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Dead Things (Ep. 6.13)"The Heart in Darkness" "Dead Things" is dark. It's kinky. It's disturbing. It's also one of the best Buffy episodes yet. As far as showing us uncomfortable truths, the sex-and-violence of "Smashed" was only the opening salvo - in "Dead Things," we're shown the dark side of Spike's love for Buffy, the unfunny side of the geek troika's schemes, and an unexpectedly grim facet of Buffy's character that's even more shocking to see because it's actually very familiar... . . . The beginning of episode starts out comfortably enough. Buffy's life seems to have settled down to some kind of workable pattern. She has adapted to her job, at least enough to make cheery comments to customers ("Doublemeat is double sweet!" she chirps while passing out bags of fast food), and her relationship with Spike has progressed far enough past the guilty hand-wringing stage to have evolved into something of a regular routine, albeit one based completely on hot sex. The opening scene shows the couple at his crypt, just finishing an athletic round of generally wrecking the place by shagging all over the carpets (or under them, actually - shag... carpet... there's a joke in there somewhere). "Missed the bed again," Buffy jokes. The mood here is far from the tension of "Wrecked" - there's an easy familiarity, almost friendly. Too much so, perhaps - even Spike is puzzling at it. "Are we having a conversation?" he suddenly asks her. "Isn't this usually the part where you kick me in the head and run out, virtue fluttering?" "That's the plan," Buffy confirms, then adds with a smile: "Soon as my legs start working." This is an honestly cute exchange, a recognition of the strange new dynamic between them - two people getting to know each other through sex. They regard each other warmly for a moment. Spike caresses her arm, and tells her she's "amazing." "You got the job done yourself," she answers shyly, smiling. The moment then evaporates when, as in the morning-after scene of "Wrecked," one of Spike's intended compliments rubs Buffy completely the wrong way - in this case, the observation that he's "never been with such an animal." Frowning and upset, she promptly begins searching for her clothes. He sighs and lays back, resigned to her leaving. "What this is to you? This thing we have." he asks her abruptly. "Do you even like me?" She looks at him, and pauses to consider. "Sometimes," she finally says. He completes the rest of the thought for her: "But you like what I do to you." She can't look at him, but doesn't deny it. Buffy's earlier comment - "We don't have a thing, we just have...this" - makes it clear that sex is indeed their one and only link. In a strictly physical sense, she is comfortable with Spike, weird as it seems given their history. More importantly, she trusts him - with her body on a regular basis, and since his V-chip no longer works on her, essentially with her life. Interestingly, this is the one element of their relationship she does deny. "Do you trust me?" he asks, dangling a pair of handcuffs from one finger. "Never," she answers. But we already know she does. "Dead Things" is about trust on more than one level. That the episode begins talking about trust issues in the context of sex is significant - sex is already a measure of trust between two people. Having sex requires a lowering of barriers, of being open and vulnerable to another person in the most intimate way possible. The experience is naturally emotionally charged simply because of this intimacy - borrowing someone's clothes or toothbrush simply does not compare to sharing your body. That bondage is entering the picture in the Buffy/Spike sexcapades only underlines this. Bondage play requires trust, as do sex games that use violence. This has actually come up before in BtVS, subtly, in Season 3's "Consequences," when Faith was stopped from choking Xander to death by Angel, and she tells him they were "just playing." "And he forgot the safety word?" Angel questions. "Safety words are for wusses," Faith scoffs. By this, Faith is showing that she can't be trusted, that she doesn't respect the trust given to her by the other person, and is therefore dangerous. "How can I trust you not to not to touch my stuff!" Andrew squeals when he sees Jonathan handling his record albums in the nerd troika's new hideout - an unfinished basement more or less like their previous one, pre-bank heist beautification. "Actually living with supervillains was not part of the deal!" he complains. In contrast to the previous scene, these three would-be supervillains do not share a lot of trust or respect. Their decline in living status is also of note: Buffy had previously commented on