Spike: I was on my way. Had a boat ticket and all. Then I put a little thinking into it. A man can't go out in a bloody blaze of glory, savin' the world, and then show up 3 months later, tumbling off a cruise ship in the south of France. I mean, I'd love to, don't get me wrong, but, it's hard to top an exit like that … I expect Buffy would be happy enough to see me. It's just, I gave up my life for her, the world, and if I show up now, flesh and bone, my grand finale won't hold much weight. All of it... won't matter.
So Spike has fears and worries and for the first time ever we see them stand in the way of what he wants. Perhaps the soul also allows him to hear that little voice in the back of his head that cautions and stresses and vocalises fears and makes him think of all the reasons why he shouldn’t and all the things that could go wrong. Maybe the idea that Buffy would certainly remember him fondly is too precious to give up. Maybe those words spoken, those words denied in the Hellmouth are too terrifying to even contemplate. What if what she said was not true? What if it was? And so we discover, if we didn’t already know, that Spike is not all bravado. It’s all an act. He’s scared. Scared about seeing Buffy, worried that his sacrifice will be diminished in her eyes, unsure if he will be loved – and thus, this determines his underlying motivation for a good portion of the remainder of the series. Spike makes a conscious decision to stay away from Buffy and see what he can make of himself without her
Harmony can sympathise with the fear of not mattering but here we are shown the vast amount of distance that separates the souled and unsouled vampires. Spike is able to balm Harmony’s wounded sense of self worth by pointing out that she does matter because someone tried to frame her for murder; that becasue others are envious of her she matters. Yet the same explanation does not satisfy him. By his own logic, the fact that he mattered enough for someone to go to all the effort of retrieving the amulet, sending it to Angel and then re-corporialising him should have Spike feeling pretty pleased with himself. But it doesn’t. He wants to matter, not to an anonymous mass of envious co-workers, but to a blonde slayer somewhere in Europe and, one suspects, to a frequently grumpy grand-sire. He wants to matter for the right reasons and so, he stays.
CHECKPOINT | Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel Exegesis
