Dead Things

S06E13

This recap contains opinions. Use caution, as opinions may be harmful to your health. If accidentally swallowed, do not induce vomiting. Believe me, it hasn't made the Spuffy 'ship any more tolerable.

Previously on Buffy: the Scoobies speculated that they brought Buffy back wrong; Buffy denied the charges. The Legion of Dim made trouble, but Buffy didn't take them very seriously. Dawn sulked at Buffy's lack of nurturing. Tara baby-talked and dumped Willow. Willow dumped magic. Buffy and Spike argued about his feelings for her; they had sex, which made Buffy disgusted with herself. The good kind of disgusted, apparently, since she went back for more.

Pan across Spike's crypt. Lots of grunting, crashing, breaking of things, and moaning. Camera carefully shows us that no one is in the bed. And of course they're not, unless they bring lots of crockery to bed to break. Camera continues to pan, and I'm bored already. Like, okay, Buffy and Spike are having sex. I have to hear every grunt, as usual. Can we just move on to some actual plot already? We finally pan over to Spike and Buffy, who have apparently just finished, and it's just so annoying, because there's nothing around them that could have caused the crashing noises we just heard .02 seconds ago, plus both of them are on the floor under heavy oriental carpets, which would have seriously hampered any lamp- and dish-breaking in the first place. I'm tired of the sex scenes, but I'm extra tired of the unconvincing sex scenes. So here are Spike and Buffy, naked, under itchy, mostly likely very dusty, carpets. Um, how sexy. I hope neither of them has allergies. Casual pillow -- er, rug talk. Buffy jokes about missing the bed and asks if the rug is new. It's not, and then Buffy actually compliments Spike's place. He jokes about having eaten a decorator once, and Buffy shares that she's thinking of fixing up her room, since the "New Kids on the Block posters are starting to date" her. First vampires and now boy bands? Ooooh, she means the posters are giving away her age. As if her sad, lined face weren't already doing that. Spike chuckles and leans in close with an offer of room-sprucing help, then asks in surprise, "Are we having a conversation?" Buffy says no, but laughs and concedes that perhaps they are. Spike is worried that she's going to kick him in the head and run away, and Buffy giggles, "That's the plan -- as soon as my legs start working." More laughing, but then Spike has to screw it up as usual. He praises her sexual technique, saying, "The way you make it hurt in all the wrong places. I've never been with such an animal!" Buffy, what with all the worries about coming back wrong, takes great offense at being called an animal and starts digging around for her chonies under the rug. She gives unconvincing lip service to needing to be home before Dawn goes to bed. If Dawn were a kitten or a fish, she would have withered up and died by now. Buffy's just lucky she's in charge of a being that can forage for its own food. As Buffy struggles into her drawers, Spike asks what she thinks is between them, and Buffy basically denies that they have anything at all other than sex. Spike looks her right in the eye and says, "Do you even like me?" Oh, poor Spike, not. If you let yourself get used for sex, then you end up, well, used for sex, Just say no, Spike. Look how well it's working for Willow. Buffy admits that she likes Spike "sometimes," and then he pulls out a pair of handcuffs. "Do you trust me?" he wants to know. "Never," replies Buffy. But don't forget, kiddies, as defined by The New Buffy Usage Dictionary: Muddying The Sexual Consent Waters, any negative used by Buffy in the vicinity of Spike actually indicates agreement.

Jonathan, Andrew and Warren are in a new basement lair. Jonathan flips through a box of records and touches Andrew's "Frampton Comes Alive" record, which causes all sorts of bickering and magic bone-shaking between the two beta nerds. Alpha nerd Warren bitches at them and then calls them over to charge the "cerebral dampener" that he's been working on. All three guys don red sunglasses, and Andrew pulls out a musk gland from some Not-Going-To-Transcribe-The-Name demon that's needed to complete the dampener. Jonathan sprinkles powder over the gland and chants a spell, which causes orange energy to zap out of his hand and into a small chrome sphere sitting on the desk. Jonathan sulks about his sore hand as Warren gloats that the cerebral dampener gives them the power to make "any woman [they] desire [their] willing sex slave"; Andrew and Jonathan look a little blank, but Warren crows, "I know just where to start!"

