She feels real bad. Honest. The little schlampe. 

Always lock the door, kiddies.

season three   >  Lover's Walk

Let’s catch up, since we're big slackers and it's taking us a month between reviews: Buffy and Angel are not together but want to be together but can’t be together because Buffy drives him to evil. Sort of like my brother and his wife, but with a whole being dead and cursed thing as an excuse. Xander is still with Cordy but also with Willow because he’s living the American teenager's dream, and he’s living it well. Willow, unlike Xander, is wracked with guilt, and she should be because she’s cheating on the sweetest boy alive, yet she is still hanging off of Xander’s lips the second the sweetest boy in the world turns his back. Oz and Cordy remain oblivious for roughly…45 more minutes. Giles is being Giles. This episode he's around for about 5 seconds before he heads off on a retreat where, I would hazard to guess, he reads and plays with his glasses a lot. He likes to do that. I'm sure he even got in some cross-referencing. And I suppose Dawn, since she’s supposedly around now and stuff, is probably hanging around and shrieking about how things are not fair.

It's a very intimate situation, it's all sexy with the smoke and the sweating and the shoe rental...

Willow, Xander, Cordy and Oz decide to double date and go bowling because it's super fun and sexy. Willow’s nervous because she thinks they might slip, lord knows I’ve slipped on someone’s lips when trying to get a strike, and decides to do a de-lusting spell. We all know how well this won’t go, because we’ve seen season six, and we know magic, like sex, is bad. Willow doesn’t know that lesson yet, but amazingly enough Xander does. He doth protest the de-lusting spell. He might have broken off the whole icky affair like an adult too, if Spike hadn’t busted into the school science lab and knocked Xander silly with what my memory tells me was a toaster, but since I don’t recall having toasters in my school labs I’m going to assume it was probably something more like a microscope and in any case, he knocked Xander out with something big.

Whoah. It smells like church in here. No, wait...EVIL church.

That's right, Spike's back. Spike rolled into town, see, to moon over his lost love, Dru. And everyone who's anyone knows the best place to spend your time brooding over amour is Sunnydale, CA, USA. So he moons over the burned out remnants of their love factory of evil and then he broods his way to the mansion where he finds Angel brooding over a book and then he passes out. Because he's stinking drunk. The next day, and we are talking day here, good thing he has a car with windows painted black, he skips on over to the magic shop to find a spell that will make Angel's parts fall off or cover him in boils or do anything that might generally cause him to have a bad couple of days. All logic in this scenario aside, he overhears Willow come in to buy stuff for the de-lusting spell, decides that’d be the easiest way to go, eats the shopkeeper and goes after the little witch to wine her and dine her the Spike way until she does a spell to win the loopy Dru back from a chaos demon. And to Spike, kidnapping someone, knocking out their secret boyfriend with something heavy that may or may not have been a toaster, threatening to kill them and locking them in a factory while he goes out to get supplies is the equivalent of a good wine and dine. At least it was back when he was cool. Nowadays it's probably something like actually taking someone to a fancy French restaraunt and saying "please", the nancy-boy.

I caught her on a park bench making out with a Chaos Demon--have you ever seen a Chaos Demon? They're all slime and antlers, they're digusting; she only did it to hurt me...I said I wasn't puttin gup with it anymore, she said fine, I siad, yeah, I've got an unlife, you know...

So Willow and Xander, sporting a fabulous sucking head concussion, hang out and resist playing tonsil hockey while Spike goes to Buffy’s house to pick up supplies for the spell and to drink hot chocolate and bitch about Dru with Joyce. Eventually Xander and Willow get down to business, just in time to get busted by Oz and Cordelia, Oz having followed Willow’s scent from his car.

Buffy, meanwhile, ran all the way home from school, where she was busy jump roping as a silent protest to her friends having dates without her, when she got a harassing phone call from Joyce (Joyce is a little hopped up on crack after finding out Buffy got good SAT scores and keeps haranguing her to go to college.) and freaked out after hearing Spike's voice on the phone. She finds Spike in her kitchen, having the aforementioned hot chocolate with Joyce (sans marshmallows), taunting Angel at the kitchen door (Angel having showed up in the hopes that he and Buffy could moodily brood together). Buffy threatens to kill Spike with a wooden spoon, like she would ever actually stake a bad bad guy, and he plays his “I’ve got Willow and Xander and I’ll kill them, I really will” card. He pretends he doesn’t have them at the factory and Buffy pretends to believe him because she secretly wants to hang out with him. Since she secretly not-loves him. Broody boy tags along, just to bother me.

The merry trio skip down the yellow brick road to the magic shop, because Spike won’t let Buffy have her friends back until Willow helps his sorry, drunk ass win back Dru. After breaking into the Magic Shop the gang gets into a contrived fight because this show needs to have a fight every episode. This week, the mayor, bless his oft-sold soul, decided that Spike was too much of a pain in the ass and might get in the way of whatever it was he was doing, I sort of forget, and sends his mooks out to stake him. So they fight. Blah blah blah, the good guys win and Spike realizes that all he needed was a good fight and he doesn’t need a love spell after all and he will instead drive back on down to South America and tie his lady love up until she falls in love with him again via torture. He also gives some speech about how he’s love’s bitch, but he admits it and basically just calls Buffy and Angel a bunch of pussies for pretending to be friends. He then glibly tells them to sod something or other and that their friends are at the factory. And then Buffy just lets him walk out. Because she’s cool like dat.

I'm gonna do what I shoulda done in the first place. I'll find her, wherever she is, tie her up and torture her until she likes me again.

While Buffy wasted time flirting with Spike, Cordy had the ill grace to fall through some stairs and stick herself through the middle with a big metal rod after catching her nerd making out with a bigger nerd. Xander, feeling all sorts of bad, hops on down and gallantly requests that she be okay.

She is okay, in case you were worried. She's jacked up and in the hospital, but she's fine. For a few more years anyway, and then she ascends and descends and sleeps with Angel's son and gets possessed and then ends up in a coma and probably wishes that little bar had done her in, but in the Buffyverse there is no such luck. Also, Buffy dumps Angel, again, even though they were never really dating. Really.

Angel gets sad about this and if you really pay attention you can subtly see David register his character’s growing ache and need and--who am I kidding. Angel sits there, same as usual. You can almost feel his pain, can't you? It's darn near palbable. Either that, or he's hungry. It's hard to tell with this character.


And then we have a montage of moodiness—Oz sad in an empty Bronze; Willow sad in her room with her witch Pez; Xander sad in the school library's cage, Cordy sad in the hospital and Buffy being moody, per usual, over her and Angel at school. Get used to it. It's a theme.