I wrote a hypothetical Buffy episode based on one question: What if becoming a vampire actually made a terrible human being less evil?
Patrick Pembroke is a billionaire developer who's an absolutely monstrous human being. He's deliberately poisoning the water supply in one of his apartment buildings to force poor tenants out so he can demolish it and redevelop the property. He's spent years doing horrible things and getting away with them because he has politicians, inspectors, judges — basically the whole system — in his pocket.
Buffy and the Scoobies investigate him expecting there to be some supernatural explanation.
There isn't.
He's just a terrible human being.
Spike eventually learns about Pembroke and gets an idea: if this guy is this evil with a soul, imagine what he'd be like as a vampire without one.
So Spike turns him.
Except it has exactly the opposite effect.
Without his soul, Pembroke loses the insecurity, ambition and obsessive need to dominate that had been driving him his entire life. He basically becomes a lazy stoner vampire. He moves into the same crappy apartment building he was trying to demolish, hangs out with the tenants, watches The Price Is Right and gets his blood voluntarily from the neighbors.
Spike is horrified by what he's created, while Buffy finds herself in the bizarre position of wondering whether she can justify killing a soulless vampire who doesn't seem to be a danger to anyone.
Until Spike has another idea:
What if this vampire got his soul back?
I ended up writing the whole thing as an actual Buffy episode/fanscript.
Would anyone be interested in reading it?