YMMV / Buffy The Vampire Slayer S 6 E 15 As You Were

• Broken Base: Does this episode redeem Riley? Or is it further proof as to why he sucks?
• Designated Hero: Riley goes around believing his opinion is better than everyone else's, everyone is friendly to him despite how he hurt their friend and skipped out on them all (after Willow explicitly told him in Season 4 she'd beat him to death with a shovel if he ever hurt Buffy), he has married someone below his rank in the same chain of command (which is a no-no in the US army), he doesn't even ask about Buffy's mom, and he makes Buffy (who's suffering from depression, struggling with money and raising a teenager) feel terrible... but she listens to him anyway. It's kind of obvious that the writers wanted to make us think "look what you made Buffy throw away!" but instead made him look like an even bigger jerk than before by not addressing his faults.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Xander refers to Riley as Nick Fury. This foreshadows him losing an eye in the next season.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Spike is illegally selling demon eggs on the black market using the alias "The Doctor." Years later, James Marsters would get a recurring role on Torchwood, a spinoff of Doctor Who.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: This episode redeemed Riley for some fans, as it showed him in a far more positive light. In addition to being a badass soldier with a loving wife, he inadvertedly gives Buffy the confidence to end her Destructive Romance with Spike.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: While Spike is largely presented as little more than a prop for Riley's Character Shilling in the episode, his situation is actually rather sympathetic if you really stop to think about it. For one thing; him being an international arms dealer makes zero sense whatsoever. He doesn't even have a phone, dumpster-dives for his furniture, and a couple months earlier couldn't even pay off his kitten poker debts. He hardly has the connections for such a thing, and so when he tries to explain that he was "holding them for a friend", it seems far more likely that he was telling the truth than the alternative. Secondly, even if he was significantly involved in dealing, it's very unlikely he was the mastermind or knew what eggs he was holding, given that he clearly didn't know how to care for them (which leads to them hatching prematurely). Thirdly, the only real plausible motivation Spike could have for suddenly scheming in the Black Market would be Buffy's own money problems, as he'd promised in "Doublemeat Palace" to get her money. So to sum up; Spike was given false hope for his relationship, beaten up and humiliated in front of his girlfriend's ex, his home destroyed for a scheme he was likely only involved at all in to help said girlfriend, then unceremoniously dumped, all without anyone stopping to even slightly hear out his side of things.

---