Spike's newly decorated crypt basement: "This place is pretty nice for a hole in the ground. You fixed it up." Likewise, the three geeks had fixed up their "hole in the ground" in the image of a styling supervillain lair. Now, they've been forced to give it up, thanks to their identities being outed to Buffy at the end of "Gone," and they're right back to where they started, squatting in squalor. (A bit of foreshadowing, maybe - when Spike's relationship with Buffy is eventually "outed," will he also lose everything he's gained?) The trio's newest scheme is a device to hypnotize women - a "cerebral dampener," a gadget that employs the powers of all three with a little of Warren's technology, a little of Jonathan's magic, and a demon's musk gland gathered by Andrew. "With this baby, we can make any woman we desire our willing sex slave," Warren gloats. (The echo of Spike's songline to Buffy in the musical "you know you got a willing slave," is likely to be deliberate here.) What's more, Warren says he knows right where to start, and as he scopes out a wood-paneled wine bar wired with surveillance devices like something out of Mission: Impossible, he ignores the radio commentary from his friends ("Ooh, the leather skirt! The redhead! Go for the bazoombas!") and zeroes in on his old girlfriend, Katrina, from "I Was Made to Love You." He approaches her with a practiced line: "So, how'd you get so beautiful?" She turns with an amused putdown about the pickup line already on her lips, but her smile fades instantly when she recognizes him. Warren tries talking at first - "I thought we could talk... I thought we could work things out." She angrily reminds him about his "robot slut" that tried to "choke her to death." "I admit, I made a few mistakes," he tries gamely. "No, I did," she snaps back. "For ever lowering myself to be with a jerk like you." She gets up to leave. "You sure about that?" he says, and when she says yes, he pulls out the dampener and uses it. Katrina stares up at him, suddenly glassy-eyed. "I love you, Master," she says tonelessly. Warren, just like Willow with her "forget" spell, has won their argument by removing Katrina's ability to make her own decisions. Meanwhile, Buffy has arranged to meet up with Tara at her burger job. The breakup seems to have done Tara quite a bit of good - she is showing a dry sense of humor that rarely came out when she was with Willow. "I suddenly have this urge to dedicate my productive cooperation," she deadpans, looking at the inspirational posters in the restaurant's break room. Buffy brushes off Tara's initial worry that she was called in to talk about Willow's magic problem ("she's been doing really well - you'd be proud of her," Buffy says offhandedly) and gets to the point. In halting language, Buffy tells Tara about Spike being able to hit her, and that she feels... different. And, after so vehemently denying the idea in "Smashed," she now uses Spike's exact words to describe her fears: "I think, maybe... I came back wrong." That Buffy reaches out to Tara - an outsider from the group since her breakup with Willow - instead of her own best friend, the main author of the spell (magic withdrawal or no), says volumes. Buffy is worried about revealing too much to her friends, and - just like her return-from-heaven confession to Spike - she can only share her fears with someone who is not part of her inner circle. This connection between what she shares here with Tara and what she's been sharing with Spike is made clear when we see Buffy absently rubbing her wrists, and then hiding them under the table. Tara promises to research the spell the group used to bring Buffy back. Arriving at home after her shift, Buffy is alarmed to see Xander dancing with Dawn. "Is there singing? Are we singing again?" she asks, eyes wide. But no, the dancing demon isn't back - Xander and Anya are just teaching Dawn how to dance for the wedding reception. Relieved that she won't be called upon to spill any more uncomfortable confessions in one night, Buffy collapses on the couch. "You've been going at it too hard, Buffy," Xander says, following up with the wincingly appropriate: "We hardly ever see you, what with slinging the doublemeat and pounding the big evil." They invite her to come to the Bronze with them to unwind, but perhaps out of sheer embarrassment, Buffy replies she just wants to "stay here with Dawn, curl up on the couch with a big bowl of popcorn..." and is promptly surprised to discover that Dawn has already made plans to sleep over at a friend's house. "I didn't think you'd care. You're never here," Dawn says quietly. "Not like I knew you'd be around." Feeling the guilt big time now, Buffy accepts her friends' invitation to go to the Bronze. The nerd