One of Buffy's strongest selling points was its large cast of supporting characters. The Slayer Collection: Spike gathers together four episodes involving perhaps the most popular of all of these: the cool punk rock vampire who, in the course of the show's run, moves from being one of Buffy's most terrible enemies to her lover and defender. He and his Goth vamp lover Drusilla arrived on the scene in "School Hard" and proceeded to disrupt a PTA meeting at Sunnydale High. Also from the second season we get "Lie to Me", in which a temporary alliance with one of Buffy's most treacherous friends demonstrates the essential fragility of the relationship between Spike and Dru even after a century. He returned briefly in Season 3 in "Lovers Walk", deserted by Dru and desperately flailing around, wrecking most of the show's relationships in a single bout of drunken violence, truth-telling and sharp wit. By the fifth season, Spike was a very different vampire--with a chip in his brain that stopped him hurting humans and he fell desperately in love with a Buffy, who had not yet learned to trust him; "Fool for Love" was the episode in which we learned Spike's back-story: he was a minor Victorian poet, turned by Drusilla when rejection in love led him down the wrong alley, his entire hyper-aggressive persona is based on a need to hide his sensitivity. Spike was always one of the main focuses of the show's combination of acute wit and passionate romanticism and these four episodes admirably sample what made him so appealing to fans. On the DVD: The Slayer Collection: Spike also includes a documentary about the history of Spike as a character in which James Marsters talks intelligently about his portrayal of his most famous role. --Roz Kaveney