Now, Angel might have only started with a six-episode contract on “Buffy,” but Spike — who ended up outstaying him on the series — only had five. When the leather-clad British bad boy crashed into Sunnydale at the beginning of season 2, he was set up to be the major villain of the first half of the season, only to be defeated by the stronger Big Bad of the season, Angel.
“He was just Drusilla’s boy toy for five episodes and he was going to be Angel’s first victim,” Marsters explained at a panel in 2019. “Like the whole point of the season, this was over on the other show, was that Buffy would get her heart broken by Angel. They finally hook up and then Angel goes evil. Then Buffy would really, really cry all the time. And then his first act of evil was to take me down. So they only built me up to be cool so that when Angel killed me he would look awesome.”
Spike wasn’t supposed to survive the show’s second season, let alone return as Buffy’s love interest, but the strong fan reaction became impossible to ignore. Even still, Whedon tried his hardest to resist bending to the audience’s desires. “I don’t think that Spike was designed to be a romantic character,” Marsters continued. “I remember when after a couple episodes, the fan reaction was that I was a romantic character. Joss backed against the wall and said, ‘I don’t care how popular you are, kid. You are dead. You are dead, you hear me?”’
And then Spike didn’t die.