Is It Real?
"Your eyes are different colors."
"My left eye sees the past."
"And your right...?"
The first hint we get that Spike's anatomy is not what he seems is in Session #5: Ballad of Fallen Angels. As he falls out of the window (was that symbolic of the title? why yes!), we get a close-up shot of he right eye: a wide, vivid red. His left eye is a perfectly normal, perfectly boring brown. If the short glimpse is not enough to convince you, the next episode, Sympathy for the Devil begins with a man (in greenish/sepia monochrome indicating a memory) lying on an operating table. His eye is held open by painful-looking instruments as it darts around frantically. Perhaps - or perhaps not - seeing exactly what is happening. Cut to the end, and the man takes on a familiar shape: Spike, and he wakes up in the present day with a gasp.
If these shadowy hints are still not enough for you, Session #20: Pierrot Le Fou, makes it very clear that Spike's right eye is very much red, very much glass-like, and very unlike his real brown eye.
Spike claims that he lost his real eye in an accident, but the scenes in Sympathy seem to indicate that his eye was working quite well (or at least well enough). It was moving and seemed to respond to the doctors' movements. It may even be what the viewer "sees" through. So why was it replaced, and does it give Spike any kind of special ability? Have his eyes always been "too fast" or was his ability to catch card-cheats or dodge nearly every blow or shoot nearly everyone smack in the middle of the forehead just an effect of the transplant? Who knows, really? There was never any indication of his ability being "supernatural" or artificical in any way. He was a hitman, and I think that would account for some skill. Which begs the question of when he had his eye replaced. Julia never saw his real eye (see above quote). Was it replaced by his own choice? I don't know. Perhaps The Red Dragon Syndicate talked him or forced him into doing it. (Why was the operation so apparently traumatic if it was done to save a damaged eye?) At this point, I can even speculate that it was an early experiment of the syndicate's - before they developed Red Eye or later to counter it - to produce an above-average fighter, which can explain how Spike crushed Asimov in the first episode (despite Asimov O.D.ing on Red Eye and being fast enough to dodge bullets and kill at least half a dozen men). Well, we know that Spike was a valued member of the syndicate (Mao Yen Rai, one of the leaders, scoured the solar system for him after his disappearance) and it is very likely that they financed the operation, whether they made him do it or they simply helped him recover from an accident.
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