Doublemeat Palace. Daytime. Buffy is working the counter with Gina and trying out new lines on the customers. Tara pops up in front of the counter, and she and Buffy head to the break room for a chat. We see a close-up of the "Dedication" poster from last week, and I'm sorry to report that what Ace thought was a pothole appears to actually be an alligator or Gila monster in the road. Still strange. There's another poster to "Dedication" that says "Productivity" and has a picture of an ostrich and some zebras. Tara cracks a joke about the posters, and Buffy thanks her for coming. We then get a little misdirection, as Tara asks, "Is it bad?" (talking about Willow) and Buffy replies, "I was sort of hoping you could tell me" (talking about her coming back wrong). Tara continues, "What did Willow do wrong now? Did she -- she hurt anyone?" and OUCH! She doesn't have much faith in her ex, does she? Buffy assures Tara that Willow has been doing well, and confesses that she asked Tara to the restaurant to talk about something else. Buffy has a hard time getting the words out, but she finally tells Tara that Spike can hit her without feeling any pain. As she says this, she wraps one hand around her other wrist and then hides both hands in her lap. I guess she let him put the handcuffs on her, then? Tara is panicked that Spike's chip has stopped working, but Buffy assures her that the chip works on everyone but her (Buffy). Buffy wants Tara to look into the spell that Willow used to raise her (Buffy again) from the dead. Too many feminine pronouns in these sentences. "I think maybe I came back wrong," says Buffy sadly, skirting the sex-related reasons she has for thinking so. Tara stutters out an immediate denial of Buffy's wrongness, but Buffy isn't convinced. She wants Tara to check the spell anyway.

The Legion of Dim's black van is parked in an alleyway. The Beta Nerds are in the van, in visual and radio communication with Warren, who's in a wood-paneled bar. Warren's all dressed up in a suit, and his tie tack is a camera that sends a visual feed to the van. Telling Jonathan and Andrew to keep an eye out for the Slayer (in a way that makes me think the Slayer isn't his reason for being in the bar), Warren strolls past a bunch of young people in business clothes, chatting and drinking. In the van, the Beta Nerds share nerd talk about having any "juicy, pulsating" piece of unsuspecting womanhood they want. Cree-pee. Jonathan wants one woman in the bar, and Andrew wants another, but Warren has a specific "target" in mind. He spots his ex-girlfriend Katrina (from the fifth-season episode "I Was Made to Love You"), sitting at the bar, sporting new highlights and a lot more make-up than the last time we saw her. I'll ignore the ensuing "comedy" wherein the Beta Nerds spot a girl with "bazoombas," and instead move right on to Warren sitting down to Katrina. He gives her a lame line, which she laughs off until she realizes who she's talking to. Then she's disgusted and outraged to see him. He asks if she's still sore "about that thing," and Katrina makes it quite clear that, yes, she is still sore about Warren building himself a robot sex slave which then tried to kill her. Katrina prepares to leave but Warren grabs her arm, claiming he hoped that he and Katrina could "work things out." Katrina is emphatically not interested in this suggestion, so Warren dons his red sunglasses and pulls the cerebral dampener out of his pocket. He sets it off. Katrina looks blankly at him and drones, "I love you Master." "I love you too, baby," smugs Warren.

Buffy wanders through the front door of her house, yawning. She's wearing an off-the shoulder green monstrosity of a t-shirt with puffy little sleeves. She's shocked to hear music and see Dawn and Xander dancing in the living room, and she frets, "Is there singing? Are we singing again?" Nope, Xanya are just teaching Dawn some dance steps in preparation for the wedding reception. Xander dips Dawn, who giggles like a schoolgirl. Which she is, so um, there you go. Buffy declines to join the dancing and instead flops onto the sofa between Willow and Anya. "Double entendres" ensue when Xanya chide Buffy for looking "pounded." Oh hoo haw! They're talking about working at the restaurant, but Buffy's thinking about the pounding she takes from Spike. Har. I just about died laughing there. Willow, dressed in a high-necked shirt and brown ultra-suede blazer that even my fashion-impaired high school guidance counselor would have rejected as frumpy, invites Buffy to the Bronze for a little drinky-drinky, but Buffy declines, saying she's going to stay home with Dawn. Too bad, so sad -- Dawn is going to sleep over at Janice's house, and before she leaves she gets a few digs in about how Buffy is never home to spend any time with her. Dawn remains impervious to Buffy's attempts to get her to stay home, and who can blame the kid, because making tortillas with Janice's mom probably is a hell of a lot more exciting than spending time with a distant, depressed person who would most likely disappear to "go patrolling" at around 10 PM. Buffy decides some drinky-drinky doesn't sound so bad after all.

