OK, so it was “Crush”, then. I was trying to remember exactly which episode it was, kinda vaguely thinking it might be “Crush”.
I just don’t remember even a *mention *of a disinvity spell to keep Spike out. I mean, it wasn’t like Spike could harm Buffy (outside of her possibly starving to death if Harmony’s aim had been a bit better, and she’d already eaten someone that night) 'Course, then again, I’ve only seen most of S5 only once, and sometimes I miss details the first time I see an ep and pick them up in the repeats.
I just think it’s more fun to think that Buffy’s ordering this besottedly-in-love-with-her vampire who came through being vamped with a heapin’ helpin’ of his humanity intact to stay away would actually work, where you’d have to sprinkle holy water and burn mossy herbs and chant a few rhyming couplets in Latin to keep your average undead guy out once he’d gotten an invite.
I wonder if you didn’t happen to have a copy of the Latin text, could get by with singing the chorus of “I Will Survive” a few times while you sprinkled the holy water and burned the mossy herbs?
They didn’t mention it explicitly. However, in that ep, Willow asks Buffy, just before she leaves to confront Spike, if there’s anything she can do, and Buffy tells her yes, there is something. It looks like a pretty strong implication to me. Of course, if you watched it on FX, they may have cut that scene, the bastards.
I agree with WordMan 100% on the whole “issue”. For me, what matters most is what the artists are trying to say. Unless the continuity “gaffe” directly invalidates a major thematic point (not just a plot point) from an earlier episode, it doesn’t matter.
And it actually kind of bugs me when people do go online and start talking about continuity “errors” and such, for two reasons:
- I think they’re missing the point. As WordMan points out, the whole business with Angel’s losing his soul is a plot device to represent Buffy’s first love and first betrayal. What gives the show weight & depth, what makes it more than just a teen soap opera action/horror/comedy with vampires and robots, is that the creators are using the conventions of horror & sci-fi stories to make analogies with more fundamental stuff – growing up, learning responsibility, finding your place, losing a loved one, etc. etc.
It doesn’t impress me so much that the creators of the show (actually, usually only Joss Whedon is given all the credit, as if he did the entire series solo) have made this alternate reality with its own rules about demons and vampires and such. What impresses me is that they’re able to take the conventions of television series, soap operas, and horror/sci-fi cliches, parody them, and then make them meaningful. Pointing out “nitpicks” just undermines the true art behind the whole thing.
- It often turns nasty. If you disagree with a point, you’re informed that you’re not qualified to speak on the issue because you haven’t watched enough of the series. Bull. I think you should be able to watch any individual episode of a show like Buffy or Star Trek and appreciate or not appreciate it on its own. If you’ve seen them all, then you can enjoy it on a different level, and the characters’ actions will have more weight and meaning to you. But criticizing someone for not investing as much time into a television series as you have, is just not cool.
For the record, I’ve seen every episode of Buffy, most of them at least twice, but I don’t remember episode titles and I don’t particularly care about the details of vampire and demon physiology. (But yes, it does bug me that they had so many reservations about killing Spike, when in the first episode(s) they made such a point about how it was okay to kill Xander and Willow’s friend because the vampire version “wasn’t him anymore”).
In retrospect, I believe point (2) is off-topic. So just put me down for number (1), emphatically.