Btvs Recap - Tumblr Posts

"She didn't even kill me! [...] She didn't even care enough to cut off my head, or set me on fire. Is that too much to ask? Y'know, some little sign that she cared?" - Spike about Drusilla, definitely not Faith about Buffy

Lovers Walk is about Faith.

One of the reasons I don't mind that Faith is physically missing for so much of S3 is that she is such a strong thematic presence that episodes where she doesn't even appear are still very much About her and what she represents in the narrative. Like Band Candy showing us the events of Bad Girls eight episodes in advance, The Wish showing us how easily Buffy could end up a more jaded, bitter, friendless slayer, Earshot being centred around characters whose jealousy and insecurities can turn suicidal as easily as homoicidal. But Lovers Walk might be my favourite of these.

If you read the events of Revelations as Faith feeling cheated on and dumped (which you should, because that's how the narrative describes it. It's not literally what happens but it is explicitly how Faith feels about it), then that makes Spike in Lovers Walk very clearly a proxy Faith. Like, we leave off Revelations with Faith alone in her motel, feeling sad and heartbroken and cut off from Buffy, and then we roll into Lovers Walk and Buffy's other dark shadow self turns up a heartbroken mess, having just been cheated on and dumped, and spends the whole episode being very sad and bitter about it, and I think it's a good reference point for what Faith is also feeling at that point.

Faith is already linked to the events of this episode through the "we're just good friends" axis that connects Buffy/Faith, Buffy/Angel and Willow/Xander that I've talked about before. She's also linked through the dog/love theme that is woven throughout S3 and pops up here with the "love's bitch" reference. And Spike's speech puts a bow on this, by being, to be honest, a better desriptor of Buffy/Faith than it is of Buffy/Angel. Everything that Spike says in this episode Faith could say herself, and most likely wants to say herself.

"You're not friends. You'll never be friends. You'll be in love till it kills you both. You'll fight, and you'll shag, and you'll hate each other till it makes you quiver, but you'll never be friends."