At the Legion of Dim's new lair of dim, poor Katrina has been dressed in a French maid's outfit and is serving the nerds champagne. The Beta Nerds are both pretty impressed with their new toy. Warren suggests a toast to "crime," and they all drink. More drooling over Katrina, which just gets more and more disturbing as she stands there blankly. It's so disturbing that I find it hard to recap, even at this point. Warren praises Katrina's beauty, including "the way her nose crinkles when she laughs," seemingly unable to understand that he's rendered her incapable of ever laughing again. Excited giggling from the Betas, followed by bickering over who will get to have sex with Katrina first. Warren calls shotgun and then assures the other two, "You play with her all you want, after I'm done with her." My skin crawls. Warren leads Katrina into another room, where they begin kissing. He demands that she tell him she should never have left him. His inability to separate brain-dampened Katrina from the Katrina he dated, and the twistedness of his feelings for her (his need to punish and humiliate her, while saying he missed her), is truly, truly frightening. Warren makes Katrina say she loves him and then immediately demands, "Get on your knees." Oh, I so don't want to see this. As Katrina kneels, she monotones, "Yes, Warren," which alarms him. Katrina suddenly comes to herself and is shocked to find herself in a basement and on her knees in front of Warren.

She throws Warren out into the main room, where his entrance interrupts a light-saber fight between the Betas. A literal light-saber fight, not any sort of basement love. As the Betas scramble for the cerebral dampener, Katrina forcefully demands to know what was done to her. The three men surround her and Andrew thrusts out the dampener, which emits a few sparks but fails to work. "First a skank-bot and now this?! What is wrong with you?" demands Katrina, giving Warren and his mat of chest hair a good shove. I know Buffy can't kill Warren because he's a human and all, but maybe she could just hold him down and wax his chest? Warren claims he wanted them to be together, and Katrina shouts that she isn't his girlfriend anymore. The Betas are shocked to find out that Warren brought home his ex; somehow it makes it all the more real for them, and they're appalled. Katrina, displaying some refreshing anger and candor in this season of weeping, muted women, gives the Dims a piece of her mind: "Bunch of little boys playing at being men. This is not some fantasy! It's not a game, you freaks! It's rape!" Jonathan and Andrew try to claim that they didn't mean to rape her, but their faces say that they've realized she's right. Katrina tells Warren she's going to make sure he goes to jail for her abduction. "And then we'll see how you like getting raped!" She rushes to leave the basement, making short work of the Betas who try to stop her. She's partway up the stairs when Warren catches her. They struggle, and she slashes his face with her nails, but he manages to knock her down and then club her in the head with a bottle. "Charge the cerebral dampener," demands Warren, but Jonathan and Andrew are really freaked out. Andrew disproves Warren's claim that everything will be all right when he touches the back of Katrina's head and says, "She's dead." And I'm seriously sad. Katrina was just an everyday girl who, when confronted with unacceptable behavior, did exactly the right thing and she ended up dead. I liked Katrina's no-nonsense attitude last season too, and in this episode I found her to be a refreshing antidote to Buffy's season and a half of sniveling. I'm sorry you had to die, Katrina. I guess maybe that's what happens to bright, independent, forthright women on Buffy these days. Not to belabor the point, but I've seen a shift lately to a depiction of our two main female characters as women unable to control their own desires, who have these appetites that they need help in curbing. It's a far cry from the days of yore when this show featured proactive women taking care of their own business. Speaking their minds and kicking ass. Now the first such creature we see in two years gets clubbed to death like a baby seal.

Back from a break, we're still at the Legion of Dim's lair of dim. Andrew cries into a tissue while Warren figures out that he broke Katrina's neck. Jonathan looks shell-shocked. "What the hell did you do?" he demands, horrified. Warren slams him into a wall and yells that the murder is on all of them. "We have to get rid of it," decides Warren, meaning Katrina's body, and asks if Jonathan can teleport it elsewhere. "No, she's -- it's too big," moans Jonathan. Andrew says he could summon a demon to consume Katrina's body, but the demon would most likely eat them too. Jonathan freaks out that Buffy will figure out they're connected to Katrina's death, since Warren is Katrina's ex. Both Jonathan and Andrew bring up turning themselves in, but Warren will have none of it. After bit of thinking, Warren says he has a plan to take care of both the body and the Slayer at the same time.

