Warren Mears

Warren Mears was a mad scientist supervillain and enemy of the Scooby Gang. A technological genius, he built several humanoid robots, including his own personal girlfriend as well as a copy of the Slayer, Buffy Summers. Warren and his friends Jonathan Levinson and Andrew Wells formed the Trio, a supervillain team planning to taking over Sunnydale. Although relatively harmless at first, Warren eventually showed his true colors as a misogynistic killer, and fell victim to Willow Rosenberg who flayed him alive. His life was instantly restored by Amy Madison, however, and he continued to live in a skinless, undead state. Warren and Amy aligned themselves with Twilight, seeking vengeance against Willow.

Warren was a recurring character in Buffy the Vampire Slayer seasons five to seven, where he was played by Adam Busch. Initially a minor comedic character, Warren went on to become one of the show's most dangerous villains. He also appeared in Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, the canonical comic book continuation.

Early life
Warren Mears grew up in Sunnydale, California. At school, he excelled in science and technology, but was bullied by his peers, including a jock named Frankie. As a teenager, he attended Sunnydale High for a semester before moving to a tech college in Dutton. However, he continued to be plagued by loneliness, and began to apply his technological skills to solve the problem. Warren built an ideal robot girlfriend named April, who was programmed to love and obey him. He assumed that he would love her in return, but grew bored of how easy and predictable things were with her. Instead, he met and fell in love with Katrina Silber, a strong-minded girl in his engineering seminar, and the pair began dating. However, Warren was unable to bring himself to break up with April, so he went home for spring break without her, hoping that her batteries would run out.

April followed Warren and Katrina to Sunnydale, where she proceeded to question everyone she met about Warren's wherabouts. This caught the attention of the Scooby Gang including the Slayer, Buffy Summers. When April's behaviour grew erratic and violent, Buffy tracked Warren down and confronted him. He explained that April must have been recharging her batteries somehow, and Buffy became concerned about the danger she posed. When Katrina told April that Warren was her boyfriend, the robot angrily attacked her; Buffy and Warren showed up just in time to save her life. Warren admitted to April that he didn't love her, and she reacted violently. As she and Buffy began to fight, Katrina realised that April was a robot and left Warren in disgust. He ran after her, leaving Buffy to deal with April, whose batteries finally ran out. Warren was later approached by the vampire Spike, who harboured a romantic obsession with Buffy. Spike forced Warren to build a robotic version of the Slayer for him to have sex with.

The Trio
Warren resurfaces in the Season 6 episode "Flooded" as part of the Nerd Trio, along with Jonathan and Andrew. During the first half of the season, the Trio appears as a comic nuisance to Buffy, who gets in the way of their plans to rob banks and so forth.

From the beginning, it is clear that Warren (unlike his more passive portrayal in Season 5) is the leader of the Trio, dominant over Jonathan and Andrew, as well as more willing than the other two nerds to take real risks and possibly do real harm to people.

Starting with the episode "Dead Things," Warren shows his true colors as a dangerous, misogynistic, and possibly psychopathic individual. When Katrina reappears, Warren uses an enslavement device to make her obey his will. When she resists the device, Warren attacks her and accidentally kills her. Unmoved, he hatches a scheme using demons that cause temporal disturbances to confuse Buffy into thinking she was responsible for Katrina's death. Buffy eventually figures it out, but Warren and the Trio evade her for the time being.

After Katrina's death, Jonathan becomes increasingly unhappy with Warren's lack of conscience. Warren plots with Andrew, who is enamored with him, to ditch Jonathan in the near future.

In "Seeing Red," Warren makes his bid for major villain status when he steals a pair of magical orbs which give him strength and invulnerability. He, Jonathan and Andrew attempt to rob an armored car, but Buffy (aided by Jonathan, who surreptitiously tells her to destroy the orbs) stops him. However, Warren escapes with a jetpack. Andrew has one too, but he blasts off into an overhang, and he and Jonathan (who received no jetpack as part of Warren and Andrew's plan to abandon him) are jailed. In prison, Andrew laments being left behind by Warren.

