After "Intervention" there was far more reason to believe he was helpful than harmful, and the scoobies didn't have any reason to believe he would start killing again, especially after he'd risked his life in Intervention, Spiral, and the Gift to save human beings. To stake him on the spot after all he'd done at that point would have been plain bizarre.
Again, the Scoobies have been lenient with other soulless vampires (vamp Willow and Harmony), so it's not really out of character that they didn't stake Spike, even if it frustrates me for a lot of reasons. But it makes no sense that people like the Watchers in "Checkpoint" didn't attempt to stake him. The Watchers made it very clear in all their interactions with Angel that they have zero tolerance for vampires, no matter what the circumstances are.
Again, that's true in season 4. It's very clearly stated in that season by Spike and other characters that safety is his motivation for helping them. However, I"m talking about late season 5 and season 6 in which it is very clear to me that his motivation is, initially, to win the approval of Buffy. And very clearly something more after she is dead, when he continues to help. (By the way, after Buffy's death, who's protecting him from demons? Certainly the argument that he's only saving the scoobie's lives on a daily bases in exchange for safety no longer works. 🙂 )
The other demons don't know Buffy is dead, so any of them who aren't attacking Spike out of fear of Buffy would continue to leave him alone as long as he sticks with the Scoobies. Also, on top of an interest in self-preservation, it's possible that Spike with his vamp hearing overheard the Scoobies talking about plans to resurrect Buffy. Being on his best behavior while she was dead would be an excellent way to score points with her when she came back, because none of her friends would be able to accuse him of anything. His surprise when he saw her alive could just have been because he thought it was the Buffybot and wasn't expecting the resurrection spell to have already been done. I know no Spuffy shipper would like that idea, but nobody can prove it either way, and it's certainly possible.
Honestly, regardless of what you or I believe about what souls are and who has them, this is a show about a series of truths and a universe that the writers came up with. They can set up rules and then break them as they see fit so long as they do so in a believable way, and I happen to think that they did. That's all.
They can't break them without explaining why it's possible, which they never did.
Exactly. And at first they set up the seemingly black and white truth that those with souls can be good, and those without them are all bad. There's a twist when it turns out that that's not entirely true; that there's some grey area there.
But WHY? How? This "twist", if I were to accept it (which I don't, obviously), creates all kinds of problems that others in this thread have pointed out, but the show never addressed. If soulless doesn't automatically equal irredeemably evil, then Buffy has no business slaying vampires without giving them a chance. Perhaps she should have been shipping them all to the Initiative to get chipped. That she stakes first and asks questions never is not once challenged by the show. It could have been a really interesting dilemma, and made things much more complicated all around. Perhaps the Watchers' Council has merely been manipulating the Slayer for all these millennia, making her believe that there's nothing good about these creatures they've declared war on. With that kind of story, I maybe could have accepted that Spike wasn't wholly evil anymore by S6, but the show never went there, or even hinted at going there, so it doesn't work.
Nope, it's not his humanity alone. Again, it's the chip that provides the catalyst. Yes, if he was a vampire without a certain degree of underlying humanity, the chip might not have been as effective in basically retraining a lot of his impulses, up to a point. He needed both, not just one or the other. That is why he was different. Put a chip in formerly saint-like Dru and you might get the same result. If she was lucid enough to benefit from it that is.
All of that is just as air tight an explanation to me as "they did some magic and now he has a soul so he couldn't possibly kill people." 🙂
You're still not explaining to me WHY Spike supposedly has this extra humanity. I can explain why Angel has a soul even though vampires are always soulless: Gypsies used magic to curse him with one. The whys and hows are answered. But you have not answered the whys and hows of Spike having more humanity than other vampires. Whether or not the chip was necessary to bring this alleged humanity out of him is irrelevant. I need you to explain why Spike, and not any other vampire we saw in the shows, had this extra measure of humanity despite having no soul. How is that possible, and why is it true of him specifically?
Also, Angel (and post-S6 Spike) certainly could kill people even though he has a soul. The point is that the soul gives him the ability and desire to choose not to.