At the Bronze, Willow freaks out over Anya and Xander swing-dancing on the dance floor. Look, Willow, I know the trend is a little 1998, but there's no reason for you to act like you've never seen the Lindy before. Willow claims she been clinging to a thread of dignity that swing-dancing at the wedding would eradicate, but I feel we should tell her that her old lady blazer has chased whatever dignity she had far, far away. Buffy, in a drape-necked top and a string tied around her neck in place of jewelry, asks if Willow is still doing okay, but it's pretty obvious that she doesn't really care at all. Apparently, Willow finds not doing magic easier if she's surrounded by others, which causes Buffy to apologize for not being around much, which in turn causes Willow to say that she knows Buffy has been "all tied up," and Buffy looks guilty and I bang myself in the head repeatedly with my laptop. Xanya invite Buffy and Willow to join them on the dance floor. Willow does, but Buffy claims she needs to get another drink. She wanders up to the bar, but then dumps her glass and walks up to the mezzanine level overlooking the dance floor.

As she climbs the stairs, the noise of the Bronze fades out and someone turns the Wanker score up REALLY LOUD. Sad Buffy sadly looks down at the dance floor, where her friends are having fun without her. She's sad. Off-screen voice-over from Spike: "You see, you try to be with them but you always end up in the dark…with me." Spike walks up and stands right behind Buffy. He asks what the Scoobies would think of Buffy if they knew "all the things" she had done, if they "knew who [she] really [is]." What a prince. Makes me want to have sex with him. Oh wait, it doesn't, because I don't get off on being humiliated and told that my friends would look down on me if they truly knew me. Maybe Spike needs to write a dating tips book: How To Win Over Your Seriously Depressed Girlfriend Who Is Only Using You For Sex By Humiliating Her And Alienating Her From Her Friends. And didn't he want her to liiiive just a few episodes ago? Now, he's all blah blah creature of the dark blah blah you don't need any friends or a life outside me blah blah blah? Well, it stands to reason that vampires would have a different definition of living. Spike caresses Buffy and slides his hand along her thigh, causing her to whisper, "Don't." Oh, shut up, Buffy!! We all know "no" means "yes" for you. Do we keep having to hear it over and over? Spike slides Buffy's skirt up, telling her, "Stop me." He then becomes her backdoor man in some anatomically impossible sense, and she moans. Huh? Was Spike walking around with his pants around his ankles, or is he wearing a skirt too? As they grind, Spike demands that Buffy not close her eyes; instead, he wants her to watch her friends below as he does her behind. Referring to said friends, Spike says, "That's not your world. You belong in the shadows. With me." Like in the alley scene in "Doublemeat Palace," the look on Buffy's face is morose rather than ecstatic. Spike wants Buffy to tell him that she "doesn't love getting away with this right under their noses." Buffy has no answer. She doesn't appear to love or even like anything at all this season, but I suppose we're supposed to think her lack of answer is agreement with Spike.

Sep: Again. This is anatomically impossible, right? She's a good three feet shorter than he is.
Ace: Well, the show has been skewing a little more sci-fi lately. Maybe the fiction comes in where we're all supposed to believe that Spike is hung like an elephant.
Sep: Heh. Maybe that's how Buffy came back wrong -- with a prolapsed uterus.
Ace: Ow. Moving on. Yes. I do think these sex scenes are unconvincing. Not that I would know. And that's really all I want to say about it because my parents read these.
Sep: Really? You're so lucky My m-o-m doesn't take an interest.
Ace: What the h-e-l-l are you spelling for?
Sep: Well, it's not that she doesn't read them at all. She uses the search function to see if I've mentioned her and reads only those bits. Cracks me up. She's learned only enough about technology so as to enable her to use her computer like a huge vanity mirror with 128 megs of RAM.

Outside Der Zauber Kasten, Xander and Willow run into a just-departing Tara, who's carrying a big book that obviously has something to do with magic. Because it's all musty and bound and stuff. After sharing a small smile with Tara, Xander departs to give the former lovebirds a little space. Willow attempts to make some small talk, but then stumbles into some awkward junkie rhetoric: "No spells for 32 days." Y'know. In case Tara was interested in taking her back or something. She babbles on, dropping a pretty big hint that she was hoping Tara was at Der Zauber Kasten to check up on her. For her part, Tara assumes that Willow would be upset if she were indeed monitoring Willow's activities, and explains that she was really looking for Buffy. Willow says that Buffy has been notoriously absent lately and that "we kinda miss her," in a thinly-veiled ambiguous-pronoun-use attempt to tell Tara that she, Willow, misses her, Tara. Tara earnestly says, "I'm sure she feels the same way." Aw. She walks away, but then turns back to Willow and says, "I'm glad you're doing better." Y'know, all through this scene I kept getting distracted by the fact that both Willow and Tara's outfits allowed little flashes of their bellybuttons to peek out. I kept imagining their bellybuttons having a conversation in sad little voices like, "Hey, it's nice to see you." "I miss you." "Oh gosh. I really wish these two would get their shit together so we could be together again!" Huh. I think that was funnier when it was in my head.

