Fool For Love
Nov. 5th, 2011 10:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shapinglightI went with Fool For Love in the end. It really is a brilliant episode.
I know I'm probably not supposed to think that any more, or I'm supposed to hate Spike because of it, or something. But I do, and I don't. I think the only difference is that, watching it this time, just post him killing Nikki, I didn't feel sorry for him at all when Buffy told him he was beneath her.
Apart from that, though, Spike clearly believes everything he tells Buffy, even if some of it was pretty arrogant and stuff he couldn't really know, and that it resonates with her is very clear. Of course she understands that the day might come when she's tired enough to want the uncertainty to stop. Of course she does.
Other stuff: the flashback party scene with William the Bloody Awful Poet is teeth-grittingly bad. It doesn't look at all like a Victorian society party, but more like a saloon/whorehouse setting in an old Western. Cecily's accent still amuses me no end, though. She keeps going all northern, and I keep expecting her father, who must be some self-made Northern industrialist, to burst into the room going, "Eee, Cecily, lass, there's trouble up at t'mill." :snorfle: Dru's seduction of poor William is perfect, though. She knows exactly what to say to him.
Speaking of Dru, I remember listening to the episode commentary by Doug Petrie and him saying that after Spike kills the Chinese slayer is when he and Dru have sex for the first time. It seems a little unlikely - she put him off for twenty years? - but after watching it again, that is probably what we're supposed to think.
I still adore the Fanged Four slo-mo power walk, and love the porch scene to pieces.
I know I'm probably not supposed to think that any more, or I'm supposed to hate Spike because of it, or something. But I do, and I don't. I think the only difference is that, watching it this time, just post him killing Nikki, I didn't feel sorry for him at all when Buffy told him he was beneath her.
Apart from that, though, Spike clearly believes everything he tells Buffy, even if some of it was pretty arrogant and stuff he couldn't really know, and that it resonates with her is very clear. Of course she understands that the day might come when she's tired enough to want the uncertainty to stop. Of course she does.
Other stuff: the flashback party scene with William the Bloody Awful Poet is teeth-grittingly bad. It doesn't look at all like a Victorian society party, but more like a saloon/whorehouse setting in an old Western. Cecily's accent still amuses me no end, though. She keeps going all northern, and I keep expecting her father, who must be some self-made Northern industrialist, to burst into the room going, "Eee, Cecily, lass, there's trouble up at t'mill." :snorfle: Dru's seduction of poor William is perfect, though. She knows exactly what to say to him.
Speaking of Dru, I remember listening to the episode commentary by Doug Petrie and him saying that after Spike kills the Chinese slayer is when he and Dru have sex for the first time. It seems a little unlikely - she put him off for twenty years? - but after watching it again, that is probably what we're supposed to think.
I still adore the Fanged Four slo-mo power walk, and love the porch scene to pieces.
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Date: 2011-11-05 11:00 pm (UTC)I just think it is a brilliant layered character portrait, combining an unreliable narrator, in Spike, with more objective truth shown to us onscreen. Of a deeply vulnerable character, seduced by his vulnerabilities into a life where his dark side can run rampant. But then he is seduced again by his vulnerabilities away from that. And the result is one big hell of a mess in his head. Despite being dense about himself, he has pinpoint emotional sharpness about others and senses the Slayer nihilism as a way in. And of course, as always with the vamps, as Buffy says somewhere – blood and love and sex and death all hopelessly confused. (I think she says it in Conversations with Dead People, to Holden.) I find the last 20 minutes superb. The range of conflicting emotions Spike travels through... from the intercut Nikki/Buffy scene through to the porch... just stunning.
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Date: 2011-11-05 11:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-06 12:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-06 11:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-05 11:43 pm (UTC)Still my favorite episode of the show. I love it.
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Date: 2011-11-06 08:01 am (UTC)Really well said! And now I want to watch FFL again.
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Date: 2011-11-06 11:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-06 04:24 pm (UTC)Agreed. This is one of the things I love about Spike's character. He's incredibly insightful about everyone else. But when it comes to himself? Clueless.