All About Spike

Now I'm suddenly trying to imagine Angel being played by Bette Davis. It's kinda amusing.

Part of the problem on Angel may have been the takeover of W&H and the death of Connor at the end of S4. A lot of ongoing (and potentially ongoing) plotlines disappeared.

So is the complaint about Spike taking over Buffy or taking over Angel? In the interests of full disclosure, I was giddy at having Spike over on AtS, though I agree it took awhile to get the fit right.

I think "taking over" Buffy, if that's how you see it, was really a later development than what I was thinking about in relation to the Marsters quote. S2, you had a bit character taking on a bigger role for reasons that may not have been intentional or anticipated. I'd consider the S5 and beyond stuff a separate issue.

And I can barely consider the AtS stuff without the meta, so it's hard for me to really analyze. Personally, I'd have been happy if they just let him go down with Sunnydale. But once that call was made, I still liked the character, so it didn't terribly ping me.

This corner is complaining about Spike not so much taking over Buffy, but continuing to be shoehorned in as a main character after his story had ended. At the very latest, he should have been staked in "Seeing Red." I'm not so sure he really belonged in Angel, and the PTB never really figured out what his story should be, but he didn't seem to create the same imbalance.

Some of the Spike stuff on Angel works better for me in retrospect, after it was clear that they were using Spike to highlight things about Angel.

But a lot of it, especially in the earlier episodes, was tiresome. I feel like there were scenes where he'd pop in, remind people that he was a ghost, and wander out, and I'd be like, "What was the point of that?"

A couple of Spike's pop-ins were hilarious. Not so much during the ghost era, but his small bits in SMILE TIME were priceless. Of course, since I find peeved Angel funny, peeved Puppet!Angel was exponentially funny, and Spike can bring the peeve out of Angel like almost no other charcter.

The saving grace, I think, was that Spike inspired hostility and guilt in Angel, as opposed to the addlebrained rationalization and mooning he evoked from Buffy. I'd much rather listen to Angel bitch someone out than hear Buffy whine the Nth variation of "But he has a soul now!"

The saving grace, I think, was that Spike inspired hostility and guilt in Angel, as opposed to the addlebrained rationalization and mooning he evoked from Buffy. I'd much rather listen to Angel bitch someone out than hear Buffy whine the Nth variation of "But he has a soul now!"

True, that.

This corner is complaining about Spike not so much taking over Buffy, but continuing to be shoehorned in as a main character after his story had ended. At the very latest, he should have been staked in "Seeing Red." I'm not so sure he really belonged in Angel, and the PTB never really figured out what his story should be, but he didn't seem to create the same imbalance.

And this.

Whoa, sorry to just pop-in during the 3rd reel of the movie, but what do you mean Spike didn't belong on Angel? He was one of the very best things about it, hands down.