Spike, the Buffybot and the meaning of "Human".
After some discussion on EF about Spike and the Buffybot I found myself thinking about the thematic importance of Warren's short-lived creation. This is the result - comments would be welcome, especially if you want to engage with or rebut my ideas, but if meta isn't your thing, feel free to pass on by.
The Buffyverse is full of doppelgangers, from Vampire Willow and The Wish Buffy to Liam, William and Cecily/Halfrek. It could be argued that The Road Not Taken is almost a mission statement for the show at times, and characters frequently have to make choices about their fundamental identity - who they are and who they want to be. We, the viewers, are shown the alternatives and are encouraged to reflect on the choices made.
Part of growing up is about discovering your “real” self, and coming to terms with your strengths and weaknesses, your core beliefs and your self-delusions. To some extent all the transformations are about that - schoolgirl to witch or Slayer, schoolboy to werewolf or skilled craftsman, young gentlemen to vicious vampires. Dawn, who is “really” a mystical Key, writes about her “real” self in her diary in the first episode in which she is a full participant. As viewers, however, we know that much of what she believes is the truth is not “true” according to our experiences of her world; she is an unreliable narrator on a scale previously unexplored in the show. Moreover, on our first viewing, we have no idea how to handle our own knowledge; our understanding of her - and by extension our own - world is challenged almost to the point of breaking. Eighteen months later it happens again, even more brutally, as Normal Again gives us another version of both Buffy and her world which is frighteningly plausible and undermines everything we thought we knew.
The Buffy of Normal Again is one of a number of alternative Buffies (Buffys?). The vampire of Nightmares, the hardened killer of The Wish, the broken girl of Normal Again are all roads not taken. They are all, significantly, also severely damaged by their life experiences, just as “our” Buffy is. But what if nothing had hurt her? If she’d continued to be happy, supported, unchallenged by the brutal realities of life? What if the loss of her mother and of her boyfriend, Riley, had washed over her, leaving her unaffected?
That is what you get in the Buffybot. Created by sleazy Warren according to Spike’s requirements, she is cheerful at all times, displays the emotional responses expected of her, is invariably ready and eager for sex and her first priority is to please Spike. In other words, she is not a real girl. The image of Pinocchio recurs during the series, often in Spike’s language, but also in the human-made people. The Buffybot is far from being the first of these. Sid, the possessed ventriloquist’s dummy, is followed by Ted, the serial wife abuser and April, the rejected lovebot. All are deeply damaged as “people”, while challenging us to question our own understanding of what actually constitutes a person.
It’s important to recognise that the Buffybot is doubly a masculine idea of what a “real girl” is: Spike’s illusion of Buffy carried into action by Warren. The episode Intervention was written by Jane Espenson, and her twist on what a man might see as ideal is not only funny, as so much of her work is, but also thought-provoking. The Bot is manufactured by a man who is incapable of seeing women as people with their own agency, as we will see in the next season. He made April, tired of her remarkably quickly, moved town to wipe her out of his life and is completely lacking in remorse when she comes looking for him. She was made to be his concept of a girlfriend, only existing in relation to him: he specifically says: “I made her to love me. I didn't make a toy. I made a girlfriend“, but when he is not with her she ceases to exist as far as he is concerned. Her “love” is relevant to him only as long as he wants it, after which it becomes an irritating inconvenience to him. Despite the failure of his first creation, abandoned because she does not perfectly fit his needs, he makes another, to order. And this second attempt has all the same flaws as his first. He is the ultimate solipsist; nobody exists for him when he is not there to observe them.
Spike wants, he thinks, a Buffy clone who is devoted to him, the perfect girlfriend. He himself, after all, was "created" by Drusilla to be her ideal, or idealised, companion. He has tried managing with one false Buffy, when Harmony is ready to play sex games while wearing Buffy’s stolen clothes. It failed, because the pretence was too flimsy, and Harmony’s own needs and demands kept pushing through the fragile fabric of illusion. She is of no value to him in herself, and he barely notices that she leaves him at the end of Crush. Playing as a toy Buffy, from his perspective she is no more real than the robot; if anything, he is able to spare more emotion for the latter. He has been Drusilla's toy for a century or more; this is the relationship pattern he has internalised.
Even so, the robot is clearly a failure in Spike’s terms. It provides sex, but only according to its programming. The programming treats sex as a technical exercise, with files of positions shown onscreen as part of the database. When it reaches the end of a programmed sequence it can only start again or, on instructions, move to another sequence. It is, by specific design, incapable of autonomy. Yet even Warren tired quickly of a too-perfect “girlfriend”. April bored him. Spike wants more from his manufactured girlfriend than Warren wanted from his, however, and the disappointment is likely to be more extreme.