trio's basement. A blank-faced Katrina, now attired in a tacky French maid's outfit, fishnet hose and all, pours champagne for the trio, calling them "Master." Andrew and Jonathan look her over appreciatively. It's clear that this is a game to them - Katrina is a toy, not a person - "It's like candy... juicy pulsating candy," as they'd commented while Warren cased the bar. Warren, on the other hand, sees Katrina's individuality. "Look at her, man! The the shape of her lips. The smooth, silky skin. The way her nose crinkles when she laughs... She's perfect." This is the girl whose personality he praised to Buffy in "I Was Made to Love You," but if he can't have that girl, he's willing to settle for a mindless drone that looks just like her. "She's mine," he tells his friends, draping an arm around her shoulders. "You can play with her all you want... after I'm done with her." Her feelings no longer matter to him. He takes Katrina to his room, a bachelor-style bedroom with a red bedspread and lava lamp. "I missed you so much," Warren gasps as the hypnotized Katrina kisses him. "You never should have left me. Say it." She repeats his order robotically: "I never should have left you, Master." He tells her to say she loves him. She says she does. Master. He tells her to say it again... and then get on her knees. She does, but begins to snap out of the spell. Realizing suddenly what's happening, she stares up at him in horror. Katrina marches out of the bedroom in a high dudgeon, throwing the maid's cap at a cowering Warren. "First the skankbot and now this?" she shrieks. "What is wrong with you?" Andrew and Jonathan are shocked to realize that Katrina is Warren's ex - somehow, it seems to make the situation more real to them. "Dude, that is messed up," Andrew wows uncomfortably. Katrina pushes the point home by calling them "a bunch of little boys playing at being men" and shouts "This is not some fantasy. It's not a game, you freaks! It's rape!" Jonathan and Andrew stutter in shock at the accusation, as if it had never quite occured to them in that way before. In tears, Katrina tells them they're all sick, and points at Warren, saying she's going to "see you get locked up for this." Stunned and scared by the threat of jail, Andrew and Jonathan both try to stop her from running out on Warren's shouted command. To escape her captors, Katrina does everything right - she drops them with classic self-defense moves, but only makes it as far as the stairs before Warren grabs her. She rakes his face with her nails; he grabs the champagne bottle and hits her over the head. Katrina crumples and lies still on the stairs. "Get her up," Warren says, wiping the blood from his face. "We'll give her another dose - a strong one. Everything'll be all right." But it's not - Andrew touches her head and his hand comes away bloody. She's dead. The three stare at the body for a moment, paralyzed with fear. "Ohgod, ohgod, ohgod," Andrew chants, hugging his knees to his chest. Jonathan looks sick. "What did you do?" he shouts in horror. Warren immediately rounds on both of them, reminding them that they're all responsible. He stolidly focuses on getting rid of the evidence, first by asking Jonathan if he can magic the body away, then Andrew if he can summon a creature to eat the corpse. In both cases, the answer is the same - it's too large for them to handle. They go over the options - Andrew suggests that they turn themselves in, and Jonathan angrily reminds Warren that since Katrina is his ex-girlfriend that there's a link to trace back to him. "We can't hide this!" he yells. "Sooner or later, the Slayer's gonna find out she's dead!" (That their largest worry is Buffy, not the police, says something not terribly flattering about the abilities of the Sunnydale P.D.) But this gives Warren an idea - he comes up with the plan to push the murder off on Buffy herself. At the Bronze, the Scoobies have settled into party mode. Xander and Anya are tearing up the dance floor with some '40s-style Swing dancing, not too unlike the number they'd performed in the musical episode. Willow watches them, alarmed. "We're not going to have to do that at the wedding, are we?" she asks nervously. "There's this last shred of dignity I've been desperately clinging to." Buffy smiles, and asks if Willow's okay, and apologizes for not being around very much. "It's okay," Willow answers. "We know you've been tied up... with your job and the slaying." A startled Buffy looks back at her, no doubt thinking of the earlier handcuff incident, and manages a weak, guilty smile. Xander and Anya break in, panting, to encourage the pair to join them on the dance floor. Despite her previous misgivings, Willow agrees. Buffy declines. "I'll catch the