Do note that this is a cross-over episode with "Angel" - episode 2.7 entitled "Darla". If you notice that the scene during the Boxer Rebellion has Angel and Darla acting oddly you'll not understand what's going on at all unless you watch that episode.