I think you’re reading too much into that. We don’t know when or why Andrew turned evil. All we know is that he was enamored with Warren.
One could just as easily assume that he was already evil, and that he developed feelings for Warren after they had already teamed up. This would, in fact, be more consistent with the Geek Trio’s origin (“So, you wanna team up and take over Sunnydale?”).
Here’s my problem with the whole “Evil Willow” thing:
SPOILERS BELOW
Okay, supposedly Willow is going to torture and kill Warren to avenge her dead lover. My problem is that what happens after that? Poor Willow has to live with the fact that she killed a live person(albeit for revenge)?
My prediction: They will have Willow have amnesia going back to the first time she tried magic under the tutelage of Jenny Calander. Joss Whedon has said next years theme is Back to Year One, so taking magic(and memory) away from Willow would be a way to achieve that end.
You gotta wonder if she would remember she’s gay, tho…
Remember, you heard it here first!
Chris W
In Tabula Rasa she was aware of being “kinda gay”. Vampire Willow is "kinda gay’. Willow is bisexual. It isn’t a matter of memory it is a part of who she is beyond the explicit memories of gay experiences.
But I think that Buffy wouldn’t have just said “No Spike, stop!” I think she would have kicked his ass. That’s the Buffy we know and love. We know she can beat the shit out of him…she does it all the time! Even when Spike isn’t a physical threat. So when all of a sudden he turns into a physical threat, she’s all weak and scared? Nope, sorry. She says she can’t love him because she can’t trust him. Fair enough. In that case, she should always be on her guard around him, and he shouldn’t get the chance to overpower her.
I’m not trying to blame the victim here. I’m blaming the writers for turning her into a victim when she is not one and should never be one. Remember in season 2 when the guy on the swimming team got a little too friendly and she took care of him right quick? There’s absolutely no reason she couldn’t do the same to Spike from the very beginning of the attack.
p’l’girl, the difference between Spike and swim-team guy is that Buffy clearly has some feelings for Spike. She may not think he can change, but there are reasons that she hasn’t staked him yet. (Did anyone else immediately think, when he showed up in the bathroom, “Why haven’t you withdrawn the invitation to your house if you’ve broken up with him?”)
I still say portraying Buffy as scared and vulnerable makes her a more interesting hero, and inevitably (I don’t read spoilers) sets up conflicts for the future between Buffy and Spike as well as Buffy and Dawn. Again, I’ve felt the most sympathy for Buffy when she’s just a girl, like when she has the one night stand with Parker and just doesn’t get it.
But pepper, she didn’t want to beat the shit out of him, see? I wonder… if she would have fought back, would she have slept with him again???
Not to take away from the what-was-up-with-Buffy-and-Spike debate, but I just want to note how hard Tara’s loss is going to hit Dawn. She’s lost her mom (died), her dad (in Spain with secretary). her sister (for a few months), her surrogate dad (Giles, off to England) and now one of her mom-type figures (Tara). Dawn may be annoying, but she’s had her good moments as well, such as her reaction to seeing Willow and Tara back together.
I was so blown away(pun unintended) by this.
I rewound the credits last night so my husband and I could confirm that Amber was back in the credits.
I don’t care how they have to do it… BRING HER BACK!!!
I love Tara. So does my husband. Willow and Tara are the best gay couple on television.
If the credit thing was a tease, I want to yank out Joss’ ball hairs one by one and then get nasty.
Breakups I can handle. Brakeups are normal.
But when they put her in the credits, spend the whole episode having them hang all over each other and then kill her off? Spare me the anvils, I get the message.
Having Tara back in the opening credits is the result of a long-ago trick that Joss wanted to play on us but couldn’t. In the very first episode, he wanted Jesse to be in the opening credits to make his death all the more shocking right off the bat. It would have cost too much for a one-off joke, though, since they would have had to shoot additional scenes with Jesse just for use in the credits.
On this, I’ll agree with p’girl. The entire bathroom struggle was not set up well, and it lacked credibility.
Well, she is a witch, but luckily she’s never cursed anybody… 
WAG (not informed by spoilers in any way):
I wouldn’t be surprised if we see that Warren not only becomes Willow’s punching-bag, but her sacrfificial deer in the resurrect-Tara spell.
Good policy. I agree.
TARA LIVES!
But the Parker thing makes sense to me, being conflicted in her feelings makes sense to me, not being able to kick Spike off (which is what it looked like) doesn’t make logical sense to me.
If the director was trying to convey that Buffy wasn’t sure what she wanted emotionally, it was bad directing - it looked like she was physically incapable (not emotionally conflicted). And that didn’t work for me.
I know. Got my DVD right here.
Doesn’t make it any better. Or any less dumb, anvil-ish, or any other negative thing I could come up with.
They played this feed in place of Entropy’s, so this news has been around the net for awhile. I knew it was coming, but I’m still on the charter cruise of the HMS Bitter.
Re: Tara lives. We have the precedent of Tara helping Buffy through her resurrection vertigo. Hope. Hope.
My woefully demonstrably inaccurate BtVS speculation: next season, Tara will be OB1 for Willow, showing up all otherworldly, shimmery and advisory.
