Spike Choking Drusilla?

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Kimm

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I was just wondering....

Throughout the show we always hear that vampires don't breathe, don't need air, etc. but in Becoming Part 2 Spike chokes Drusilla until she passes out.....so is this just a mistake in the writing?

Curious if anyone else has ever noticed this.
 
got this from Goof and Gaffes on Buffyguide.com.....
explains that it was a goof better then what i could say...

It's been established that vampires don't breathe, at least not in the "real" way that humans do. That is, they obviously can and do inhale and exhale air "” it's necessary in order to talk (or smoke). But they don't actually need to, and they probably don't process the gases in the same way humans do. Thus, without that need for oxygen, the choke hold Spike puts on Drusilla should not make her lose consciousness. (Remember, the whole reason that restricted blood flow renders one unconscious is because the blood carries the necessary oxygen to the brain.)
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There are plenty instances like this one... I've always just took them as major goofs, that are pretty much overlooked.

Drusilla being choked, Spike being affected by alcohol (his blood stream wouldn't be active, I assume, so it's hard for him to get drunk), Spike being drowned in season seven by the turok. The list goes on and on.
 
Things like that always bug me, too. My biggest peeve, personally, is Angel saying he's not able to give Buffy mouth to mouth, so Xander has to do it. I mean, sure...he doesn't HAVE to breathe to live (or be undead) but he obviously has to expel air to TALK! What does he mean he can't rescuscitate Buffy? Horsepucky! Not that I minded Xander doing it, not at all.
 
SpikedBuffy said:
Drusilla being choked, Spike being affected by alcohol (his blood stream wouldn't be active, I assume, so it's hard for him to get drunk), Spike being drowned in season seven by the turok. The list goes on and on.
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vampires can get drunk, it just takes alot longer.

Miffed67 said:
My biggest peeve, personally, is Angel saying he's not able to give Buffy mouth to mouth, so Xander has to do it. I mean, sure...he doesn't HAVE to breathe to live (or be undead) but he obviously has to expel air to TALK!
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yeah, that's annoying too. either when vampires breath (to talk/smoke whatnot) its not like breathing humans do. OR Angel wanted to let Xander be the one to save buffy.
 
SpikedBuffy said:
Drusilla being choked, Spike being affected by alcohol (his blood stream wouldn't be active, I assume, so it's hard for him to get drunk), Spike being drowned in season seven by the turok. The list goes on and on.
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I think vampires' blood must be circulating somehow, how else would vampires get drunk, and how else would male vampires be able to have sex?
 
good points... about bloodstream. I just always assumed that, being dead, your blood is not pumping anymore. But, maybe because they are undead it just takes a little bit longer; it's more of a slow process.
 
I agree that the blood must somehow be circulating....but if the heart isn't beating (which it isn't) then I'm not sure how it's happening.
 
I always pinned their getting drunk to some kind of osmosis/diffusion lol but i did notice the whole spike choking drusilla and spike being drowned in series 7 and they annoyed me to but i couldn't even think of an unlikely explanation so i gave up on it lol
 
Xin Rong said:
I always pinned their getting drunk to some kind of osmosis/diffusion lol but i did notice the whole spike choking drusilla and spike being drowned in series 7 and they annoyed me to but i couldn't even think of an unlikely explanation so i gave up on it lol
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Spike and Dru were the most humany vampires ever! lol
 
S
StuckinTraffic
LOL! They were.....hence the Judge's saying they stink of it, or whatever it was he said, and almost burning them up.
Okay, a few theories that (sort of) explain away some of these technical errors (or mistakes, take your pick 😀):

1) The stranglehold that Spike had Drusilla in wasn't in order to choke her but to cause her pain, from which she passed out. Okay, why he didn't just punch her again i've no idea, given this was Spike and Dru we are talking about, but the pain theory works anyway.

2) As mentioned several times in Buffy and Angel, vampires can and do get drunk and therefore there must be some sort of blood flow going on in their bodies, just not caused by the heart. This is also apparent in the fact that vampires can have sex, for the male vampire blood flow would be kind of important there too! 😉

The fact that blood is flowing without the heart beating shouldn't be too hard to accept though. I mean they walk and talk but are technically dead, what is a little blood flowing compared to that?

3) The Turok Han drowning Spike issue. Well, i just saw that as more of a torture thing than anything else. I mean just because it wasn't gonna kill him doesn't mean that it was particular nice having his head constantly forced under water, right?

4)As for the breathing thing, well vampires can and do simulate breathing, obviously to help them pass as human, but that isn't the same thing as being able to take a deep breath or give somebody else mouth to mouth. The small amount of air needed to talk or even smoke is nothing compared to what Angel would have needed to do to force air into Buffy's lungs in Prophecy Girl. That is actually one of the issues discussed in this thread that i honestly don't see as being a mistake.
 
it bugged me when I first saw the episode but its really not considered a mistake to me....becuase of all the reasons posted above ^^^
 
Well the idea of vampires is so complex that we really need some of the top writers to get together and create a vampire anatomy book or something to get all of this straightened out. The idea is that they are "undead" but we don't really know how that works. It's not so much important that their bodies are completely different from humans as it is that can heal really fast, are quick movers, and oh yeah, drink blood for food. The concept of vampires is that they are "just dead." By that I mean that they are at the point right after death, where the body is still the same as before just not working. In contrast to a zombie who wakes up from the dead.... a vampire's transition is much quicker.
 
Vampires really are complex. This is kind of off topic, but still vampire anatomy related: How does the blood that vampires drink get into their veins? You'd think it would go into their stomachs, since their anatomy is like a human's. What happens?
 
The idea of Joss and some of the other top writers coming up with a specific anatomy for vampires is an interesting one, but i doubt they ever would do that. Far too restrictive.

See, for a series like Star Trek, dealing in science and technology, there needs to be some form of consistent reasoning behind why something does what it does, or works like it works. Otherwise the fans can go to their technical manuals and starship blueprints and say "Hey! That's wrong! This is what should have happened!!!". In the Slayerverse it's all about the magick, however, and that makes things a lot more adaptable.

Joss once said something along the lines of the Hellmouth being the most amazing and all inclusive plot device ever, because rather than need to come up with a complicated answer to why something happened, they just had Giles say "Well, we are on the hellmouth, things like this happen!" and that would be good enough.

Same goes for the vampire physiology. There will never be a full and thorough explanation for why things work the way they do in the vampire body. It's supernatural and so it just does! 🙂
 
I always saw this as Drusilla being weird and dramatic how she is. But maybe it was something else entirely. I dodn't know how the vampire body works so I don't know exactly.
 
Spike didn't get drowned by the Turokhan did he? I thought it was just pushing his head in the water...besides, he didn't pass out...that I remember. Besides, he had a soul.
 
This has eaten away at me for years. They don't breath, how do they smoke, how did he choke her.

THought I let it go but now that I see this thread I get up set all over again. I just don't see why he didn't hit her again.
 
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