For a moment, I'm taken aback by strains of music that doesn't suck. I was all ready to give props to the Wanker, but then the lead singer of Bush starts singing, and I realize that the reason the song doesn't suck is because Wanker wasn't allowed within five hundred yards of the recording studio. ["You know, I don't love Bush, and the song they use here is almost identical to 'Letting The Cables Sleep,' which the ER editors used for the same purposes in Julianna Margulies's last episode, but it somehow works both times. Anyway, just a little primetime-music trivia for you." -- Sars] Cut to Buffy walking through the graveyard. Shot of Spike at home, pouring himself a bit of spiced blood. He gazes at the door to the crypt, then goes to the door and places both his hands on it, as if he's either trying to sense the presence of someone outside or has completely forgotten how to operate a doorknob. It's a smoldering sort of look. The wooden door collapses into a puddle of goo and exclaims, "Hey! I'm not made of stone, people!" Hee. Not really. I'm just making my own fun over here. Cut to outside, where Buffy leans on the other side of said door. Cut to Sep as she gazes longingly and with great emotion at her own door and wishes she could hightail it away from this crap. Finally Spike remembers how to open doors and bursts out to an empty stoop. Do crypts have stoops? Whatever. His shirt is all open and fluttering in the wind, reminding me of nothing so much as Heathcliff, and I'm seized with a sudden desire to see him take a long, long walk off a very short moor.

Elsewhere, Buffy walks through the graveyard saying to herself, "Don't think about the evil, bloodsucking fiend. Focus on anything but the evil bloodsucking fiend." She hears a scream and raises her eyes heavenward. With a small "thank you" she takes off running. What follows is all very odd. Buffy comes upon a robed Denorex demon chasing a girl and tackles him to the ground. Suddenly they're both gone. Then a shot of Katrina crying on the ground, and again she disappears. Voices whisper incoherently, and Buffy raises her hands to cover her ears as if in pain. Cut to Spike with a bleeding lip on the ground, wondering, "What the hell did you do that for?" Then Buffy is attacked by a couple of the Denorex demons. More quick cuts and loopy time. A scared Buffy asks Spike what's going on. He's all, "Thought you could just slip away then. Vampire, remember? I could feel you." Uh, yeah. I guess that, as a vampire, Spike has Lust-O-Vision which allows you to see through objects that are separating you from your lust bunny. We've never heard of this special vampire booty detection system before. Maybe it's an after-market addition for the chip? Anyway, more confusion. Fighty fight. Katrina crying. Denorex demons kicking the crap out of Buffy; then Katrina grabs at Buffy. Buffy, without even thinking, backhands her so hard that she rolls down a leaf-covered embankment. Buffy follows, as does Spike, after dispatching of the last of the Denorex demons. Spike finds Buffy kneeling to a prone Katrina. "She's dead. I killed her," utters the Slayer in disbelief. Spike assesses the situation and decides that they need to get out of there but quick before someone sees Buffy with the body. Buffy is still too shocked to move. Spike grabs her and drags her away, telling her that she's going to go home and go to sleep while he "sorts this out." "Trust me," he finishes.

Cut to the Vanagon of Dooooom. Warren and Andrew are observing the events on their fancy-schmancy set-up. I'd really like to know how they managed to have the entire surrounding area of the cemetery under surveillance, since Buffy and Spike have already left the scene of the "crime." "Katrina" pulls open the door to the van and climbs in. Her mascara is smudged from crying. Warren congratulates "Katrina" on her performance, and then Katrina morphs into a skirt-clad Jonathan, mascara still smeared with tears. Jonathan agrees that it was "some of [his] best work," but it doesn't sound like the achievement is making him very happy. Andrew wants to know what happens , and Jonathan snarks, "The night's young. There's gotta be some more girls we could kill." Warren callously sums it up: "We stick to the plan. Buffy thinks she killed Katrina. It's her problem now."

