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| | Guest Starring: | |
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| | Anthony Stewart Head: | |
| | (Giles) | |
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| | DB Woodside: | |
| | (Robin Wood) | |
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| | Tom Lenk: | |
| | (Andrew) | |
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| | Iyari Limon: | |
| | (Kennedy) | |
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| | Caroline Lagerfelt: | |
| | (Anne) | |
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| | Indigo: | |
| | (Rona) | |
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| | KD Aubert: | |
| | (Nikki Wood) | |
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| | Juliet Landau: | |
| | (Drusilla) | |
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17. Lies My Parents Told Me. |
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Robin Wood attempts to take revenge on Spike for killing his mother. |
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Great quotes: |
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 | | Spike, kicking it 'old school'. |
- Buffy: “Any apocalypse I avert without dying, those are the easy ones.”
- Spike: “All the rubbish people keep sticking in my head, it’s a wonder there’s any room for my brain.” Giles: “Doesn’t take up that much space does it?”
- Drusilla: “Such a pretty house, smells of daffodils and viscera.”
- Spike: “I gave him [Robin] a pass on account of the fact that I killed his mother. If he so much as looks at me funny again, I’ll kill him.”
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Fantastic moments: |
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- Spike versus Wood gives the body-doubles plenty of opportunities to show off their considerable marshal arts skills. Not to mention the way that the scene is juxtaposed with Spike’s siring of his own mother and subsequent killing of her. It’s great stuff.
- Spike’s mother gives a horrifically Oedipal speech about how Spike has “... always wanted to get back inside me.” Now that’s evil.
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Duff Bits: |
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- MacGuffin of the week: the magical slug that finds and helps to expose Spike’s memories. It feels like they’re desperate to move the plot on now.
- There are a couple of examples of the writers moving the series’ conceptual goal posts in order to make the plot more dramatic. Buffy talks of making sacrifices to save the world, would she now sacrifice Dawn. She said repeatedly that she wouldn’t at the end of season 5. Spike also appears to still love his mother after becoming a vampire, a new take on the whole ‘becoming evil’ aspect then.
- Be prepared to avert your eyes when Anya’s pink hat enters the screen. It’s hideous.
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Dean's comments: |
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| |  | | Spike's mum. |
So everything comes down to mothers then? In this most Freudian of all BtVS episodes, we get an insight into Spike’s relationship with his mother juxtaposed against his murder of Nicky Wood, the slayer who was Robin Wood’s mother. Essentially the message is that it is the mother that makes the man, Spike notes to Wood that “She [his mother] was your world but you weren’t her’s.” while it turns out that Spike was a distinctly un-evil vampire before he turned his mother and she turned against him. Then there is the contrast with Buffy’s remaining parental figure; her turning away from Giles is seen more of a blossoming of her potential while the two male characters are totally unable to relinquish the looming presence of long-dead mothers. The implications of the episode for Spike are enormous; we see that he wasn’t such a bad guy before his mother influenced him. I.e. Spike can be a good man, something that Buffy has been insisting on for a long time finally has some evidence to back it up. Spike killed his own and Robin Wood’s mothers, but that was the demon, not the man. Redemption may be possible yet. | |
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| | 8/10 | |
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