next soul train out," she says, indicating her empty glass, and heads to the bar, her cheery expression failing as she walks. As if on autopilot, she climbs upstairs to the darkened catwalk and gazes down at the dance floor from overhead. She hears Spike's voice before he appears, moving out of the shadows to join her at the railing. "You see... you try to be with them," he says softly, "But you always end up here in the dark. With me." He moves close to stand behind her; she leans back against him. "What would they think of you if they found out? All the things you've done," he whispers, brushing a hand down her bare arm. "If they knew who you really were?" His hand moves lower. "Don't." Buffy moans. "Stop me." he tells her. She doesn't - if anything, she leans into him even more as his hand slides her skirt up, and they begin to move together, subtly, quietly. Buffy closes her eyes in pleasure. "No, don't close your eyes," he breathes in her ear. Buffy opens her eyes and watches her friends dance below, her body still moving in gentle rhythm with his. "That's not your world," he tells her. "You belong in the shadows. With me." Buffy keeps watching her friends as he continues whispering to her, "Tell me you don't love getting away with this... right under their noses." This scene has amazing shock value, not just because it features sex in a public place, or the unremitting kink of Buffy watching her friends during the act itself (voyeuristic and exhibitionistic at the same time, especially for the viewer), but because it's our first real glimpse of the dark side of Spike's love for Buffy. Having gained her physical trust, Spike now wants more. He truly does want "all of her," and to that end, is coaxing her to turn her back on her friends and her daylight world, and devote herself completely to him. Just as Dracula did, Spike tells her that she's "a creature of darkness," that she should revel in her powers, and lose herself in the nighttime world of magic and monsters that they share. By doing this, he stands to gain a lover that he can dote on and cherish as he once did Drusilla, but the price is Buffy's "ties to the world" - "the Scoobies, brat kid sister" - the same things he once told her himself are what kept her alive for so long. And, by encouraging Buffy to indulge her dark impulses, Spike is also feeding his own - as a vampire, this kind of seduction is in his nature. Having tried for so long to bring himself up to her level, to change into something she might not be ashamed of, he's now begun to backslide, reverting to the path of lesser resistance - to change her, to bring her down to his. As a secret, forbidden thing, without any grounding in her daily reality or higher purpose to strive for, his love for her is becoming a destructive force. But even more disturbing is the fact that Buffy herself has implicitly encouraged him to take this approach. "A man can change," he'd told her in "Smashed," only to have her throw back in his face that he is "not a man" but "a thing." But Buffy has responded to the monster in him the way she never has to the man - in "Smashed," her ultimate answer to his violent aggression and hurtful insults was wild passion, while none of his attempts to impress her with good acts or polite behavior had ever changed her mind about him in the slightest. (The morning scene in "Gone," before and after the social worker shows up, is a particularly good illustration of this.) She's reminded him repeatedly that he's evil, disgusting to her. But her actions continue to reinforce the idea that she wants him this way. "I may be dirt, but you like to roll in it," he told her in "Wrecked." That she keeps coming back for more is only proving him right - both in his assessment that she thinks of him as "dirt," and the fact that she enjoys it. Next day, Xander and Willow run into Tara emerging from the Magic Box. Willow stutters in surprise, rushing to say that "it's okay for you to be here. If you have things that you have to be here for." Xander offers Tara a quick, supportive smile, and excuses himself to go inside, leaving the two alone. Willow is clearly uncomfortable to be confronting her ex on this formerly common ground, but awkwardly tries to smooth things over with "I didn't expect you to stop doing magic just because..." She fumbles for the right thing to say, finally settling on "I'm doing better. No spells for 32 days." Tara smiles weakly, and asks Willow to pass on the message that she's looking for Buffy. "She's not around much these days. We kind of miss her," Willow says. "I'm sure she feels the same way," Tara replies. With this exchange, we're reminded that Tara, like Spike, is now all but excluded from the group. Even though she's been told that