Buffy the Vampire Slayer Launched Its Most Controversial Couple 26 Years Ago

The scene comes at the end of an episode that is mostly setup. Spike (James Marsters) lounges morosely in his crypt. A chip in his brain keeps him from hurting humans, so he is harmless. Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) kicks down his door and announces she’s done with him. She plans to kill him once and for all.

“Do it,” Spike says. “End my torment.” It’s standard Spike melodrama. Buffy gets ready to stake him, then holds back, and Spike kisses her. They stare at each other in shock. Then Buffy does the unthinkable. She kisses him again and tells him she wants him. Spike says he’s in love with her. Then he wakes up, horrified. “Oh God, no. Please, no.” Roll credits.

The dream sequence foreshadows much of the dynamic between Spike and Buffy. That relationship goes to some of the darkest places in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and rarely runs both ways.

“Out of My Mind” aired on The WB 26 years ago. Rebecca Rand Kirshner wrote it and David Grossman directed. It is the fourth episode of season five, and it lays the groundwork for many plot threads in the episodes that follow.

What is “Out of My Mind” about?

Despite the Spike and Buffy kicker, the episode focuses on Buffy and Riley (Marc Blucas), her college boyfriend. At the start, Riley interrupts Buffy’s patrol and recklessly kills vampires to prove his strength. Spike also crashes the patrol, which sets up the trio at the core of the episode.

Later, Buffy learns that Riley is at risk of a heart attack. The Initiative has fed him drugs that make him stronger than a regular human. Buffy looks for a way to help him while Riley goes into hiding. She asks everyone to help track him down, including Spike, whom she bribes. Spike takes the money, of course, and kidnaps the doctor who was supposed to help Riley. He tries to force the doctor to remove the inhibitor in his brain.

The plot ends in a confrontation between Spike, Buffy and Riley. Spike learns that his plan failed and the chip is still in his head. He has no way to satisfy his desire to kill the Slayer. Meanwhile, the cracks in Buffy and Riley’s relationship begin to show.

The episode is one of Riley’s showcases, and it finds him at his most grating. After searching for him for half the episode, Buffy finds him punching rocks in a cave, literally. Their tense exchanges pave the way for their breakup and for Riley’s departure from the show. He tells Buffy he’s too normal for her. Buffy replies that if she wanted to date a superpowered guy, she would just date Spike.

Beyond the kiss, the episode quietly lays out several key pieces of the season:

• Riley’s insecurity
• Joyce’s collapse at breakfast, which doctors can’t explain
• Spike’s slow turn into one of Buffy’s allies
• Willow’s overreliance on magic

The episode saves its best for the end. There the series commits to the long-simmering tension between Spike and Buffy, which the writers had doled out patiently.

Spike, defanged

In “Out of My Mind,” Spike is at his most lovelorn and pathetic. He’s also at his funniest. “I will know your blood, Slayer. I will make your neck my chalice and drink deep,” he says into the night, then falls into an open grave. Unable to kill humans, Spike spends his free time watching Dawson’s Creek. (“Oh, Pacey, you blind idiot. Can’t you see she doesn’t love you?”)

Spike becomes a regular in season five, and the episode introduces his most enduring version. The final twist shows that his obsession with Buffy has been more complicated than plain murderous rage. In a 2008 forum thread, fans recalled watching the kiss for the first time. Most described shock that the show had brought the subtext between Buffy and Spike to the surface.

Series writer David Fury said the moment when Buffy learns of Spike’s feelings, 10 episodes later in “Crush,” developed unexpectedly. In the writers’ room, they only wanted other characters to find out about Spike’s feelings. “We wound up tipping our hand a little bit. I’d said, ‘This should be the episode where people find out about Spike being in love,’ and it then progressed into Buffy finding out, which was something we were saving for later,” he said in an interview with BBC Cult.

“It turned out to be a good play because we were able to take them to interesting places throughout the rest of the season.”

In hindsight, the first kiss between Spike and Buffy captures the full arc of their relationship. The kiss is a fantasy, largely projected by Spike. It marked the start of their complicated dynamic and hinted at where their story would end up. Spike would always love Buffy, and Buffy would always keep him at emotional arm’s length.

Source: Polygon