Julia Quotes

Twenty-five sessions of a woman glimpsed in flashbacks resolve into three sentences on a rainy day, and the sentences are an explanation the series had withheld on purpose. Julia did not come to the graveyard three years ago because Vicious had told her to shoot Spike there or die with him; she chose to be hunted instead. The mechanism is exposure timing. Had the audience known this in Ballad of Fallen Angels, Spike's whole middle act, the drifting and the bad dream, would have read as a man waiting for a woman who loved him, which is a romance. Learning it in the last episode, before she is shot on a rooftop, turns the same three years into something the show can end on: she saved him once by not appearing, and the only thing her reappearance produces is his assault on the Red Dragon's headquarters. Julia has fewer lines than any character who matters this much. This one carries the plot on its own.

Her answer to why she chose to be hunted instead of killing him is a question, which is the sort of writing that gets called evasive. Make the objection properly: Julia is a character built almost entirely out of other people's descriptions, Gren's and Vicious's and Spike's, and when the show finally lets her speak she deflects. That is a fair complaint about the series' women and it is not quite fair here. Her question is the answer. Spike loved her, in a syndicate where love was a liability, without a reason he could give; she refused to kill him for the same absence of reason, and the four words put his own inexplicable choice back in his hands. Neither of them says anything else about it. Later that session she dies telling him it is all a dream, and he agrees, which is the same exchange in different words. The show declines to explain love twice. Once is evasion; twice is a position.