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![]() Buffy s4e11 Okay, so you probably already know that Spike has been, for want of a better term, psychically neutered. After he was captured by the Initiative, they installed what they refer to as an implant, and what Spike has referred to (I believe) as a spell. Masquerade has a discussion on the purpose of this, and the gang brings it up in The I in Team. There are several options, and I'll leave up to you to decide which one fits with your knowledge of the Initiative best. (1) The Initiative may be doing this as the first step towards returning vampires to society. A quick note on the likelihood of this: Vampires and other demons are called Hostile Sub-Humans (or HST's) and Forrest explicitly tells Riley that they're only animals. (2) The Initiative may be planning on using these modified Vampires as pawns or foot-soldiers against other demons. There are to ways this could work. (a) they could just release the neutered Vampires once they are confident in the implant. When the Vamps realize that they cannot harm humans but can harm demons, they will, theoretically turn their aggression towards what they can hurt, namely demons. We saw sings of this in Spike when Giles was transformed into a demon. Spike was measuring a crypt while looking for a new place and demon Giles lumbers by, Spike becomes macho and aggressive, saying something to the effect of "Well, well what have we here, a demon...as in the one thing I can hurt" and prepares to attack. the other option is that (b) the Initiative will keep them on a short leash and attempt to use them directly. They can be used to subdue the more powerful demon species that are more dangerous for humans. The advantage of this idea is that it limits possible human casualties, which even secret organisations need to watch. After all, Vampires are expendable. (3) This may have simply been a procedure to keep Spike controllable for experimentation. (4) Finally, this may have just been a scientific experiment, to see if such a thing is possible. This is implied when the Initiative people ask Riley if it worked. Okay, now the how. I assume this is a spell. The Initiative refers to it as an implant, but they have a history of trying to give scientific terms to magical things. It would be theoretically feasible to make an implant that stimulates something (happiness, fear, pain, etc.) when aggression occurs (as in Michael Crichton's book "The Terminal Man"), but making a machine to distinguish between hurting humans and demons would be near impossible. I see two ways this could work. First, the spell kicks in when Spike thinks he is hurting a living human. If he doesn't think he is hurting someone (i.e. throwing them) then, no pain. This would be dangerous, because a psychotic Vampire would conceivably be unaffected. The other possibility is that the implant may magically sense when a human is caused pain by Spike directly. Thus, Spike could throw people, even over bridges or into dangerous objects, because the human would leave his hands unharmed. A final note on this: The pain only kicks in during or just after the action. Spike can hit people, but a blinding flash of pain accompanies the attack. Spike could, theoretically, given his strength, kill someone in one attack. He would then suffer the pain, but it would stop after a brief while. A dead human, he would be able to feed on, and a freshly killed human would still have good blood.
Your opinion Or you can
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