Spike wants Buffy. His obsession with her, if that were all it was, would have been satiated by repeated sexual activity with an apparent clone with her voice, body and face. After all, his requirements were very precise:
WARREN: Hey, she's, uh, great. You'll be real happy, I swear, she's got everything you asked for. All the extra programming, tons of real-world knowledge, the profiles you gave me about her family and friends.
SPIKE: *All* the extra programming, right?
WARREN: Ah, the, the stuff that you wanted, the, uh, scenario responses, you know, the, uh, uh, special ... skills ... (nervous laugh) All of it.
Note that to both of them the special extra programming is what matters, her ability to respond precisely as required, to order. At this point there is no significant difference between the human woman and the mechanical model, as long as the latter is sufficiently capable of mimicking the former. Spike thinks he needs a “nice Buffy”: one that will do exactly what he wants. However, as soon as he has her, he realises that her voice and body do not equal “her”, the woman with whom he is obsessed, with whom in his own mind he is in love. Without agency and free will she cannot be Buffy. What is more, it was always going to be impossible for a human to construct the “real” Buffy, lacking, inevitably, any grasp of her interiority, of the thought processes that make her act as she does.
Spike, the soulless monster, is not Warren, the ensouled human, however; he seems to have some sense of responsibility for the Buffybot. When he realises it is Buffy herself who has visited him after his beating from Glory, he asks after the robot. Later, during the interval between Buffy’s death and her return, he finds it actively painful to work with her, and finds the remnants of the programmed devotion he himself asked for to be particularly distressing. This is part of the learning process we see in him from Season 5 onwards. Unlike Warren he has learned that he needs to sense autonomy in his “girlfriend” - he is only satisfied when her free will is involved.
During the toxic sexual relationship which develops in Season 6, there is a sort of inversion of roles, in that Buffy does not feel “real”, or, indeed “feel” anything much. In the song before their first kiss Buffy admits that only he is capable of making her feel. She is, in effect, not a real girl; she has taken on the role of the robot destroyed by the demons on the day of her return. Spike, conversely, admits that she makes him feel real, not dead. This inversion persists to the point at which Buffy is forced to admit that Spike’s emotions are real for him, while her inability to share them is destroying her.
Spike attempts a number of times further to make her return his feelings; he hovers, threatening to tell all in Normal Again. He tries to make her jealous in Hell’s Bells - and derives some hope when she admits that it does hurt to see him with someone else. Her pain seems to be the only measure he has of what she is able to feel about him; Dawn tells him she was hurt by his entanglement with Anya and this is what gives him the incentive to make one last, disastrous effort to make her share his feelings in Seeing Red. In the bathroom scene she is tired, battered, almost entirely without feeling, it appears from outside. He has a superabundance of feeling and only one template for acting on it - the violent sex which has been a key feature of their relationship. His lack of a soul makes him unable to see the boundary he transgresses until too late.
Ironically this is a point at which they come closest to each other. Both are horrified at what he has attempted to do. He leaves without knowing about the terrible events of later in that episode; she is no longer able to exploit him as a caregiver for Dawn. Both of them have hit rock bottom, and for both there is now only one direction - taking their own moral and personal growth in hand. Spike seeks his soul: Buffy literally returns to the grave, but this time with a new determination to rise from it.
Spike’s growth is reflected in his idea of what humanity means, and his understanding of his place in the scale of demon to human. When he tries to feed from Willow in the dorm he is awkward, trying to reassure her that she is desirable even as he fails to kill her. He still sides with the monster n himself. The creature who attempted to convince himself to feed from a passing stranger in Smashed is fighting for an identity he has lost. A year later he asks Buffy to stake him in case he causes further deaths. An important part in the growth of his understanding of what it means to be human is, ironically, the non-human Buffy, who has shown him that form and function are not enough to make a person. Even more ironically, it could be argued that in some ways the Bot symbolises Buffy - on returning from the dead Buffy is metaphorically in pieces, unable to function. The Buffybot is quite literally both of these.
Appropriately, there are no robots in the final season. Spike and Buffy are both as real as they can be, and have to find ways of destroying their own demons independent of outside forces. Spike faces the fate of his mother and overcomes the trigger which has made him kill again. Buffy has his chip removed, so he finally has full agency - as much and as little as any souled human. His choices are his own, not his demon’s, and her choices are no longer affected by the vast weight of loss and depression which has plagued her for over a year. Each has to face a double once more, but now it’s a representation of their individual deaths, and they have learned to deal with that. When Buffy embraces him and finds peace and solace in his arms, they meet as equals, without duplicates or distorted mirror images. They are ready to go out and fight the fight as autonomous adults.