Cut to the Summers home. Buffy is tossing and turning in bed, sleeping fitfully. This is one of those dream things, so I'm just going to summarize. Her dreams are a mixture of sex with Spike and the murder of Katrina, and I'm not really one for dream analysis, but notice how she's dreaming of two very disturbing things? There might be something to that. Buffy wakes up breathing heavily.

Cut to Dawn's room. Buffy enters, her coat on, and sits on the edge of Dawn's bed. She watches Dawn sleep for a moment and puts her hand on Dawn's arm. Dawn stirs, and Buffy says, "I love you. You know that, right?" Dawn is immediately suspicious of any sort of attention from her big sister, and sits up. "What's wrong?" she demands. Buffy tries to tell Dawn that despite her shortcomings, she loves Dawn and always will. Dawn is wigged, and Buffy is forced to explain about Katrina. Dawn reaches her arms around Buffy, all the better to hug her. Buffy says that she has to go turn herself in. Dawn wants to know what this all means. She has a horrible realization: "They'll take you away. Won't they?" Buffy just repeats that she's sorry. Dawn calls her on her bluff, saying that Buffy isn't happy here with Dawn, never wanted to come back in the first place, and just wants to go away again. "Well, go," she finishes in tears, "you're not really here anyway." Dawn flounces out of the room and Buffy looks down at the coverlet forlornly.

Establishing shot of Sunnydale police department. Pan across to the alley. Buffy is about to turn the corner and march herself right inside to turn herself in when Spike steps out of the shadows and throws her down in the alley. She's all, "I have to confess." He's all, "Confess what?" Which is pretty much the essence of their differences right there. He thinks that they won't believe her, what with the demon time-looping element. Which really is SO beside the point. Buffy counters that she'll "show them." Spike: "Show them what?" Buffy gets a horrified look on her face and asks what Spike did. He replies that he made good on his promise to take care of things. She's repulsed. He doesn't get it. "It doesn't matter now. No one will ever find her." Offscreen, we hear two policemen talking about how they found a body in the river, "washed up half a mile from the cemetery." Spike dumped her in the river? Putting aside the notion of how very, very wrong it was to dump Katrina's body somewhere, let's just think about what a poor choice of disposal method that was. Guy lives in a graveyard crypt. Couldn't he have buried her in the cemetery? Nobody would ever look for a dead body there. Sheesh.

Back in the alley, Spike still seems to be missing the point. He's focusing on the ability of the police to connect the crime to Buffy, but Buffy is more upset about having, y'know, killed a human. Buffy tries to push past him. He grabs her and stops her. He can't let her go, because he wuuuuuvs her. Buffy punches him and sends him flying, then turns around to go inside. Spike recovers and, in vamp face, pitches her backwards into the alley, insisting that he's not going to let her throw her "life away over this." Buffy retorts that it isn't his choice. And y'know? It really, really isn't. Granted, I don't think that turning herself in is the best way to handle this situation, but I have to respect Buffy's need to do what she feels is right. Although I really don't understand why nobody called Giles. Too bad about that telecommunications strike in merry olde England. Sigh. I miss Giles. There is a large, Giles-shaped hole in my heart. Spike tries to convince Buffy that "one dead girl doesn't tip the scale," in light of how many people she's saved. And this is why you shouldn't date someone with a value system that is diametrically opposed to yours. Maybe if anyone other than Spike had been with Buffy, they might have checked the body as a matter of course and found it cold and stiff. Spike invites Buffy to explain her point of view, and instead she kicks him in the chest. He seems to welcome the pain -- "That's it. Put it all on me" -- and Buffy tackles him to the ground and beats the freakin' bejesus out of him, all the while telling him how "there is nothing good or clean in you. You are dead inside. You. Can't. Feel anything real." What's that? Is that the glint of a tiny little mirror on Spike's forehead? Don't get me wrong. I'm not opposed to seeing Spike getting the crap kicked out of him. On a daily basis. For the hundred years or so. He's done a lot of terrible, awful things and I think he deserves all this and more. But I really, really don't want Buffy to be the one to dish it out. I'm worried about what it means for Buffy that she's betraying the things she believes in by treating Spike this way. Buffy gets a hold of herself and gets up. Spike croaks, "You always hurt the one you love, pet," while his eye proceeds to swell shut. Buffy looks around, confused, and then slowly walks towards the police station. She enters and approaches to the front-desk sergeant, who is on the phone. She waits. He answers another call with, "Yeah, the phones are ringing off the hook," which never fails to crack me up. While she's waiting, she overhears that the body has been identified as Katrina Silber. Buffy puts two and two together and comes up with Warren, then takes off before the desk sergeant gets off the phone.

