Angel

A deranged vampire Slayer is convinced that Spike is the man who kidnapped and tortured her when she was a child.

When a nurse at an asylum mixes up two patients’ medications, one of them goes into convulsions and the other, a 20-something woman named Dana, goes berserk, grabs an antique bone saw, and dismembers two burly orderlies while a horrified Dr. Rabinaw watches. A bit later, at Wolfram and Hart, Angel and his friends get a tip about a “possessed” patient who escaped from the asylum. Angel and Spike go to there, and Dr. Rabinaw shows them Dana’s room, which is decorated with childish crayon drawings of demon-like monsters terrorizing young girls. Dr. Rabinaw explains that when she was a child, someone murdered Dana’s parents, then kidnapped and tortured her, and she’s been nearly catatonic ever since. Convinced Dana is possessed by a demon, Spike immediately runs off to find her, but Angel sticks around and a nurse, Carol, offers to show him videotapes of Rabinaw’s sessions with Dana. Meanwhile Dana goes to a drug store where she gorges on junk food, and flashing back to her childhood torture, snaps a clerk’s arms and uses the bone saw on a security guard. Back at the asylum Carol shows Angel the tapes of Dana’s therapy sessions, and he’s surprised to hear Dana screaming in Romanian on one of them. A bit later Spike finds the drugstore Dana ravaged, picks up her blood scent… and a bit later comes face to face with her at an abandoned building. About the same time, however, Angel calls Wesley and tells him they’re not dealing with a demonic possession after all: Dana’s Romanian rantings, and her drawings of young girls being menaced by demons, indicate that she’s a Slayer, not a monster.

Dana attacks Spike, but even though he fights back, she hurls him out a window just as Angel arrives. Angel tells Spike that Dana’s really a Slayer, and they return to Wolfram and Hart to meet with an associate of Rupert Giles. When they arrive, however, they’re surprised to see Giles’ emissary is Andrew, who’s thrilled to see Spike alive. Andrew explains that in every generation, there are thousands of young women born with the potential to be Slayers, but only one is chosen. He says, however, that Buffy, this generation’s Slayer, had her witch friend cast a spell to activate all the potential Slayers in the world, and Mr. Giles has been slowing tracking them down and training them. Andrew speculates that Dana is one of these recently activated Slayers, but she’s so deranged that she channels voices and visions from generations of past Slayers… which causes Spike to realize that Dana must have thought she was the Slayer he killed a hundred years ago, and confused that vision with memories of the man who tortured her when she was a child. Spike immediately rushes out to find Dana while Dana herself wanders a wharf, still suffering flashbacks of her childhood torture. Back at Wolfram and Hart, Angel and his friends try to figure out where Dana might be, and Lorne suggests she might return to the scene of her torture. They decide to ask Andrew where that was, but discover he’s gone… and then we see him find Spike at the wharf. Spike tells Andrew to go home, but Andrew insists he’s much stronger than he used to be, and then he trips and lands on the remains of a dockworker Dana killed. About the same time, Angel and his friends to go a suburban home, where Vernon, a psychic friend of Lorne’s, has visions recalling the brutal murders of Dana’s parents, and the man who kidnapped Dana from the scene. Then, as Vernon senses the man took Dana to a dark building that smelled of molasses, we see Dana, in the present, arrive in the basement of an abandoned distillery, where she finds a box of tools and hypodermic needles hidden behind a grate… and then she has another flashback: Spike approaching her with one of the syringes.

Meanwhile, as Spike and Andrew wander the wharf looking for Dana, she stalks them. At Wolfram and Hart, Angel asks Gunn to find out who killed Dana’s family, and Lorne to find out where the man took her when he kidnapped her. Wes asks what they’ll do with Dana when they find her, but Angel says the most important thing is to get her off the streets. Back at the wharf the smell of Dana’s blood leads Spike into an alley, where Dana attacks him. Andrew tries to shoot her with a tranquilizer gun, but she knocks him out and runs off. Spike chases her… into the distillery basement. As they circle each other, Dana babbles about people and places that make Spike realize she’s still jumbling the memories of several different Slayers, including the one he killed. Finally Spike gets closer to Dana, but she jams a needle into his neck, and as he gets woozy, she chains him to the same radiator where her assailant once chained her. Then she injects him with another syringe, and he passes out. Back and Wolfram and Hart, Lorne finally remembers what Vernon said about a molasses smell, Fred realizes it could be a distillery… and then Andrew comes crashing in, telling them about Dana’s attack. Then, back at the distillery, Spike finally comes to and realizes Dana has cut off his arms with the bone saw.

Spike starts to pass out again, but Dana slaps him awake. He tries to convince her that he wasn’t the one who tortured her, but she has another flashback of Spike as her assailant. As it continues, however, Spike’s face morphs into that of another man, Walter. Then Dana has a vision - from another Slayer’s point of view - of Spike killing her mother, and she raises the bone saw again. Just then, however, Angel arrives, grabs her arm, and tells her that Walter is dead now. She thinks about this, but then attacks Angel. As they fight, however, Angel grabs Dana, Wes fires tranquilizer darts into her, and a Wolfram and Hart SWAT team moves in while Fred and a medical team attend to Spike and his severed limbs. Finally Andrew insists that because she’s a Slayer, Dana has to come with him. Angel protests, but then a team of twelve other Slayers arrives to back Andrew up, Angel relents, and Andrew and the Slayers leave with Dana. Later Angel visits Spike in the Wolfram and Hart hospital wing, after his arms have been reattached. Spike says he now realizes that even he will face a day of reckoning for his past misdeeds… and Angel tells him to sleep tight.