she's "family," even though she's risked her life on patrol with the others, supported Willow even against her best judgment (e.g., the resurrection spell), she's now seen as something of an intruder on their turf, even though Willow herself can only enter the Magic Box "as long as someone's with me at all times." With her estrangement from Willow, Tara has been cut loose, and Willow has no reassurances to offer her yet. Until Willow deals with her issues with magic, there is no chance of reconciliation. Buffy, too, is struggling with just such questions. That night, walking through the cemetery, she is drawn once again to Spike's crypt. Inside, Spike senses her presence and smiles, approaching the door in anticipation. Time hangs suspended for a moment as they both wait, hands touching on opposite sides of the door - she, undecided whether to go in; he, awaiting her decision. Spike is the first to break the stalemate, but when he opens the door he finds her gone. In the distance, Buffy is off and walking with the mantra - "don't think about the evil bloodsucking fiend. Focus on anything but the evil bloodsucking fiend." From Willow's time measure, we now know Buffy has been "pounding the big evil" for a month at least, regarding each liason another lapse in judgment on her part ("isn't this usually the part where you kick me in the head and run off?"). Her hesitation, now, shows that she realizes the situation is approaching a point of no return. Good girl that she is, she can't accept the fact that she's having an affair with an "evil bloodsucking fiend," and yet, uncomfortable as she is with her own desires, she's still drawn to him. This "thing" they have is taking on a life of its own, and Buffy is understandably becoming worried about where it might lead. For now, though, she is relieved by the appearance of something more clear-cut to focus on - a damsel in distress being chased by two demons. Buffy runs after the cloaked creatures, but they disappear just as she reaches them. Confused, she stares around the clearing, suddenly alone. A soft sound draws her attention, and then she sees Katrina, lying on the ground sobbing."It's okay," Buffy tries to reassure her. "Are you hurt?" The next moment, Katrina is gone again. Voices begin whispering to her - "What did you do? What did you do?" Increasingly disoriented, Buffy turns, and this time sees Spike, sitting on the ground, nursing a bleeding lip. "Bloody hell - what'd you do that for?" he curses. The demons reappear, and then disappear again. Katrina is running past, lying on the ground crying again, and then she's not. Spike is fighting beside her, and then he's walking up to her, clearly approaching her for the first time that night - "Thought you could just slip away? Vampire, remember? I could feel you." Time keeps shifting out of synch, back and forth. Buffy spins in confusion, striking out... and hits Katrina, sending her rolling down a hill. Buffy chases after her in a panic. Spike dispatches the demon he's fighting and follows to find Buffy kneeling beside the body in shock. "She's dead," Buffy says numbly. "I killed her." Spike takes in the scene with a grim, businesslike air, scanning the treeline for witnesses. "There's nothing you can do now. We have to go before someone sees you," he tells her. Buffy continues to stare at Katrina's body, unable to move. He pulls her to her feet and gets her moving, stopping once they are a fair distance away. "Listen to me. It was an accident," he reassures her, telling her he'll take her home, and she's to get in her bed and stay there. "We're gonna sort this out. Trust me," he says. A distance away, Warren and Andrew view the proceedings from their survelliance van. "Katrina" enters the van and turns out to be Jonathan, disguised by a glamour spell. "Two problems... one stone," Warren gloats. "Buffy thinks she killed Katrina. It's her problem now." At home in her bed, Buffy tosses and turns, tortured by dreams. "Shh, it's all right," Spike whispers, sliding into bed beside her, "It'll be our little secret," he says, stroking her arm in a gentle motion. Buffy chokes back a sob and turns to him, wrapping her arms around his neck, kissing him desperately. Then the scene shifts suddenly - she sees herself at his crypt, sitting astride him, running her hands up his arms to the handcuffs around his wrists. Her head falls back in pleasure. The scene shifts again - now it's Katrina underneath her, hands bound in the cuffs. "Do you trust me?" Buffy taunts her. Katrina smiles. Then she sees Spike underneath her again, head turned to the side, relaxed as if in sleep. Still moving in her passion, Buffy brandishes a stake in her hand, and brings it down sharply. Katrina lies still in the woods with