Der Zauber Kasten. Buffy picks her demon out of a line-up, and Anya explains that the Denorex demons cause a "localized temporal disturbance" as well as some scalp tingling. Hey! How do you know that, Anya? How do you know ANYTHING? While I'm sure that Anya has probably seen a great many demons in her day, I find it hard to believe that she paid attention to any that were not her. I think my opposition to this scene can be summed up thusly -- shut up, Not Giles! Buffy is convinced that Warren is involved. Willow asks how she can be sure, and Buffy answers, "You always hurt the one you love." For some reason, Willow accepts a trite cliché instead of actual reasoning. It's probably the drugs. Er, magic drugs. Oh, whatever. From the background, with absolutely no expression on her face whatever, Dawn pipes up, "Does this mean you're not going away?" Buffy gets up to reassure Dawn that she's staying, but Dawn does the teenager stomp out of there. I really do sympathize with Dawn, what with her whole identity crisis, mom dying, watching her sister commit suicide in front of her, and the fact that she's not even allowed to read a book or have a cup of damn coffee without everyone getting up in her grill about it, but I swear, every time she flounces away I just want to POUND HER INTO THE GROUND. I hope that doesn't make me a bad person.

Cut to Warren, Jonathan, and Andrew in their new Lair of Lame. Warren gleefully reads to the others from a website containing the coroner's report that Katrina's death has been ruled a suicide. Oh. I guess Warren just logged onto www.sunnydalesuicides.com to find that out. Updated hourly! I don't even want to know how a body found in the river that had sustained blunt trauma to the back of the head HOURS before being dumped in said river would be ruled a suicide, but the less I try to think about things, the more my brain likes me. Andrew: "We really got away with murder." Beat. "That's kinda cool." Oh, Andrew. I had such high hopes for, as well as a tiny little crushlet on, you. That's all over. Jonathan echoes Andrew's words, but it's clear that he's less comfortable with the thought of being an actual villain rather than a comic-book crime lord.

Summers house. Tara sits on the couch and tells Buffy that there's absolutely nothing wrong with her. This semester, one of the classrooms that I'm in has lights that are hooked up to a motion detector. No matter what I do, I can't seem to make them turn on when I enter the room. This morning I stood on a desk and did a little jig. Nothing. Twenty minutes later, another person comes in and they don't get two feet before the lights blip on. Strange. I'm kinda beginning to think that maybe I came back wrong. Granted, I haven't been recently pulled from the netherworld, but I did take a short trip to L.A. this summer. That's not exactly heeee-a-ven (more like the onramp to the apocalypse), and I'm not sleeping with any serial killers, but I have noticed a strange lethargy in certain areas of my life. I haven't been doing my dishes right after I finish eating. Sometimes they sit there for whole hours at a time. Anyway. Buffy asks in disbelief, "Then why can Spike hurt me?" Tara summarizes: There's nothing wrong with Buffy, but she is different, in that the spell altered her "on a basic molecular level," leaving her with a "deep, tropical, cellular tan." Let me get this straight. All of Buffy's molecules did the electric slide one proton to the right, and now the chip is confused enough to label her not human? Oookay. I'm also a little surprised that Tara would be able to find that information in a musty book with decaying pages detailing magic spells to raise the dead. I guess there was a little asterisk and the text, "Warning. Some proton shifting can occur. Contents may settle during transport." Buffy looks deeply upset at this news, and her eyes fill to the brim with tears: "This can't be me. This isn't me. Why do I let Spike do those things to me?" "You mean hit you?" Tara clarifies. Buffy looks away, and Tara gets on the clue train. Buffy begs Tara to keep this info to herself. Tara promises and tries to comfort Buffy, but Buffy refuses to be consoled. "Tell me that I'm wrong. Please don't forgive me," she begs as her head falls into Tara's lap. Neato. I love that there's nothing concretely "wrong" with Buffy. Maybe now that she doesn't have that crutch to lean on, it will force her to confront the choices she's been making lately. I can only hope the same thing will happen with Willow and her magic-addiction meta-farce.

By Sep