This week I've started watching season seven of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and season four of Angel, which originally aired simultaneously. I'm two episodes in on the Buffy season, which is the series' final season. Spike's back after reclaiming his soul. I always liked how he didn't announce it right away, that of course it was driving him mad and he seemed kind of ashamed of it.
It's also the most Christian the show ever gets with the second episode actually concluding in a church and Spike making direct reference to the God that presumably ordained that crucifixes should scald vampires on touch. It leads to a cool moment that underlines the fact that getting his soul back doesn't mean Spike has earned salvation or even forgiveness from Buffy.
He went to all that trouble and they never get back together. But it's not half as sexy now that he has a soul anyway, is it? Somehow Buffy and soulless Spike had better chemistry than any other couple in the Buffyverse. I put it down to the mystery of perversity. I'm often reminded of this bit from "The Black Cat" by Edgar Allan Poe:
PERVERSENESS. Of this spirit philosophy takes no account. Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart -- one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man. Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such?
I might point out that, for all its lust, this is just what was missing from Poor Things. Bella always weighed her relationships by rational justification. Human beings aren't wholly rational.
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