the stake in her chest. Katrina's eyes snap open and look at her, lifeless and milky, accusing. Buffy startles awake, still dressed, shaking in shock. This dream sequence is loaded with meaning, some of it fairly obvious. Her guilt over what she thinks she's done to Katrina is tormenting her - when Faith killed the Deputy Mayor in Season 3, Buffy experienced similiar dreams, of drowning, being both dragged under by the dead man and held down by Faith herself. But it's the mixture of images that is so intriguing here. Violence and sex are intertwined - she hits Katrina, then gasps in passion. Likewise, Katrina smiles from beneath her, trusting, then moans - the scene quickly switches once again to sex, only this time, Buffy takes Katrina's place, desperately clutching at Spike as he moves over her. The overall theme of this dream is a betrayal of trust. Katrina was an innocent, someone who should have been able to rely on her for protection, but found death instead. "Do you trust me?" Buffy asks, as Spike asked her in the opening scene, yet in the dream, he's the one who is bound, helpless. Buffy's mind confuses the image of Katrina with Spike laying beneath her in trust, and also with herself. Both reveal that on some level, she sees him as her victim, and herself as his. If she were to stake him now, after all they've shared, would it be any less of a murder? It also points up how disturbed she is by what she does with Spike. Her words to Faith about the Deputy Mayor's murder was that it made her feel "Dirty. Like something sick creeped inside you and you can't get it out. And you keep hoping what happened was just some nightmare." The dream equates the killing and the sex - both are Buffy's guilty secrets. Resigned to her guilt, Buffy decides what she has to do. She goes to wake Dawn, and sits on her bed, regarding her sister with a sad serious look. "I love you. You know that right?" Buffy tells her. Dawn, instantly alarmed from the tone of Buffy's voice - more than a little like her "Live. For me" pre-suicide speech - knows that something bad is up. Buffy explains vaguely "There was an accident. In the woods. A girl... she was hurt. I hurt someone," and says she has to go to the police. Dawn is not slow to realizes the implications. "They'll take you away. Won't they," she says. Buffy says she's sorry. "No you're not," Dawn begins to sob. "You don't want to be here with me. You didn't want to come back." Buffy tries to deny it, but Dawn knows better. "Then go. You're not really here anyway!" She sobs, and runs off crying. Buffy approaches the police station to turn herself in. "What do you think you're doing?" Spike's voice comes from behind her. "The right thing," she states, only to have him grab her by the shoulders and shove her back into the alley. "Can't let you do that," he says. He tells her he "took care of it." Spike's words and actions in this scene are nearly identical to Faith's in "Bad Girls" and "Consequences." He got rid of the body in the river, exactly as Faith did - but even as he tells her, they overhear that it's already been found by the police (Faith's attempt to dump the Deputy Mayor's body was similiarly unsucessful). He tries to convince her that it was an accident, that it wasn't her fault, and that one death doesn't compare to all the people she's saved. Faith's words were: "How many people do you think we've saved by now? Thousands? And didn't you stop the world from ending? In my book, that puts you and me firmly in the plus column." Spike's logic is the same, and Buffy's reaction to it is as well - wrong is wrong. Finally, desperate, he tells her that he can't let her go because he loves her. "No you don't!" she snaps. "You think I haven't tried not to?" he snaps back. She hauls off and hits him, knocking him for distance. "Try harder," Buffy grates. Spike makes one last attempt to stop her. Changing into vamp mode, presumably for the added burst of strength, he shoves her back again, hard. "You are not throwing away your life over this," he snarls. She punches him in the stomach. "That's all this is to you, isn't it? Just another body! You can't understand why this is killing me, can you?" He asks her to explain it - she hits him instead. "Come on, that's it, put it all on me," he tells her, dropping his defenses. She kicks him. "That's my girl," he says approvingly. "I am NOT your girl!" she shouts, knocking him back. He collapses back on the ground and she climbs on top of him, straddling his body, slamming her fist into his face again and again, shouting out all her anger and frustration. "You don't have a soul! There is nothing good or clean in you. You are dead inside! You can't feel anything real! I could NEVER be your girl!" He lies there, unresisting, as