Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight was touted as a continuation of the critically-acclaimed series – and what's more, it promised even bigger storylines that never would have been possible with the show's budgets or technology of its time. No aspect of the comic series went more out on a limb than Spike's subplot, which featured him piloting an interdimensional spaceship with a crew of human-sized bugs.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight #36 – written by Joss Whedon, with art by Georges Jeanty – was the beginning of the season's final arc, and followed up on a surprising return for Spike, who arrived in a giant spaceship to rescue the other heroes from a demon attack at the end of the previous issue.
The spaceship, and its interdimensional origin, first appeared in the Spike miniseries – written by Brian Lynch, with art by Stephen Mooney and Franco Urru – released alongside Season Eight.
Spike's Side Story Comes Crashing Into The Main Plot
Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight treated fans to TV-impossible effects like giant Dawn – and centaur Dawn – as well as skinless Warren, a high-tech Slayer headquarters in a Scottish castle, and of course Buffy and Angel's flying sex scene. Paralleling the events of Season Eight, Brian Lynch's Spike miniseries found the vampire still fighting against villainous law firm Wolfram & Hart, whom he had previously worked for, and then fought against, in Angel Season Five, and its own canonical comic book adaptation, Angel: After the Fall. Wolfram & Hart, aware of Buffy Season Eight Big Bad Twilight's prophesied apocalypse, who summoned the interdimensional vessel that would give Spike his own spaceship.
The evil Senior Partners at Wolfram & Hart intended to slay the crew of the interdimensional ship – buglike sentient beings – and escape Earth. As seen in Spike #5, Spike managed to save the crew; while the vessel was lost to the Senior Partners, Spike and the crew got away in an escape pod. Though the pod lacked the main ship's interdimensional travel capabilities, it still functioned as a spaceship, introducing off-world travel into the Buffyverse. Spike and his ship next appeared at the end of Buffy Season Eight #35 – written by Brad Meltzer with art by Georges Jeanty – and played a pivotal role in the subsequent final arc of the season.
Spike's Spaceship Wasn't Mean To Last
A common complaint among readers of Buffy Season Eight, and Dark Horse's ongoing in-continuity Buffy comics that followed, was that they were completely outlandish. To many readers, it felt like because the restrictions of budgets and actors were lifted, Joss Whedon and the franchise's other creators lost sight of what made a Buffy story. Still, of all Season Eight's innovations and controversial decisions, Spike getting his own spaceship, complete with an alien crew, ranks as its most unhinged – and certainly its most fun. Spike would indeed go on to have has his own galactic adventures in Spike: A Dark Place, written by Victor Gischler with pencils by Paul Lee.
The final issue of A Dark Place returns him to Earth in time to catch up with old friends in the Angel & Faith series, running concurrently at the time. Unfortunately, Spike's spaceship would later be destroyed in Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Nine. While the destruction of the ship served up an emotional "death" of sorts for its fans, it also served to move the later Buffy comics back toward more of a status quo. In their attempt to tell bold, ambitious Buffy stories in the comic book medium, Joss Whedon and Brian Lynch delivered one of Buffy the Vampire Slayer's wildest innovations.