Spike's Soul: What Does it Mean?

understood that she was suffering from a mental illness. But what about Spike? If he was really the good person I wanted to believe he was, why was he acting that way? Or, to put it another way, both Buffy and Spike acted badly last year -- Buffy was mentally ill, what was Spike's excuse?

The "excuse" I came up with is that Spike had some kind of "illness" himself, a spiritual deficiency that made him a slave to the evil inside of him despite his desire to overcome it. I began to believe that Spike was a tragic figure who wanted to be good, but that, because of his very nature, there was something missing without which he could never get all the way there. Once I started looking at the story that way, I could appreciate and actually love what I saw happening, because I saw it as a metaphor for someone with a mental illness who needs medication before he can recover. At the same time, this interpretation did not negate the idea of free will, any more than a depressed person's need for Prozac before he can recover means he lacks free will.

This interpretation made me start to think of Spike as an even stronger-willed person than I had originally believed. If Spike had such a spiritual deficiency as I describe, the fact that he was able to do any good at all -- the fact that he was capable of even wanting to be good -- is all the more remarkable. It’s amazing that he could reach the point where he wanted to be good. He gets a lot of credit for each of the times he was able to go against his nature and do something good. He also gets sympathy rather than censure for the times he was unable to completely succeed. If, however, Spike had no such deficiency, then I would have to give him a lot less credit. That makes the good he was able to accomplish a lot less extraordinary and the evil he continued doing a lot less understandable.

I saw my new interpretation of Spike's story as a parallel to Buffy's story -- they each acted badly towards each other because they were each suffering from a mental or spiritual illness and they each needed help to recover. Buffy needed the antidote she took in "Normal Again" and/or a

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