she pounds on him, his face losing its vampiric features under the assault. It's some time before she stops, looking down at his ruined face in horror. She gets to her feet with a whimper, tears in her eyes, stumbling away as he tries to reach for her, unable to get up. "You always hurt... the one you love, pet," he slurs through bloodied lips. This scene is the most disturbing of an episode full of disturbing images because it shows Buffy herself in such an unflattering light. There are inescapable echoes of Faith in Season 4's "Who Are You?" After experiencing Buffy's life and the love lavished on her by others during their body-switch, Faith's own self image - never strong to begin with - fell apart. She began to see herself as they saw her... as worthless. With nothing left but hopeless anger, the body-switched Faith (in Buffy's body) beat her own face in screaming, "You're nothing... disgusting, useless, murderous bitch!" Likewise, Buffy's enraged ranting is directed both at Spike and at herself. If he has no ability to love, nothing good in him, how could she possibly have opened herself up to him the way she has? What does that say about her? Seen from this angle, her fury becomes an act of vicious self-hatred. What's more, Buffy beats Spike here nearly as badly as Glory herself had, and he takes it from her without protest for exactly the same reason - because he loves her. He'd withstood Glory's torture simply because he'd wanted to spare her pain - since he had no friends among the Scoobies at that point and no reason to hope for rescue, he'd essentially been willing to die for her. In this case, when he can't relieve her conscience with words, he offers her his body because it's the one thing he can give her that he knows she will take. And with every punch, Buffy reminds us how much of a pattern this is for her... and for them. Buffy habitually uses violence as a cure-all to her problems. Her first reaction to a challenge is to beat it into submission. "Who do I kill for information?" she'd asked Spike drunkenly in "Life Serial." "We killing something?" she asked the Scoobies hopefully, immediately post-resurrection in "Afterlife." In "Buffy vs. Dracula," the dark prince himself told her that her power was "rooted in darkness" and noted that her approach to slaying vampires was akin to "hunting." In this, she is little different from the vampires she slays. Buffy's reaction to her after-death misery has been a constant push-and-pull between the twin impulses of fight or flight... and with Spike, she can have both. Spike continually offers himself to her for abuse, partly out of his own masochism, partly because he knows that it's something she needs and wants. "The things you do... the way you make it hurt in all the wrong places..." he'd praised her affectionately at the beginning of the episode. He knows perfectly well that she likes to slap him around. She enjoys it. And he's all too willing to give himself to her for this kind of treatment. It's something she's done for a long time. After Spike got the V-chip, Buffy would often hit him strictly for her own amusement, as a sort of signature, even if he'd been helpful - Slayer stress relief. When Dawn discovered she was the Key in "Blood Ties," Buffy wasted no time assigning blame to Spike simply for being along, but at that point, he'd still had enough self-respect to call her on it. "Maybe if you had been more honest with her, you wouldn't be trying to make yourself feel better with a round of kick the Spike!" he'd shouted at her. But it's also true that he sees her aggression toward him as a sign that she cares. In "Lover's Walk," he'd sobbed on Willow's shoulder that when Drusilla left him she hadn't even cared enough to "cut off my head, or set me on fire. Is that so much to ask? Just a little sign she cared?" In "Fool for Love," when he finishes his story about the Slayers he'd killed, he tries to goad Buffy into hitting him before attempting to kiss her. "Give it to me good. One good swing. You know you want to," he says. "You know you want to dance." ("I'm reminded of the moment in the Dick Tracy movie where Madonna says, "You don't know whether to hit me or kiss me. I get a lot of that.") And Spike wasn't the only one to equate Buffy's violence with her affection - Riley used almost the exact same words to her in "Into the Woods" and ironically, it was her refusal to hit him that convinced him to leave her, that she'd didn't care enough about him to make him stay. When Buffy pulls back from her beating of Spike, it's because she finally realizes both what she's doing - taking advantage of his willingness to let her victimize him - and what he's doing - offering himself to her as proof of his love. When