The Buffyverse is full of doppelgangers, from Vampire Willow and The Wish Buffy to Liam, William and Cecily/Halfrek. It could be argued that The Road Not Taken is almost a mission statement for the show at times, and characters frequently have to make choices about their fundamental identity - who they are and who they want to be. We, the viewers, are shown the alternatives and are encouraged to reflect on the choices made.
Part of growing up is about discovering your “real” self, and coming to terms with your strengths and weaknesses, your core beliefs and your self-delusions. To some extent all the transformations are about that - schoolgirl to witch or Slayer, schoolboy to werewolf or skilled craftsman, young gentlemen to vicious vampires. Dawn, who is “really” a mystical Key, writes about her “real” self in her diary in the first episode in which she is a full participant. As viewers, however, we know that much of what she believes is the truth is not “true” according to our experiences of her world; she is an unreliable narrator on a scale previously unexplored in the show. Moreover, on our first viewing, we have no idea how to handle our own knowledge; our understanding of her - and by extension our own - world is challenged almost to the point of breaking. Eighteen months later it happens again, even more brutally, as Normal Again gives us another version of both Buffy and her world which is frighteningly plausible and undermines everything we thought we knew.
The Buffy of Normal Again is one of a number of alternative Buffies (Buffys?). The vampire of Nightmares, the hardened killer of The Wish, the broken girl of Normal Again are all roads not taken. They are all, significantly, also severely damaged by their life experiences, just as “our” Buffy is. But what if nothing had hurt her? If she’d continued to be happy, supported, unchallenged by the brutal realities of life? What if the loss of her mother and of her boyfriend, Riley, had washed over her, leaving her unaffected?
That is what you get in the Buffybot. Created by sleazy Warren according to Spike’s requirements, she is cheerful at all times, displays the emotional responses expected of her, is invariably ready and eager for sex and her first priority is to please Spike. In other words, she is not a real girl. The image of Pinocchio recurs during the series, often in Spike’s language, but also in the human-made people. The Buffybot is far from being the first of these. Sid, the possessed ventriloquist’s dummy, is followed by Ted, the serial wife abuser and April, the rejected lovebot. All are deeply damaged as “people”, while challenging us to question our own understanding of what actually constitutes a person.
It’s important to recognise that the Buffybot is doubly a masculine idea of what a “real girl” is: Spike’s illusion of Buffy carried into action by Warren. The episode Intervention was written by Jane Espenson, and her twist on what a man might see as ideal is not only funny, as so much of her work is, but also thought-provoking. The Bot is manufactured by a man who is incapable of seeing women as people with their own agency, as we will see in the next season. He made April, tired of her remarkably quickly, moved town to wipe her out of his life and is completely lacking in remorse when she comes looking for him. She was made to be his concept of a girlfriend, only existing in relation to him: he specifically says: “I made her to love me. I didn't make a toy. I made a girlfriend“, but when he is not with her she ceases to exist as far as he is concerned. Her “love” is relevant to him only as long as he wants it, after which it becomes an irritating inconvenience to him. Despite the failure of his first creation, abandoned because she does not perfectly fit his needs, he makes another, to order. And this second attempt has all the same flaws as his first. He is the ultimate solipsist; nobody exists for him when he is not there to observe them.
Spike wants, he thinks, a Buffy clone who is devoted to him, the perfect girlfriend. He himself, after all, was "created" by Drusilla to be her ideal, or idealised, companion. He has tried managing with one false Buffy, when Harmony is ready to play sex games while wearing Buffy’s stolen clothes. It failed, because the pretence was too flimsy, and Harmony’s own needs and demands kept pushing through the fragile fabric of illusion. She is of no value to him in herself, and he barely notices that she leaves him at the end of Crush. Playing as a toy Buffy, from his perspective she is no more real than the robot; if anything, he is able to spare more emotion for the latter. He has been Drusilla's toy for a century or more; this is the relationship pattern he has internalised.
Even so, the robot is clearly a failure in Spike’s terms. It provides sex, but only according to its programming. The programming treats sex as a technical exercise, with files of positions shown onscreen as part of the database. When it reaches the end of a programmed sequence it can only start again or, on instructions, move to another sequence. It is, by specific design, incapable of autonomy. Yet even Warren tired quickly of a too-perfect “girlfriend”. April bored him. Spike wants more from his manufactured girlfriend than Warren wanted from his, however, and the disappointment is likely to be more extreme.
