Spike wakes from his dream kiss with Buffy looking horrified, not happy. “Oh God, no. Please, no.” The ending of “Out of My Mind” doesn’t begin a romance. It forces him to recognize a desire he can no longer explain away as hatred, while leaving Buffy’s feelings entirely outside the revelation. She hasn’t kissed him. He’s dreamed that she wanted to.
That distinction gives the scene its bite. In a relationship that will reach some of the darkest places in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, attraction, affection, and trust rarely arrive together or mean the same thing to both people.
“Out of My Mind” aired on The WB 26 years ago. Written by Rebecca Rand Kirshner and directed by David Grossman, the fourth episode of season five spends most of its running time setting up problems for the episodes ahead. Its final scene makes that groundwork much more personal.
Image: The WB
In the dream, Spike (James Marsters) is brooding in his crypt when Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) kicks down the door. She announces that she’s finished with him and intends to kill him. “Do it,” he says. “End my torment.” So far, it’s familiar Spike melodrama.
Then Buffy hesitates before staking him, and he kisses her. Both look stunned. She kisses him again, tells him she wants him, and he declares that he’s in love with her. His abrupt awakening strips away that apparent mutual feeling. What remains is something Spike knows about himself, not something he knows about Buffy.
The source article offers a persuasive reading of the scene: this fantasy contains the imbalance that will shape their relationship. Spike supplies both the desire and Buffy’s imagined response. The series brings their long-simmering tension into the open without establishing that she shares his feelings.
Riley’s crisis sets the stage for Spike’s revelation
For most of the episode, the real trouble is Buffy’s actual relationship. Her college boyfriend, Riley (Marc Blucas), interrupts her patrol and recklessly kills vampires to prove his strength. Spike crashes the patrol too, bringing all three characters together before the medical crisis begins.
Buffy discovers that the drugs The Initiative gave Riley, which make him stronger than an ordinary human, have put him at risk of a heart attack. She tries to get him help. He goes into hiding instead. Her search eventually includes bribing Spike to find him, but Spike takes the money and kidnaps the doctor meant to treat Riley. He wants the doctor to remove the chip in his brain that prevents him from hurting humans.
The confrontation puts Buffy, Riley, and Spike in one place again, and neither man gets what he wants. Spike discovers that the attempt failed: the chip is still there, leaving him unable to satisfy his desire to kill the Slayer. Riley’s crisis, meanwhile, exposes fractures in his relationship with Buffy.
The source critic considers this one of Riley’s major episodes, but also finds him at his most grating. There’s a concrete reason for that judgment: after Buffy spends half the episode searching for her endangered boyfriend, she finds him literally punching rocks in a cave. His refusal to accept help turns her efforts to keep him alive into another argument about whether he’s enough for her.
Riley tells Buffy that he’s too normal for her. She counters that if she wanted a superpowered boyfriend, she could simply date Spike. The ending gives that dismissal an uncomfortable second meaning, although it remains Buffy’s hypothetical, not a confession. These tense exchanges set up her breakup with Riley and his departure from the show.
Other season-long threads develop alongside Riley’s insecurity: Joyce collapses at breakfast for reasons doctors can’t explain, Willow’s overreliance on magic grows, and Spike begins his slow shift toward becoming one of Buffy’s allies. The closing dream is the episode’s sharpest turn, but it belongs to a larger story about relationships and sources of strength becoming less dependable.
Image: 20th Century Fox
A fantasy isn’t a promise
The chip also makes Spike funny in ways that feed directly into his humiliation. The source describes him here as lovelorn, pathetic, and at his funniest. He threatens the night with “I will know your blood, Slayer. I will make your neck my chalice and drink deep,” only to fall into an open grave. Unable to kill humans, he spends his downtime watching Dawson’s Creek and complaining, “Oh, Pacey, you blind idiot. Can’t you see she doesn’t love you?”
Season five makes Spike a regular, and this episode introduces the version of him that will last: his obsession with Buffy can no longer be written off as murderous rage. In a 2008 Buffy forum thread, fans recalling their first viewing mostly described shock at seeing the show bring that subtext to the surface.
Recognizing his own feelings, however, is different from Buffy learning about them. That happens 10 episodes later in “Crush,” and writer David Fury said the disclosure came sooner than originally intended. The writers initially wanted other characters to discover 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,” Fury told 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.”
Buffy’s later kiss in “Intervention” makes the distinction between fantasy and choice even more important. That kiss is a freely chosen gesture of gratitude. It adds trust to a dynamic that was already full of attraction, but it doesn’t mean the same thing to each of them. Buffy can choose tenderness without making the romantic commitment Spike wants.
In Spike’s dream, Buffy kisses him and tells him she wants him. In “Intervention,” she kisses him out of gratitude. The difference isn’t whether the kiss is real, but whether Buffy’s choice matches the declaration Spike has already imagined for her.
