“I’ve Always Been Bad:” Self-Deception and Manipulating Flashback Formula in the ‘Buffy’ Episode “Fool for Love”
“Fool for Love” is not always listed in articles on Buffy’s best episodes, but it should be, because it is genuinely one of the best of the series. It’s a standout from an already incredibly strong season, but is noteworthy for a few other reasons as well. Obviously the most important and central thing about it is that it is the episode that flashes back to finally give the viewer what is, for all intents and purposes, Spike’s origin story. We see how he started, how he became a vampire and how he developed his personality, carefully and intentionally, into the character we know. It’s a great way to remind the audience that so much of what Spike does is for show, which is an amazing and surprising revelation for what can sometimes be considered the series’ most emotionally honest character. Spike has no impulse control — even after getting the behavior modifying chip in his head, he would get zapped at least once per episode — so it can be easy to forget that so many things that make up who he is are things that he did intentionally, to become the persona he wanted to be and rid himself of the person he actually was.
That’s explored even further in this episode’s direct sequel, “Lies My Parents Told Me,” where it becomes clear that even after Spike (or William, rather) has been turned, he still retains his original personality, as many vampires do. Creating a new name and persona for himself is not something he appears to want or even thinks about at first, and that’s why that episode is such a perfect companion to this one, as it doubles down on all of the little things that this episode appears to suggest.
“Fool for Love” stands out for another reason as well, in that it is the first episode to provide flashbacks for another character besides Angel. This kind of episode, with flashbacks interwoven throughout the narrative, usually to inform events in the present by revealing crucial information from the past, was first established — on Buffy, at least — in “Becoming Part One.” Angel received another flashback episode in the third season’s “Amends,” where the First Evil spends Christmas trying to force Angel to remember the sins of his past so that he will kill himself and take himself out of the game. Once Angel got his own show, the flashbacks came fast and furious. It makes sense, as Angel is a character so defined by his past. His whole being is based around wanting to make up for the horrific things he has done, so it’s only logical to occasionally give viewers a glimpse of what those horrific things actually are.
Just in terms of the similarities and ongoing rivalry between the two characters, it makes perfect sense that Spike would be the first character to get a flashback episode after Angel. But what makes it especially perfect is Spike’s completely different relationship to his own past. First of all, at this point in the series, Spike is still evil. He’s got a while to go before he gets his soul back, before that’s even on his radar as the kind of thing he would even want. Spike begrudgingly found his way into the Scooby Gang in the fourth season, after he first got the chip implanted in his head, but he was still evil by all accounts. He never helped of his own free will, usually having to be bribed with money or manipulating the group emotionally when he could no longer physically intimidate them. When Spike first appeared on the show, he was the closest Buffy had ever come to a full-blown supervillain. Spike would concoct elaborate, often ridiculous schemes, get drawn into a fight with Buffy and then he would always retreat at the last second and threaten to get her next time. It was an endless cycle that was truly drawn to a close when he got the chip, losing any last bit of leverage he had, becoming pathetic in the eyes of someone he had considered a legitimate nemesis.
It’s important to take all of this into context when understanding where “Fool for Love” falls in the season and why this flashback episode had to happen when it did. This is just after Spike has realized that he is in love with Buffy and probably always has been. While it wasn’t always handled in the best way, it’s a smart realization. After all, this is something that has often been read into long-running rivalries between villains and heroes, especially those with heavy banter and those where the villain always gets away and never really faces permanent consequences. It’s a way of questioning what the real reason is as to why these conflicts never reach what would appear to be their natural end. Whether it be Batman and the Joker, Skeletor and He-Man, Spider-Man and Venom or whatever, these things are always being discussed, with those themes admittedly being more prominent in some characters than others. With Spike, Buffy just did what it always did best and turned this subtext into text by having Spike wake from a dream to realize that he was, in fact, in love with her.
It’s also important to remember that this episode takes place before Spike actually tells Buffy that, so while he’s recounting his entire history to her, only one of them is privy to this information. At first glance, Buffy’s reason for coming to talk to Spike almost just seems like an excuse to have a flashback episode. She accidentally gets staked while fighting a vampire and realizes she could have died. Spike is the only vampire she knows to have ever killed a slayer and she wants to know how it happened so that she can stay on her toes. But this motivation is crucial to the development of the season as a whole. This is the start of Buffy beginning to understand death and therefore starts to lay the seeds of the “Death is your gift” theme that would come to define the season by its end. Buffy’s still grappling with mortality here, with the notion that things could just be over at any time, and that’s incredibly important to factor in considering the fact that her mother dies of an aneurysm later in the season. More than that, though, it’s setting up the first steps of the arc that leads to Buffy’s own death at the end of the season in “The Gift.”
To no one’s surprise, Spike is a much more unreliable narrator than Angel was in his own flashbacks, and that’s what makes this episode’s approach to the typical flashback structure so interesting. In “Becoming” and “Amends,” flashbacks did not have any strong concrete lead ins. Whistler’s the narrator of the first glimpses into Angel’s past in “Becoming Part One” and his job appears to simply be Angel’s historian, but for the most part he’s not actually within the scene and is just narrating the events for us, the audience. In “Amends,” there is no outside force driving the flashbacks at first glance, though they are revealed to be very pointed memories directed toward Angel by the First Evil. They come largely in the form of dreams, which feel so real that Angel gets disoriented to the point that he may as well be reliving the memories all over again.