Spike wants Buffy. His obsession with her, if that were all it was, would have been satiated by repeated sexual activity with an apparent clone with her voice, body and face. After all, his requirements were very precise:
WARREN: Hey, she's, uh, great. You'll be real happy, I swear, she's got everything you asked for. All the extra programming, tons of real-world knowledge, the profiles you gave me about her family and friends.
SPIKE: *All* the extra programming, right?
WARREN: Ah, the, the stuff that you wanted, the, uh, scenario responses, you know, the, uh, uh, special ... skills ... (nervous laugh) All of it.
Note that to both of them the special extra programming is what matters, her ability to respond precisely as required, to order. At this point there is no significant difference between the human woman and the mechanical model, as long as the latter is sufficiently capable of mimicking the former. Spike thinks he needs a “nice Buffy”: one that will do exactly what he wants. However, as soon as he has her, he realises that her voice and body do not equal “her”, the woman with whom he is obsessed, with whom in his own mind he is in love. Without agency and free will she cannot be Buffy. What is more, it was always going to be impossible for a human to construct the “real” Buffy, lacking, inevitably, any grasp of her interiority, of the thought processes that make her act as she does.
Spike, the soulless monster, is not Warren, the ensouled human, however; he seems to have some sense of responsibility for the Buffybot. When he realises it is Buffy herself who has visited him after his beating from Glory, he asks after the robot. Later, during the interval between Buffy’s death and her return, he finds it actively painful to work with her, and finds the remnants of the programmed devotion he himself asked for to be particularly distressing. This is part of the learning process we see in him from Season 5 onwards. Unlike Warren he has learned that he needs to sense autonomy in his “girlfriend” - he is only satisfied when her free will is involved.
During the toxic sexual relationship which develops in Season 6, there is a sort of inversion of roles, in that Buffy does not feel “real”, or, indeed “feel” anything much. In the song before their first kiss Buffy admits that only he is capable of making her feel. She is, in effect, not a real girl; she has taken on the role of the robot destroyed by the demons on the day of her return. Spike, conversely, admits that she makes him feel real, not dead. This inversion persists to the point at which Buffy is forced to admit that Spike’s emotions are real for him, while her inability to share them is destroying her.
Spike attempts a number of times further to make her return his feelings; he hovers, threatening to tell all in Normal Again. He tries to make her jealous in Hell’s Bells - and derives some hope when she admits that it does hurt to see him with someone else. Her pain seems to be the only measure he has of what she is able to feel about him; Dawn tells him she was hurt by his entanglement with Anya and this is what gives him the incentive to make one last, disastrous effort to make her share his feelings in Seeing Red. In the bathroom scene she is tired, battered, almost entirely without feeling, it appears from outside. He has a superabundance of feeling and only one template for acting on it - the violent sex which has been a key feature of their relationship. His lack of a soul makes him unable to see the boundary he transgresses until too late.
Ironically this is a point at which they come closest to each other. Both are horrified at what he has attempted to do. He leaves without knowing about the terrible events of later in that episode; she is no longer able to exploit him as a caregiver for Dawn. Both of them have hit rock bottom, and for both there is now only one direction - taking their own moral and personal growth in hand. Spike seeks his soul: Buffy literally returns to the grave, but this time with a new determination to rise from it.
Spike’s growth is reflected in his idea of what humanity means, and his understanding of his place in the scale of demon to human. When he tries to feed from Willow in the dorm he is awkward, trying to reassure her that she is desirable even as he fails to kill her. He still sides with the monster n himself. The creature who attempted to convince himself to feed from a passing stranger in Smashed is fighting for an identity he has lost. A year later he asks Buffy to stake him in case he causes further deaths. An important part in the growth of his understanding of what it means to be human is, ironically, the non-human Buffy, who has shown him that form and function are not enough to make a person. Even more ironically, it could be argued that in some ways the Bot symbolises Buffy - on returning from the dead Buffy is metaphorically in pieces, unable to function. The Buffybot is quite literally both of these.
Appropriately, there are no robots in the final season. Spike and Buffy are both as real as they can be, and have to find ways of destroying their own demons independent of outside forces. Spike faces the fate of his mother and overcomes the trigger which has made him kill again. Buffy has his chip removed, so he finally has full agency - as much and as little as any souled human. His choices are his own, not his demon’s, and her choices are no longer affected by the vast weight of loss and depression which has plagued her for over a year. Each has to face a double once more, but now it’s a representation of their individual deaths, and they have learned to deal with that. When Buffy embraces him and finds peace and solace in his arms, they meet as equals, without duplicates or distorted mirror images. They are ready to go out and fight the fight as autonomous adults.