Spike’s history revealed
The history of Spike was established very, very early on by Joss in Season Two. When Spike first showed up, he’s described as William the Bloody and that he has killed two Slayers.
I think there was always the idea rattling around of, "Let’s go back and see him kill those two Slayers." We talked a lot about - not a time travel episode - but an episode that bounces around in time.
I got a call at home from Tim Minear, the Angel writer/producer/director genius and he had very good news. He said, "We’re going to do a two-parter and it’ll be a Buffy/Angel crossover but it won’t literally be a two-parter. It’s going to be more like Pulp Fiction.
Joss also called, very excited. Joss and Tim came up with the idea of this massive two-parter which would be structured somewhat like Pulp Fiction, where you would see side B in the first episode and then side A [in the second], so you’d get information that you didn’t have before.
I got involved very early on. Minear and I really got a lot of work done - how to show the Drusilla of it and the Spike of it - and had a great, great time. Mere Smith, the Angel writer, was in on it too. Joss and Marti [Noxon] helped us really knock it out of the park and again, as always it’s a group effort.
We wanted to do a seventies slayer. I’m a big Seventies movie nut - you’ve seen my office, I’m pathetic - and one of my favourite movies is Shaft. I really wanted to do a Seventies Shaft, black New York city superslayer, and I got to. Joss wasn’t sure about it at first. I said "Well, what if the coat Spike is wearing is taken from the Slayer," and he just went "Do it." That’s how we invented Nikki, the vampire slayer of the Seventies.
Director Nick Mark came in and just went to town with the production values. We were talking about doing a thing on a subway platform, because we could never get a subway car, and Gareth (Davies, line producer) came into my office one day and said "Well, if you don’t mind, do you think we could do it on a moving subway car, instead of a subway platform," so we did it on a subway car, which is one of the coolest scenes I think we’ve ever done.
We went to that Chinese village where he killed a Slayer during the Boxer rebellion. That was tragic and sad and horrifying.
You can’t really say enough about the chemistry between James Masters and Sarah Michelle Gellar, because it’s just awesome. They had a lot to do with that episode and James really is so good at being this thing on the side of Buffy’s life. To put him front and centre and to watch him take the ball and run with it like that was probably one of the greatest things I’ve ever been associated with in my career. James was just amazing in that episode.
What we loved is that Spike has come all this way. What we wanted to do is go, "Okay he’s come this far, he’s come this far…" and then at the end, he’s come nowhere. He’s the exact same guy he was 125 or whatever it is years ago and he’s a fool for love. He’s a heartbroken poet, he’ll never be anything else. It’s a little hard to really hate Spike the way we have before.
He’s not even a two-dimensional villain, he exists in time, he’s a four-dimensional villain. We really gave him a lot of layers. You see that he really is heartbroken underneath all of that. When the women say to him, "You’re beneath me," its something that he cannot escape. All his cool and him making himself like Sid Vicious didn’t work. So that was a fun episode.
