Spike is in love with Buffy. Dru has returned to Sunnydale. Riley has left. Dawn has a crush on Spike. Harmony is becoming increasingly irritating. Spike decides it's time to tell Buffy how he feels.

In theory it should be a winner, but there's an air that maybe Spike should have kept his feelings quiet. While I appreciate that eventually a plotline has to go somewhere before it gets annoying, having Spike stealing Buffy's knickers and suchlike was a fun way to go, and you start to become convinced that maybe there could be something between them. Sadly, this episode makes you wish that the whole plotline hadn't been started in the first place.

The problem is, an unrequited love is a difficult plotline to deal with, and while you can keep it funny, it works quite well for Buffy. Now, while it starts off this way with Spike still mooning around (his scenes with Dawn are marvellous, especially now she's the only teenager who normal rules don't apply to), his later attempts to win over Buffy fall flat. You can't help but feel sorry for the poor guy. It seems he's finally getting his own way when he's chained and tied Buffy and Dru, but when Harmony shoots him in the back and a four-way fight begins that he's going to end up the loser of, it's heartbreaking. We know from flashbacks that Spike does have it in him to be good, but he'd serve the series far better fighting demons alongside Buffy than attempting to romance her in his own odd way. This plotline is getting dangerously close to getting annoying, and that wouldn't help any of the characters involved.

As to Dru's appearance, for a big event in the grand scheme of things, it's taken fairly lightly. If it had resulted in Spike snapping back to Bad Boy status (and we're left to assume he doesn't kill the girl he's given; his mouth has blood on it, but Dru helped there), then it would have worked better. I'd love to see Spike relocate to LA and join Angel; it's starting to seem a far better function. And, let's face it, there's someone he CAN terrorize. Juliet Landau is somewhat off-form here too; after some superbly loopy performances in Angel, she doesn't have much to do, and her accent seems more odd than usual. Although there are some flickers of the couple we knew and loved from season two, it's not quite the sparky reunion it could have been, which is a shame. I await with interest the next phase...

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