But there are selfish motives between each and every character's actions, from the virtuous ones to the monsters, soul or no soul.
Just because the soulful characters are very often selfish doesn't mean the soulless characters can ever be selfless. Like I said before, nobody's perfect, so soulful characters won't always live up to their best natures. That's what makes them interesting and relatable. But soulless characters are incomplete. They don't have the component of the self that enables selflessness, so their motives must always be selfish.
For me, not having souls should not prevent them from being exceptional as well. Especially when the 'verse gets to decide what it means to have one in the first place, and as we discover, it's not as simple as it seems in the first few seasons. Again, this is my perspective.
Spike's story is still exceptional from my perspective (it just happens to fail at making me like him). Without his exact personality (no extra humanity necessary), his specific character arc would be impossible. This is how I see his story:
Spike is a vampire who loves violence, is obsessed with the Slayer, and is very much ruled by his emotions. He gets captured and chipped, and can no longer exercise his passion for violence on humans, so he naturally joins up with the people who are both against the ones who chipped him AND fight the only things he can still fight: demons. Bonus: they pay him for any information he gives them, so he has money for blood too. After a while, he reaches a point of no return where he's killed to many demons that the demonic community won't accept him back, so he's stuck with the good guys and the more benign demons (like Clem and his poker buddies).
Eventually, his Slayer obsession, still as strong as ever, finds a new outlet. He can't kill her, no matter how much he wants to, but all this passion he has about her has to go *somewhere*. So now, instead of wanting to kill the Slayer, he develops an intense sexual attraction for her. Being soulless, he has no capacity to woo her properly, or to understand that his interest might not be returned. After all, they both started out wanting to kill each other, so if his hatred has turned into lust, why shouldn't hers? He pursues her the only way he knows how, by sabotaging her existing relationship, making a show of being helpful and sympathetic, and trying to ingratiate himself with the people she cares about, but it still isn't working.
When her friends pull her out of heaven and she resents them for it and confides in him, he sees his chance. He tries to distance her from her friends even more, because she's much more vulnerable to him without her support group. And hey, it works! She's kissing him! But then they have an argument, and he hits her. His chip doesn't activate. He jumps at the thought that he's free from this thing that's been holding him back, and immediately goes and tries to attack someone. But he can't; the chip isn't really broken. So instead he thinks he'll just carry out his original plan to kill the Slayer. But he wants her more than he wants to kill her now, so when things go a different direction during their fight, he's all for it.
Now that she's sleeping with him, it's obvious to him that she loves him, because that's what sex means to him. He doesn't and can't understand that it's not what it means to her. He continues to encourage her alienation from her friends, and the affair continues as well, with her becoming ever more miserable and disgusted with herself. But then she pulls herself together and tells him it's over. This makes no sense to him, but what can he do about it? Maybe he was wrong all along, and she really doesn't love him. Maybe she just needs time to come around. He can wait.
But as the chances that she'll come back to him seem to grow nonexistent, he becomes bitter and loses hope. He sleeps with one of her friends who is also hurting and disillusioned, and when her sister drops by his crypt and tells him how much that hurt her, hope rekindles. In his mind, obviously it wouldn't hurt her if she wasn't jealous, and she wouldn't be jealous if she didn't love him. He goes to prove to her that she really does love him. He tries to force her to have sex with him to remind her of what they had. If he can just make her feel it, she'll realize the truth. He's very, very mistaken, of course. His attempt to prove she loves him only makes her realize that she was wrong to drop her guard and believe he'd changed for the better. The truth she should have remembered all along is that he's soulless and can never change for the better.
If she wasn't really done with him before, she definitely is now, and he finally realizes this. He knows he totally blew his chance with her for good. He rages and storms a bit; all his efforts have been for nothing. But then Clem says something that gives him an idea: the only reason she can't love him is that he has no soul. The chip might be stopping him from being the monster he wants to be, but he wants her more than he wants to be that monster, and the only way he'll get her is if he has a soul. It worked out great for Angel--she didn't even hold Angelus's crimes against him. This has to be it. If he gets a soul, she'll love him. He doesn't consider that it might not be that simple, and off he goes to get his soul.
