Buffy the Vampire Slayer changed forever the moment Spike drove over the "Welcome to Sunnydale" sign and stepped out of his car. The music, the leather coat, the cigarette...an iconic character had been created. It’s not often that a series gives birth to a character who takes on a life outside that series, but Joss Whedon certainly did it with Spike. A couple of years ago I went to a James Marsters signing in Leeds- the doors opened at three in the afternoon, but I got myself down there for about 11.30 and joined a queue of about twenty. By the time the signing started, the line was down to the end of the road, round the corner and up the back street- "Buffy Star in Leeds" even made the Yorkshire Evening Post newsstands the following day. So there’s no doubt that Spike is one of the great original fictional characters of our age, but I think I owe it to myself to try to work out why.

To begin with, Spike is the anti-Angel. It’s touched on in the scene they both have together, which hints at some of the shared history which would become the backbone of the mythology for both Buffy and Angel; Angel’s "Anne Rice act" is the opposite of Spike’s "a bit more fun" approach. In his first scene with the Anointed One, Spike is not only disrespectful, he’s boastful yet charismatic but still tender with Drusilla, the ultimate Goth girlfriend. Given that several of the Marsters fans I’ve met over the years have been a little bit that way themselves, it’s perhaps not completely surprising. He’s also incredibly self-aware; his "I like weapons...they make me feel all manly" is the irony of a character who knows at some deep level that he’s a fictional creation. Together with Anya, he becomes one of the characters who say what the audience is thinking- which just goes to show that the moment Spike arrived in Sunnydale was also the moment Joss Whedon really started chipping away at that fourth wall.

But even if Spike as such had never been thought of, "School Hard" is a tightly plotted episode which shows Buffy at her best. Given that the episode introduces the new regular villains, it doesn’t leave a lot of time for the rest of the regulars- apart from Buffy’s heroics, only Angel and Xander’s hostage act really stands out, and Cordelia’s discovery of the power of prayer feels like taking the character a step backwards. So it’s left to Armin Shimerman’s Principal Snyder and Kristine Sutherland’s Joyce to really make a difference here. Snyder gets to be threatening in his usual unsubtle way, but also has that good exchange with the Chief of Police at the end of the episode, which lets slip that he knows exactly what the vampires were, but he’s implicated in a conspiracy of silence. And Joyce gets that wonderful moment of flooring Spike, which make for a good scene later in the season. Sheila is a nicely drawn and acted minor character whose fate isn’t telegraphed from her first appearance, but she’s seen in enough detail to give her the beginnings of a third dimension.

Still, regardless of everything else, "School Hard" will always be the episode where Spike and Dru enter the fray- and when Buffy went from being a good show to a great original show.

Have a lemonade.