Spike's Soul: What Does it Mean?

seemed like he had lost those qualities when it came to dealing with Buffy. Instead, he told her that she had come back wrong, that she belonged in the darkness, and to just get over it. He kept telling her exactly the right things to make her depression worse.

Sometime between "Smashed" and "Normal Again", I started to question whether Spike really had any desire to become a better person. If I had held on to my original belief that Spike was capable of making the complete transformation to one of the good guys without the benefit of a soul, then seeing him do all of those things would have led me to the conclusion that he had no real desire to become a good person. I knew he wanted Buffy, but other than that I started to think he hadn't changed. He still didn't care about anyone outside of Buffy's immediate circle of friends. He could do a few good things for Buffy's sake or in Buffy's memory, but he had demonstrated neither the intention nor the desire to make any progress beyond that point. Holding on to the belief that the story we were seeing was entirely about free will would have made me spend the majority of Season Six being disappointed in Spike and, at times, actively disliking him.

I wasn't happy feeling that way about someone who, just a few months earlier, had been one of my favorite characters in the history of television. I wanted to believe that Spike was trying to be good, but I couldn't reconcile that with the way he kept acting. How could he attack innocent people or broker weapons of mass destruction if he wanted to be good? Even the way Spike treated Buffy last year, with his frequent attempts to separate her from her friends and draw her down into the darkness, was just as wrong and just as abusive, in it's own way, as the way Buffy treated him. These were not the acts of the good person I wanted Spike to be.

In trying to reconcile my desire to see Spike as a good person with the seemingly contradictory behavior I was seeing from him, something occurred to me. I had been able to look at the way Buffy acted towards Spike all season long and still consider her a good person despite her bad behavior because I understood

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