In the history of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, nobody has ever made an entrance quite like Spike. After crashing his car into a Welcome to Sunnydale sign, he emerges, clad in his iconic leather duster. He lights up a cigarette and says to no one in particular: “Home sweet home.”
Twenty-nine years ago this week, Buffy the Vampire Slayer aired “School Hard,” one of the best episodes in the show’s seven-season run. It’s the third episode of its second season, and it puts Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) through the wringer, forcing her to fend off a vampire attack on parent-teacher night while also keeping her vigilante alter ego a secret from her mom (Kristine Sutherland). It introduces Spike (James Marsters), the series villain-turned-reluctant-hero, with Marsters’ delivering a performance so captivating it turned a mid-season villain arc into one of the show’s best characters.
But looking back, “School Hard” is more than just the first Spike episode. It’s also a major turning point in the show’s early run, as Buffy begins to grow into the series we all know and love today.
What is School Hard about?
Written by David Greenwalt (who would go on to run the Buffy spin-off Angel) from a story idea by series creator Joss Whedon, “School Hard” is a pun on Die Hard. Buffy is our John McClane, army crawling through the school’s AC ducts to catch the offending vampires off guard.
But before that, some setup. Principal Snyder (the delightfully hateable Armin Shimerman) tasks his least favorite students, Buffy and fellow miscreant Sheila (Alexandra Johnes), to organize parent-teacher night, believing the two will fail and bring him one step closer to kicking them out. Meanwhile, Spike crashes a meeting of the Master’s leftover followers, who have been leaderless since Buffy killed the Master in the season 1 finale. Spike is joined by Drusilla (Juliet Landau), his spacey and beloved vampire girlfriend.
With his vampire face on, Spike puts a fellow vamp in his place and volunteers to take out the Slayer. He boasts that he’s killed two Slayers already, so he’s the right man for the job. Too impatient to wait for ritual night, he plans a Sunnydale High break-in, which just so happens to coincide with parent-teacher conferences. The episode then becomes a siege, with Buffy herding the parents into a classroom and locking them inside for safety.
By the end of the night, after Buffy and her allies save the day, Snyder and the police chief calmly agree to blame the whole thing on a gang. It’s the first sign that Sunnydale’s adults know more than they let on.
The episode’s legacy
It sounds absurd in hindsight, especially for a character with an entrance that dramatic, but Spike was supposed to die that same season in the mid-season two-parter, “What’s My Line.”
“In Joss’s world, evil is not cool,” Marsters told the podcast Inside of You in 2020. “I was supposed to come in and get killed off, but the audience reacted to me in a way that was going to make it very difficult to kill me off. I was basically ruining his show.”
Spike has long been one of the most debated elements of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, even inspiring a tug-of-war in the writers’ room. Longtime series writer David Fury said he spent years believing that Spike was irredeemable. Others clearly thought differently, making Spike a reluctant member of the Scooby Gang. That push and pull, between the monster the writers built and the character that audiences fell for, is Spike in a nutshell.
But Spike isn’t the only character who clicks in “School Hard.“ Buffy’s mom, Joyce, gets her time to shine, too. Up to this point, Joyce has been little more than a complication in Buffy’s moonlighting as the Slayer, a worried mom who sees her daughter as a rebellious and prone-to-trouble 16-year-old. When vampires storm the school and Joyce is left locked up with the adults in one of the classrooms, she stands up for Buffy against Principal Snyder. And when Spike is about to kill Buffy, Joyce smacks him in the head with an axe. It’s a moment that proves Joyce can be so much more than the annoying mom, and it sets her up to become one of the series’ most affecting characters.
Buffy’s first season is full of growing pains, as the show tries on different kinds of stories to see what fits. It was built around the Master, a big bad kept underground who barely had any relationship with Buffy. “School Hard” marks a new path forward, featuring more personal and complicated villains while showcasing the series’ sharp humor, character work, and the best depiction of high school as a literal hell on earth.
“From now on, we’re gonna have a little less ritual and a little more fun around here,” Spike says after disposing of the Anointed One (the show’s lamest villain) in a matter of seconds. He was right.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer is streaming on Hulu