I shed bitter tears last night. I thought the ep was supposed to be funny.
I’m under your spell.
Surging like the sea,
Floating here so helplessly.
I break with every swell.
Lost in ecstacy,
Spread beneath my willow tree.
You make me complete.
Tara lives!
I agree with Baroo: let’s have ghost Tara! There’s already precedent of sort in Angel, with Cordy’s, um, “loofah buddy.”
Also, MrVisible, you’re misreading Andrew. He’s not a criminal because he’s gay, he’s a criminal because he’s repressed. Get this kid to a Pride Parade, and he’ll be way to busy for freeze rays and jetpacks.
Wow. Cool. Very well told.
Let me preface this by saying that all along I’ve like Buffy not because of the vampires, not because I’m looking for escapism, but because all I want in life is a drama, with a story, that’s well told. And Buffy has always met that criteria. Especially with this week’s ep.
I’ve actually been thinking over the second half of this season that Buffy has been looking tired, and that’s probably just the drags about living at the beginning of the Millennium. She works in a fast-food joint, fergoshsake! She’s in a twisted relationship, and she has a second job saving the world. All the leisure she had in the past to train, relax, have fun? Gone like a soap bubble because now her mom’s dead, her father figure is gone, and she’s gotta grow up and be an adult in the rat race.
Forget that she’s superstrong. *She’s still just * a regular woman. She does not have to make the smart choice because she’s a hero. She does not have to kick Spike’s ass three ways from Sunday just because she can. She’s a normal person, and she reacted the way normal people do. She cares about Spike, doesn’t really want to hurt him, and then feels ashamed because of what happened. I can relate to that. I can empathize with that. I think it’s totally believable, unlike some JThunder and pepperlandgirl. But maybe I’m the only one who found it hard to really break up with someone that I thought I loved.
Spike. I think I may be the only person on this board who thinks his way of handling love actually makes sense. That his bathroom attack is normal. I mean, back when he was human, as a 19th century aristocrat, his behaviour would have been socially acceptable, even (in some circles) *expected *.
And it’s not like he’s had a normal life as a vamp. He was with Drusilla! A twisted, twisted person who repeatedly abandoned him for whatever new demonic butterfly she snared in her web. Spike has never known how to handle his feelings.
But now he’s a lover scorned, and he’s gonna go all Shakespearean on us. If he was a friend of mine, I’d counsel him otherwise. But he’s a TV character, dammit, so as long as he’s interesting it’ll be good.
Tara needs a heart. Warren’s got one. You’d think a witch who resurrected her best friend, who just lost her lover, would know how to perform a quickie transplant.
Warren, Jonathon, and Andrew. I love it! Andrew is the guy being led down the path to evil for love. Jonathon is reluctant, but they’re the only friends he’s got. And Warren, he’s always been an irrational fuck wanting to be a James Bond villain, and his plans finally, totally, went awry. He has no original dreams-- he gets all his ideas from comic books, video games, and films.
Seriously, he grabs a pair of super-duper orbs to become super-strong and what does he do? Knock over a friggin armoured car! It’s ludicrous, and totally in character. And when Buffy foils his plan by castrating him, of course he reacts by grabbing a gun (replacement penis) and fires off a few shots. I love it. His high-falutin things have gone amuck, so he sinks to being a common thug. Fantastic!
I am very impressed.
Yeah, they might just as well have given Tara a red shirt and started calling her “Ensign Tara”.
Even without the obnoxious and unavoidable spoilers and hints percolating around the internet, it was pretty clear that Tara was pretty near the end of her “sell-by” date.
As for the Buffy and Spike scene – I guess it’s always been the BTVS theme that the really scary stuff isn’t the monsters and the ghouls – it’s the real life stuff – being an outsider in high school, having parents die, having abusive, stalker boyfriends. So it fits in with the general theme – it’s just that the drama was more deftly woven into the plots in the earlier seasons. Now the focus is on the drama and the monsters are an afterthought.
See, I don’t think Warren got crazy because he had a gun. I think he got a gun because he went crazy.
Warren’t primary motivation all along has been his fear of and lust for women. He built a robot so he could have sex without having a relationship. He mind-controlled his ex-girlfriend for the same reason, and when she tried to leave, he killed her.
He hates Buffy with a passion, more than the other geek trio folks.
He gets a source of ultimate strength and invulnerability, and they’re a couple of magic balls. Hmm… and then a woman comes along and breaks his balls, rendering him powerless.
I think that sent him round the Freudian bend. He was no longer in a state of mind where he could plan: he was psychotic with rage. He wanted a way to kill Buffy.
And all their previous inventions were gone, and his friends were gone. He didn’t want to spend two weeks creating a new doomsday machine: he wanted her dead, more than he’d ever wanted anything. She’d emasculated him, and that was the one unforgiveable sin for Warren.
So he got a gun.
As for Joss ruining queer relationships, I agree that he ruins ALL relationships. He’s a rat bastard that way, but he’s an equal-opportunity rat bastard. I hate that Tara had to die; she was becoming one of my favorite characters. But I’m a masochist, so I guess it’s good thing that he killed one of my favorites, rather than picking off a character (coughAnyacough) that I don’t care so much about.
Daniel