Spike tells her "You always hurt the one you love," he is talking about her. Shaken by the scene in the alley, yet still determined to go through with her confession, Buffy stumbles into the police station, and tries to get the attention of the busy desk officer. He motions her away while he handles a phone call. Buffy overhears the call as she waits, at last learning the identity of the girl she thought she killed, and immediately makes the mental connection. She leaves without hesitation, making a beeline for the Scooby gang and some research. Anya rapidly identifies the demons as a race that cause a "local temporal disturbance," explaining the weird time shifts. Buffy tells them, "It wasn't the demons. It was Warren. He knew Katrina. He had something to do with it. I know it." Willow asks her how she's so sure. Buffy responds thoughtfully, "You always hurt the one you love." Meanwhile, Warren, Andrew, and Jonathan have hacked into the police database to look over the coroner's report, finding that the medical examiner has ruled Katrina's death a suicide. "We really got away with murder," Andrew muses. "That's... kinda cool." Warren and Andrew both smile. Jonathan stares at them uncomfortably. "Yeah. Cool." he agrees, his face troubled. Later, at the Summers house, Tara reveals the results of her research to Buffy. As the two sit alone on the couch, she tells Buffy that there's nothing wrong with her - just a little side effect of the reconstitution process. "Shifting you out of from where you were... funneling your essence back into your body ...it altered you on a basic molecular level," Tara explains. "Probably just enough to confuse the sensors or whatever in Spike's chip." Buffy stares at her in disbelief. "I didn't come back wrong?" she manages, weakly. "No, you're still the same Buffy," Tara reassures her. Far from being satisfied, Buffy instead begins to break down. Tears well up in her eyes. "This just can't be me," she says. "Why do I feel like this? Why do I let Spike do those things to me?" Tara asks if she means that he can hit her; Buffy just looks at her. Tara's eyes widen a little. "Oh... Ohh. Really," she stammers, getting it. Buffy begins to cry freely, tears running down her face. "He's everything I hate," she whispers. "He's everything that I'm supposed to be against. But the only time that I ever feel anything is when..." Suddenly realizing that she's let her secret out, she pleads with Tara not to tell the others. "The way they would look at me... I just couldn't..." she weeps, and begs Tara for understanding. "Why can't I stop? Why do I keep letting him in?" Tara asks the obvious question - "Do you love him?" Buffy can only stare at her, and Tara hastens to reassure her that, "It's okay if you do. I mean, he's done a lot of good, and he does love you." She then adds, "It's okay if you don't," because Buffy is going through "a really hard time, and you're..." Buffy looks even more miserable. "What? Using him? What's okay about that?" she sobs. "It's wrong. I'm wrong. Tell me that I'm wrong, please. Please don't forgive me, please..." She falls to her knees, crying, with her head on Tara's lap. Buffy's weepy confesssion to Tara shows just how much Buffy was counting the idea that she was "wrong" - an idea she'd first strenuously denied - to excuse her behaviour. She had hoped to find something that would make any uncomfortable feelings not her fault. ("Why do I feel like this?") But if nothing is wrong with her, then everything Buffy has done has been of her own volition, something she wanted to do, chose to do. She can't blame her impulses on a spell gone wrong, or no soul, or being demon... just herself. In realizing this, Buffy's self image has taken the worst body blow possible. She can't bear to see herself as the sort of heartless person who would use someone, even the undead, the way she's been using Spike, but the only other alternative - that she might indeed feel something for him - is just as repellent to her. If she is capable of having feelings for a soulless demon - or of behaving like one herself - what does that say about her? Is she good or bad? Something in between? How can she even tell anymore? In this episode, the actions of nearly every character cross and recross the lines between good and evil until it's almost impossible to tell where that line is anymore. If, as "Dead Things" suggests, anyone can be selfish or heartless or vicious, even essentially good people, then nearly everything we've ever been led to believe about good and evil and souls and monsters set up in the show's canon from the early days is being called into question as a childish oversimplification. That's pretty remarkable.
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