Fool for Love

"Fool for Love" is episode 7 of season 5 of the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It is a companion to the Angel episode "Darla", which first aired later the same night on The WB network; both episodes include multiple flashbacks to the history of Spike and Darla, shown from their respective viewpoints.

Plot synopsis

Buffy receives a serious stab wound while fighting a vampire at the cemetery; she is saved only by the unexpected arrival of Riley. Despite his encouragement that she is not slipping, Buffy wants to research ways to avoid making more mistakes. She and Giles start looking in the Watcher diaries for information about past Slayers' deaths, but Giles tells her there won't be much in them because the Watchers usually also died or found it too painful to recount the incidents. Buffy then remembers they have another witness to Slayers' final battles: Spike.

Buffy meets Spike at the Bronze, and he agrees to tell her about his battles with the two Slayers that he killed. He starts out by describing how he was turned, revealing that he was ridiculed by his peers and rejected by the love of his life before Drusilla sired him.

Meanwhile Riley, Xander, Willow and Anya take over Buffy's patrol. Riley is very methodical, but the rest of the Scoobies are rather lax about the process. They do discover a nest of vampires, including the one that injured Buffy. They make plans to destroy it the next day when the vampires won't be active.

Spike tells of killing the Chinese Slayer during the Boxer Rebellion, describing her as "all business" and getting nostalgic about how Drusilla was excited afterward.

Riley, rather than waiting for daylight, goes back to the vampire lair at night and firebombs it.

Spike moves on to his second Slayer (Nikki Wood), whom he describes as more improvisational like Buffy. After he finishes, he reveals that he won by exploiting the Slayers' curiosity about – and wish for – death. Buffy rejects his conclusion and becomes angry and disgusted when Spike comes on to her, challenging her to prove him wrong. She leaves him on the ground.

When she gets home, her mother reveals that she needs to go into the hospital for some more tests, and that her condition may be serious. When Buffy goes outside to cry, Spike walks up intending to shoot her. Buffy's distraught state changes his mind and he attempts to comfort her instead.

Acting

Starring

• Sarah Michelle Gellar as Buffy Summers
• Nicholas Brendon as Xander Harris
• Alyson Hannigan as Willow Rosenberg
• Marc Blucas as Riley Finn
• Emma Caulfield as Anya Jenkins
• Michelle Trachtenberg as Dawn Summers
• James Marsters as Spike/William
• and Anthony Stewart Head as Rupert Giles

Guest starring

• David Boreanaz as Angelus/Angel
• Mercedes McNab as Harmony Kendall
• Julie Benz as Darla
• Juliet Landau as Drusilla
• and Kristine Sutherland as Joyce Summers

Co-starring

• Kali Rocha as Cecily Addams
• Edward Fletcher as Male Partygoer
• Katharine Leonard as Female Partygoer
• Matthew Lang as 2nd Male Partygoer
• Chris Daniels as Stabbing Vampire
• Kenneth Feinberg as Chaos Demon
• Steve Heinze as Vampire #1
• Ming Liu as Chinese Slayer
• April Wheedon-Washington as Nikki Wood

Production details

Music

• Avenue A - "Run Cold"
• Johann Sebastian Bach - "Partita 3.III for Violin Solo in E Major"
• Crushing Velvet - "Xxx"
• Felix Mendelssohn - "Overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream"
• Holly Golightly - "Run Cold"
• The Killingtons - "Balladovie"
• Virgil (Elephant Ride) - Heal Yourself"

Translations

• Italian title: "Pazzi per amore" ("Insane (ones) for love").
• German title: "Eine Lektion fürs Leben" ("A lesson for life")
• French title: "La faille" ("The Flaw")
• Spanish title: "Allar Del amor" ("Fool for Love")
• Japanese title: "過去" ("Kako" - "The Past")

Quotes and trivia

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Buffy the Vampire Slayer#Fool for Love

• The episode is named after a play of the same title by Sam Shepard. The plays two protagonists, Eddie and May, struggle with an intense attraction to each other that disgusts them because they are brother and sister. They hate each other, yet cannot stay apart. As a result, they are doomed to be together, and therefore damned.

• The actress who plays the Chinese Slayer came back to Buffy in the final episode, playing one of the strong slayers shown after Buffy stands back up after being stabbed.

• Spike says in "School Hard" that the last slayer he killed (Nikki Wood) begged for her life. It is learned here that he was lying.

• It is learned that Spike has been in love with Buffy since they teamed up to save the world in "Becoming, Part Two", but he only realises his feelings for her in "Out of My Mind".

• The poem snatched from William's hands and read out loud (to public ridicule) is a portion of the same poem that Spike later reads (in its complete form) at the open-mike event in the series finale of Angel "Not Fade Away."

• According to the comic Spike: Old Times, Cecily was already Halfrek, a vengeance demon (and longtime friend of Anya), at the time of her meeting with William, and subsequently massacred the room of people who had laughed at his poetic efforts. Actress Kali Rocha played both Cecily and later Halfrek.

• As a vampire, William adopted the name Spike and claim that both the nickname and his former title as "William the Bloody" derived from his practice of torturing people with railroad spikes. This episode reveals the true origin of these nicknames: one listener to William's poem in the flashback comments that he would rather have a rail spike driven through his head than listen to any of William's poetry, and notes that William is referred to as "William the Bloody" because of his "bloody" awful poetry.

• It is revealed in the Angel episode "Darla" that Angel had already regained his soul when Spike killed the Chinese slayer.

Continuity

Arc significance

• Crossover with Angel: This episode consists largely of flashbacks from Spike's viewpoint. Some of the same events recounted are seen from Darla's viewpoint in "Darla", first aired later the same night.

• This marks the first reappearance of Angelus in Buffy series since "Becoming, Part Two".

• The actor playing Cecily will return in several future episodes as the vengeance demon Halfrek.

• This is the first time Spike shows real affection and caring towards Buffy on the series; a foreshadowing of his joining the "good" side later on.

• The second Slayer Spike kills, Nikki Wood, has a son named Robin, who later appears as Sunnydale High's new principal in the seventh season. In "Lies My Parents Told Me", we see him as a child witness an earlier fight between Spike and his mother, as well as try to get his revenge on Spike in the present day for his mother's death.

Continuity violation

• This episode shows Drusilla siring Spike, apparently contradicting the third episode of season two, "School Hard", in which Spike calls Angel his sire. Joss Whedon later verified that any vampire in a line can be referred to as a sire. The Master sired Darla, who sired Angel, who sired Drusilla, who sired Spike – forming a "familial" line.

• This episode reveals the true origins of Spike's name and his nickname "William the Bloody", both of which had recently been described as having violent origins.

• In "School Hard" Giles said that Spike was "barely 200", but in "The Initiative" Spike said that he was 126 years old. This episode definitively establishes that he was sired 120 years ago.

External links

• "Fool for Love" at the Internet Movie Database
• "Fool For Love" at TV.com