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!"
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.
orkhan, there are several reasons for this.
One, the WB pretty much told the show runners Spike had to be a regular or the show wasn't going to be continued, which made some people unhappy with the outside influence on the show.( Especially since they cancelled it anyway.) Some people felt this really interfered with the storytelling of the season because Joss & Co weren't free to do whatever they wanted they had to work around the network's demands.
Second, some people weren't happy with the character development of Spike on BtVS and didn't like the character he had become in the later seasons and were fine with his storyline ending.
Show Not Called Spike!
(Okay, just had to get that out of my system. Dana, can I have some popcorn?)
