Whedonverse

Though I think this is an intersting article about fan clamoring for a return to the Buffy/Angel universe, that and $3.50 will buy me a latte at Starbucks. There’s a poll up asking who we’d most like to see in a spin-off. (I’d pick Giles, but didn’t the BBC’s Watcher stall at the starting gate? And we already know Eliza Dushku would rather ride the merry-go-round on Fox Fridays than reprise Faith.)

I wonder who is going to win The Marster fans are rabid, I tell you. Though his response to a Spike spinoff is interesting (see above article):

I told him I would be very interested in doing it within a five-year time span, but being that the character is a vampire, I didn’t think that I was the guy to play him after that because, with everyone who played a vampire on that show, it was a prime concern that you try to maintain the look that you were hired with, that you really try not to age.

Jimmy boy, I think you already missed the boat.

Now, I was living in a tent in the middle of the Outback during the last season of Angel, so I missed it, but I wasn’t exactly crying in my billy can. I thought the show jumped the shark ’round about the time Cordelia jumped in bed with Angel’s supernaturally-aged son, and not even the appearance of the awesome Mrs. Fishburne rescued it for me. And the addition of Spike didn’t whet my appetite either.

I don’t like ensouled Spike. I like him bad and sensitive, like he was in the second season, in the fourth season, hell, even in the fifth season. Remember that scene in the second season when he teams up with Buffy to fight Angel and Acathla (sp?) and says how he, unlike most evil villains, does not want the world to end, because he likes it here. I don’t want my bad boy to get all guilty, because I like him the way he is. I thought the characterization of Spike in the six and seventh seasons of Buffy was one of the things that was most wrong with the show.

But it doesn’t stop me from watching the reruns on TNT. In the one I was watchign the other day, Spike got “corporealized” and proceeded to hook up with Harmony (whom I always thought was a highly amusing character, btw). And there he is, on top of her, thrusting away (great undying soulful love for Buffster, by the way — I love how both vamps whore around L.A. while still holding onto the idea that they are competing for the Slayer) and we get a close up view of his craggy old face, and all the nooks and crannies that the cakes of pancake makeup aren’t quite hiding.

And it occurs to me: Spike is getting old!

Now, “old” and “unattractive” are not the same things at all — after all, I’d still do Paul Newman if given half a chance, and he’s what? Three hundred? But Spike isn’t quit pulling off the Billy Idol thing anymore. He looks more like Billy Idol in The Wedding Singer. That’s not a compliment.

So Spike spinoff? Five years or not, only if he plays a supernaturally aged vampire. He can be a 45 year old vampire, no problem, but he’s not going to play a 25 year old one anymore. Sorry. And I think he should lose the bleach. It doesn’t become his maturity.