For the record, I'm okay with last night's Buffy. I was okay with it when I was told what would happen, and it played out beautifully. My boyfriend is the best actor on the planet, and he sold every line and made Spike even more sympathetic and human, and that's always a wonderful thing. It's what I was told will happen in next week's ep that has my gut twisted into a tight little ball of worry. Beyond that, I'm not spoiled. Well, I am, but I don't believe the spoilers I was told, so I might as well have not heard them. They sounded a lot like recycled fake spoilers from last year. But even if they're not, and that does happen, I can still see how it could work out for the good. So really, next week's ep is the one that might break me.

Yesterday on FX I watched "The Freshman," and got stuck on Willow's line about how Maggie Walsh was an expert on operant conditioning. It stood out this time because I just did that paper on the behavioral perspective of psychology and so this time I knew what she was going on about. Operant conditioning is, for those who don't know, the process of changing a person's behavior through positive and negative reinforcement, or punishment and reward. So basically, it's stated right up front in Season 4 that the person responsible for Spike's chip is an expert in this stuff. For the last three years Spike has been a big study in operant conditioning on vampires. Kinda hard to dismiss any changes in Spike as just a possible side effect of the chip and not the intended result when you know that this sort of thing was Professor Walsh's specialty. I wish I knew all of this back when I still bothered to debate this stuff at TWoP.

I had two scenes for my upcoming episode of DL completed, and last night they disappeared. I've tried every way I know how to recover them, and they're gone. Sigh. In other fic news, I'm almost finished with part 3 of Getaway. I was determined to stay up and get that part finished last night, but I got too sleepy to do the scene justice. Today I need to sign off and go incommunicado and get my child psych paper written. If I finish it tonight and I'm not too brain-fried, I'll try to finish that section. But I make no promises.