Lipsofspikee

Missy’s the poo so take a big whiff!

Seeing Spike with a soul is so potentially rich, because it’s not something we’ve ever seen on the show before. Angel’s situation was different - not because of anything magically different about his soul, but the fact that we are first introduced to Angel and get attached to Angel, before the sudden turn to Angelus. The soul canon is irrelevant - what matters is that Angel with a soul is a different character to Angel with a soul. He acts different, he talks different, he dresses different - he’s a different character. So when he gets his soul back, it’s easy for the audience to see that as simply a reversion to the original character they already knew.

Whereas Spike’s story is a bit more interesting, because the character the audience has experienced for five seasons is a Spike without a soul. That’s the character we love and have grown attached to. When you give that character a soul, you can’t do an Angelus and have him act like a completely different character. He has to be recognisably Spike, as we’ve known him. He has to be the same person or we will not care about the character. So that opens up this incredibly fascinating territory to explore. If Spike is the same person with or without a soul, then can he be forgiven for the crimes he committed before? Where is the line drawn when it comes to moral responibility? Or if he is different without a soul, then is he no longer Spike? Can anything he did before this point really count - including the good stuff like protecting Dawn? What about his relationship with Buffy? This is really interesting, fertile ground for storytelling and either direction you go in, the audience is going to be challenged.

And so they decide to go in neither direction. They straddle the line. They have their cake and eat it too. Spike is absolved completely of any previous crimes. The show is didactic about this - he has a soul now, so it’s fine. Yet, at the same time, there is no change in Spike as a character. He’s still basically the same. The show engineers a situation in which Spike is killing again, and yet cannot reasonably be held accountable for it - yet other characters are held accountable for how they react to it.

Nowhere is this line-hopping more apparent than in how the show approaches Nikki’s coat. The coat is an essential component of the character the audience recognises as Spike. Spike is indivisible from his iconography, and the coat is part of that. Fool For Love makes sure to soak that iconography in blood, and so make Spike’s crimes invisible from Spike. It is metaphorically a dead woman’s flayed skin. S7 then reminds us of this history through Robin, and the pain he experiences seeing a man in his mother’s metaphorical flayed skin. And Get it Done doubles down on this - the coat is tied to this idea of the “old Spike”, the person who tried to kill Buffy. The person who killed Nikki. And yet, when it comes to confronting Robin, the show is insistent on this Spike being new and different. He has a soul now. 

So which is it? Are we going to get rid of this piece of iconography because it represents “old Spike” (challenging!)? Or are we going to keep it and have Spike literally shoulder his old crimes (challenging!). What they do is neither. He doesn’t need to feel guilty about anything he’s done, but he gets to keep the coat because it looks cool. It does not explore the tension of that, because it’s not interested in risking the audience liking Spike less. The show’s stance is vague - and not so that the show can explore the ambiguities, but so that in any given situation, Spike can always be in the right. I don’t care if he is or not - I care that this approach is deeply boring.

Andrew Garfield: “To heal the most traumatic moment of his own life through doing it for his younger brother. Making sure that he didn’t have the same fate, there’s something cosmically beautiful about that. It meant getting a second chance at saving Gwen.”

“I didn’t know what would happen until after. I swear I would’ve told you.”