In “Fool for Love,” Spike is the one telling the story and because of that, he’s telling it the way he sees fit. That’s where the episode truly deviates from traditional flashback structure, not only in general, but just in the way Buffy had approached flashbacks in particular. It’s not totally literal and the story Spike is telling does not match up directly with what we’re actually seeing. Right out of the gate, Spike puts on a familiar smirk and says “What can I tell you, baby? I’ve always been bad,” a line that’s so embracing of the personality he’s created for himself that it’s almost undoubtedly Spike’s attempt at flirting. But of course it leads directly into our first glimpse of William, a human and a great big nerd.
It also showcases how important it is for these two characters to have this conversation. Just as Buffy needs to go to Spike to learn how he killed two slayers, Spike needs to tell this to her specifically, as much as he’s dressing it up. He’s basically embellishing and making himself and his past sound much cooler than it mostly was, as guys so often do on a first date. Because for Spike, that’s basically what this is. The irony is that Buffy’s only going to him for this information because she thinks he’s a monster. Her whole reason for talking to him is based on hatred and disgust, and Spike clearly sees that to some degree, but tries to ignore it.
Which is perfect, because that sense of self-deception is the overriding theme of his character throughout the episode. As aware as Spike is of the world around him and as much as he can easily acknowledge or exploit the fears and weaknesses of others, he’s never been half as introspective toward himself and that has always been a crucial component to his character. It starts right when William first speaks to Cecily, the night he gets turned into a vampire, to attempt to express his love. He knows he’s a bad poet, but only because he has a reputation for it to the point that he’s learned to keep his writing a secret. When he pours his heart out to Cecily, though, it’s clear he expects her to feel something when she absolutely does not. The parallels between that and his developing crush on Buffy are obvious. But this deluded sense of self is especially strengthened in the next flashback.
By the next time we see him, he has already renamed himself and has adopted the accent that — it’s incredibly important to note — was not his own. Angelus hates him, Darla barely tolerates him, and it’s clear that he’s only there because Drusilla has probably forbid the others from killing him. Spike is only dimly aware at best, in this scene, that the other members of his vampire clan do not like him. It’s pathetic and a little sad, but it’s one of the things that has always made Spike so endearing.
When Spike actually does get to telling Buffy about the two slayers he killed — one in China during the Boxer Rebellion, the other in New York in the ‘70s — it’s the only time he’s blatantly and obviously honest throughout the entire episode. It’s clear that Spike is most honest with himself when he’s in combat, which makes sense as the major difference between evil Spike and Angelus is that Spike had been much more of a thrill killer while Angelus was more in line with a traditional serial killer. As the two of them eventually discussed on Angel, Spike never stopped to look back at the bodies while Angel could never take his eyes off of them. It’s this in-the-moment nature, killing for the sheer hunt and thrill of it, that even led Spike to the challenge of taking on a slayer in the first place.
These flashbacks are also where Spike is most honest with Buffy about what he is done and who he was and that’s why it’s perfect that it’s where the episode most explicitly begins to play around with the flashback structure. Spike ignores Buffy’s disgust as he explains exactly what he did and how it made him feel — mainly, horny — and that’s when the Spike in the flashback merges with the Spike in the present and the line between the two blurs completely. It stops being a hard-set narrative at this point, but is perfect considering what an unreliable narrator Spike has been through the whole episode. This bit of honesty about the predator he was and misses being connects the Spike in the present to the Spike in the past both figuratively and literally, as Spike in the flashback begins to speak directly to Buffy in the present, as well as the audience. And as the scene unfolds, it hits a boiling point of honesty that proves to be too much for Buffy to take, as she walks off once Spike insists that a part of every slayer wants to die. “Every slayer has a death wish, even you,” he says which, given the direction of the season, is at least somewhat true.
The honesty between them hits critical mass and reveals the ultimate truth of the episode when Buffy insists that even if she will be bested by a vampire, he will never be the one to do it. She repeats the same words Cecily said to him the night he died, back in 1880, telling him, “You’re beneath me,” and leaves him broken down and sobbing on the street. It’s a moment that pulls back the curtain on the most honest point of the episode, something we probably could have picked up on very early on, which is that Spike for all his posturing is still exactly the same lovesick and loveless boy that he’s been from the very beginning. That as much as he has tried to change himself, as much as he has fabricated every aspect of his personality from his appearance to his fake Cockney accent, he has never really changed.
It leads into the most sobering flashback, one set immediately after the end of season two, depicting the initial breakup between Spike and Drusilla that led to him drunkenly rolling back into Sunnydale in “Lover’s Walk.” As Spike said in that episode, it was the truce with Buffy that led to the breakup, but it’s not because she thought he’d “gone soft.” No, this very clearly showcases the truly illuminating reason, which is essentially that Drusilla had figured out that Spike was in love with Buffy before anyone else did, including Spike himself.
At the end of the episode, Spike boils over into his biggest self-deception yet by falling back on old habits, ignoring his own feelings to once again manufacture a sense of self and pretend he’s the same villain he used to be by declaring that he is going to kill Buffy once and for all. It’s a lie so blatant that, for once, even he is the one to realize he’s doing it in the moment, showcasing genuine empathy when he sees Buffy crying, letting his obvious self-lie of a murder plot fade away in an instant to simply sit with her and ask her what is wrong. This is in some ways the true end of Spike as an actual, villainous presence on the show, while setting up a somewhat frustrating arc of Spike attempting to care about Buffy and be a part of her support system while still being genuinely evil.
That’s part of what makes the individual episode so strong. At both the beginning and the end, Spike is a bad guy, but he’s an interesting one and a complicated one, sometimes needlessly so. It’s a strong episode just in the way it peels back the character’s own manufactured personality, but also in the ways that it examines and dismantles the roadblocks that Spike has set up to keep himself from processing his own emotions in any kind of remotely helpful way. It’s a genuinely innovative episode and remains one of the best of the series as a whole.
