The Weirdest Part Of Buffy’s Worst Relationship

For this tawdry tale of Buffy and Spike’s awful relationship to make sense, you’re going to need plenty of context, starting with how a vampire slayer and a vampire hooked up in the first place.

Spike first realized he loved the Slayer in season 4 but mostly kept it to himself, and the combination of his feelings towards Buffy and a chip in his head keeping him from hurting humans made him a reluctant ally of the Scooby Gang. 

In the season 6 musical episode “Once More With Feeling,” a spell makes everyone reveal their feelings via singing, and after Spike confesses how painful his feelings are and Buffy reveals her own pain from being yanked out of heaven, the two end the episode by passionately smooching.

Two episodes later, they have a fight that leads to an intimate encounter so rough it literally brings a house down. Buffy and Spike were a very toxic, very secret couple, but their forbidden shenanigans became a thing of the past when the vampire shockingly tries to rape the Slayer. 

Just when it seemed like the “Spuffy” relationship couldn’t get any weirder, the two finally connect emotionally rather than physically after Spike gets his soul back in season 7.

However, the episode “Lies My Parents Told Me” inadvertently reveals the real reason why Buffy was so attractive to Spike in the first place. We see the vampire’s sick mom in a flashback sequence, and he turns her into a vampire but then kills her when her comments to him just get too cruel.

Buffy writer and director David Fury later revealed that the woman who played Spike’s mom, Caroline Lagerfelt, was cast because she looked like an older Sarah Michelle Gellar.

Furthermore, while her name isn’t mentioned onscreen, Spike’s mom is Anne Pratt. As you may remember, Buffy Summers’ middle name is, in fact, Anne.

Knowing that this actor was cast because she looks like an older Buffy completely changes the context of the woman’s remarks to Spike and his later relationship with the Slayer.

Spike basically kills his mother because he hates what she is saying, like “All you ever wanted was to be back inside” and “You wanted your hands on me.” The combination of his mother’s incestuous accusations and the revelation of her new vampire face was enough to make Spike drive a stake through her heart.

Watching the episode, it’s easy to think she is just saying hurtful things for the sake of saying them—after all, she admits that “I used to hate to be cruel in life; now, I find it rather freeing.”

But knowing that this actor got the job because she actually looked like Gellar seemingly lends weight to her accusations. In a plot point that would have made Sigmund Freud proud, Spike went from going “inside” his mother with his teeth to going inside someone who looks just like his mom in an entirely different way.

There are practically too many weird things to list when it comes to the problematic aspects of the Buffy/Spike relationship. However, the fact that the entire romance was seemingly driven by Spike’s explicit mommy issues and Buffy’s implicit daddy issues might just take the cake. The incestuousness is all a bit too much, and I deeply worry about what the Buffy fanfic community is going to do with this knowledge.

Seriously, if I catch any of you writing naughty fanfic with lines like “what are you doing, Key sister,” then I’m turning this computer around and taking the internet back home.