But then he has it. He's no longer the same Spike. He never could have imagined that having a soul would be like this, and part of him wishes he'd never gotten it. As William, he was harmless. He never would have hurt anyone. But now he has over a century of memories of killing and torturing and raping, and that he enjoyed every second of it. Worst of all, he tried to do all of that to the woman he believed he loved. He focuses on that, because the rest is too much.
He knows he has no right to go anywhere near her, but he has no one else he can turn to. Miracle of miracles, she's willing to help him, and she protects him when her friends and her sister still want him dead. He loves her for real now, and he knows she's still hurting from what he did, so he doesn't press it. They fight together. They have each other's backs when nobody else does. They trust each other. He allows himself to hope that it might lead to something else, but then Angel comes back for five minutes and she kisses him without hesitation. Everything he's been through for her still isn't enough, but he's still willing to fight by her side to the end, so he takes the amulet and goes down into the Hellmouth with her and her little army. He wasn't planning on making it out of there alive; none of them were, really. Then the amulet activates and takes out all of the enemies at once, and suddenly there's a chance that some of the good guys will live to see another day. After everything they've been through, she doesn't want to leave him there to die. She finally does love him, but it's still not in the way he hoped for, and now that he's about to die, it doesn't really matter anyway. He tells her to go and she does. He dies.
But then he comes back. He's a ghost, bound to the L.A. branch of Wolfram & Hart, of which Angel is now CEO. His big sacrifice seems a little meaningless now, and he's stuck with the guy who brought the amulet to Sunnydale in the first place. Things couldn't really suck more. He amuses himself by being as irritating to Angel as he possibly can. Then he finds himself corporeal again, and that there's a prophecy that might apply to him. He fights Angel for it, believing that winning the fight means winning claim to the prophecy. He wants it because he thinks he deserves it more. He's always been the one fighting for things: his soul, Buffy, and now this prophecy, while Angel's soul just kind of fell in his lap, and Buffy loved him without him doing anything to deserve it. Of course, he's missing the big picture, but that's beside the point.
He wins the fight, he drinks from the goblet, but it was fake. So much for proving he deserved the prophecy more. He doesn't feel like he can just go to Buffy now. He isn't secure about what she feels, so maybe it's better to just leave it be. As long as Angel doesn't get her, he can live with that. Then this guy comes along and tells him he's supposed to fight the good fight because Angel fell off that wagon. This is the kind of thing he loves to hear, so he tries it out, even though he has no patience for idiots who get into situations where they could easily get killed. Then a crazy Slayer comes along and reminds him of all the people he's killed. He's been avoiding the guilt, blaming Angel instead of himself, but now he has to own up to it, and it's not pleasant.
He finds out his destiny guide was a fake too, and only using him to get to Angel. He can't have that, and the idea of actually working with Angel becomes more appealing than it ever was before. When a girl he cares about gets taken over by an ancient demon, he leaves all that antagonism towards Angel behind him. What does any of that matter when Fred's life is at stake? They fail to save her. Angel starts showing signs of having gone off the deep end. As much as he doesn't like the guy, part of him does care. He never thought Angel would go evil, and he doesn't like it. Then it turns out it was all an act to get in with some powerful bad guys so he could take them out. Angel asks Spike and all the others if they're in. Once again, Spike is facing a "go down fighting" situation, but this time at Angel's side, not Buffy's. There's no girl to impress here. To his surprise, he discovers that he's noble enough to do it. After all, if Angel goes down fighting too, he won't get the girl either.
...Wow, that ended up being way[ longer than I expected. For summary's sake, I didn't go into detail about all the stuff I don't like about Spike, I just tried to give his story from what I interpret to be his perspective. Even though I personally don't like him, I think it's possible to like him quite a lot within this perspective, which doesn't break any rules of the Buffyverse.
