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“Do it,” Spike says. “End my torment.” It’s standard Spike melodrama. As Buffy gears up to stake him, she holds back, and Spike kisses her. They stare at each other in shock, and Buffy does the unthinkable. She kisses him again and tells him that she wants him. Spike says that he’s in love with her. And then he wakes up, horrified. “Oh God, no. Please, no.” Roll credits.

It’s a dream sequence that foreshadows much of Spike and Buffy’s dynamic, which goes to some of the darkest places in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and rarely runs both ways.

26 years ago, “Out of My Mind” aired on The WB. Written by Rebecca Rand Kirshner and directed by David Grossman, it’s the fourth episode of the fifth season, and it lays the groundwork for many plot threads explored in the coming episodes.

What is “Out of My Mind” about?

Image: The WB

Despite the Spike and Buffy kicker, the episode is about Buffy and Riley (Marc Blucas), her college boyfriend. At the start, Riley interrupts Buffy’s patrolling, recklessly killing vampires as he tries to prove his strength. Spike also crashes the patrol, establishing the trio dynamic at the core of the episode.

Later, Buffy learns that Riley’s at risk for a heart attack due to the drugs he’s been fed by The Initiative, which make him stronger than a regular human. While Buffy tries to find a way to help him, Riley goes into hiding. She reaches out to everyone to help track him down, including Spike, whom she bribes. But Spike, of course, takes the money and kidnaps the doctor who was meant to help Riley. He tries to force the doctor to remove the inhibitor in his brain.

It all leads to a confrontation between Spike, Buffy, and Riley, with Spike learning that his plan failed, and the chip is still in his head. He has no way of sating his desire to kill the Slayer. Meanwhile, the cracks in Buffy and Riley’s relationship start to show.

This is one of Riley’s showcase episodes, and it finds him at his most grating. After searching for Riley for half the episode, Buffy finds him punching rocks in a cave (literally). Their tense exchanges pave the way for their breakup and for Riley’s departure from the show. He tells Buffy that he’s too normal for her. Buffy replies that if she wanted to date a superpowered guy, she would just date Spike (Ha!).

Beyond the kiss, the episode quietly lays out key pieces of the season, among them: Riley’s insecurity, Joyce’s collapse at breakfast that doctors can’t explain, Spike’s slow turn into one of Buffy’s allies, and Willow’s overreliance on magic. But it saves its best for the end, with the series committing to the long-simmering tension between Spike and Buffy, one that writers doled out patiently.

Spike, defanged

Image: 20th Century Fox

In “Out of My Mind,” Spike is at his most lovelorn and pathetic. He’s also at his funniest. "I will know your blood, Slayer. I will make your neck my chalice and drink deep,” he says into the night, only to fall into an open grave. Unable to kill humans, Spike spends his free time watching Dawson’s Creek. (“Oh, Pacey, you blind idiot. Can’t you see she doesn’t love you?”)

Spike becomes a regular in season 5, with this episode introducing his most enduring version. The episode's final twist reveals that Spike’s series-long obsession with Buffy has been more complicated than plain murderous rage. On a 2008 Buffy forum thread, fans recalled their reactions when first watching the kiss, with most describing shock that the show had brought the subtext between Buffy and Spike to the surface.

Series writer David Fury revealed that the moment when Buffy learns of Spike’s feelings 10 episodes later (in “Crush”) developed unexpectedly. In the writers’ room, they simply wanted other characters to learn of Spike’s feelings. “We wound up tipping our hand a little bit. I’d said, ‘This should be the episode where people find out about Spike being in love,’ and it then progressed into Buffy finding out, which was something we were saving for later,” he said in an interview with BBC Cult.

“It turned out to be a good play because we were able to take them to interesting places throughout the rest of the season.”

In hindsight, Spike and Buffy’s first kiss is a good representation of the full arc of their relationship. It’s not a real kiss; it’s a fantasy, one largely projected by Spike. It marked the start of the pair’s complicated dynamic and hinted at where their story would end up: Spike would always love Buffy, but Buffy would always remain emotionally at arm's length.