The next day, Warren, upset at his plans being foiled, appears in Buffy's back yard with a gun. He shoots, wounding Buffy and accidentally killing Tara. This action creates the season's true Big Bad, as Willow is pushed by grief into dark magics and becomes Dark Willow. She hunts Warren down and flays him in retribution for Tara's death, ending Warren's life and his villainy.

Skinless
The First Evil appears as Warren a few times in Season 7 - including as Season 6's representative in the parade of villains at the end of "Lessons" using his appearance mainly as a means of bending Andrew to its will. Using this method, the First Evil gets Andrew to murder Jonathan (in "Conversations with Dead People"), in order to open the seal in the basement of the new Sunnydale High. Warren's final major appearance occurs when a spell (cast by Amy) causes Willow, feeling guilty over moving on after Tara's death, to manifest her feelings by making her outwardly assume the appearance of her former victim. Later it appears that Willow's mind starts to become replaced by Warren's.

The real Warren, however, returns months after the destruction of Sunnydale. Having been saved from death by Amy, seconds before he could have been killed by Willow. He was the one who gave Amy the idea of cursing Willow in order to become him, and he bears a considerable grudge against both Willow (for flaying him) and Buffy (for ruining all of his criminal plans).

Amy and Warren remained in the remnants of Sunnydale after the massive exodus and were present during the town's destruction. They remained for months in the crater, feeding on whatever edible substance they could find, until they were found by General Voll. In exchange for their aid against Buffy and the Slayers, Warren asked for a chance to exact revenge on Willow. In Part Four of "The Long Way Home", he reveals the means of his survival as he lobotomizes a captive Willow. When Buffy and Satsu arrive on a rescue mission, Amy teleports away, taking Warren with her. Willow heals instantaneously.

In Part 1 of "Time of Your Life", Twilight is seen with Warren and Amy in some sort of military base, where Warren shows him something that will help get Twilight's job done: a missile, which targets and destroys the Scotland castle headquarters, with Xander looking on nearby, helplessly. It seems Warren is still a technological genius.

In "Retreat", Part 1, while on the run from demons with his Italy squad, Andrew discovers a bleeding and skinless Warren underground who claims to have been abandoned by Amy to die slowly as his magical skin wears off. Andrew listens to Warren's pleading, and he seems to take responsibility for some of the First's claims while under Warren's guise, such as the instruction to kill Jonathan. However, it quickly transpires that this was a ruse as goatmen demons descend and Andrew and his Slayers are forced to fight back and retreat to the Scotland Slayer Organization headquarters.

On the letters page of Buffy Season Eight #6, Released September 2007, Whedon responds to a question by Kaylee Pansieri of Montreal, Quebec asking how the First could have impersonated Warren, to trick Andrew, if he'd never died, by saying, "He was legally dead for like a second. Amy didn't tell him 'cause she didn't want to upset him. I forgot, okay?!" In the letters page for #26, Scott Allie reiterated that he was technically dead for a moment before Amy's magic kicked in, allowing the First to use his form.

Powers and abilities
Although Warren displays no independent supernatural powers, he does possess a genius-level intellect, especially in the fields of technology and robotics. He is capable of building highly advanced robots which can easily pass for ordinary humans. The Buffybot he built successfully masqueraded as Buffy Summers for several weeks while the real Slayer was dead, and a robot duplicate of himself was convincing enough to actually fool Willow, even with her magical tracking abilities, into thinking it was the real deal. Some of his other creations, which fuse magic and technology, include an Invisibility Ray (cf. "Gone"); a Freeze Ray (cf. "Smashed"); a small microchip capable of slowing time (cf. "Life Serial"); a Cerebral Dampener, which strips the will of any female within its range, rendering her a slave (cf. "Dead Things"); and at least two jetpacks (cf. "Seeing Red"). In Season Eight, he also displays enough knowledge of biology to perform a lobotomy (cf. "The Long Way Home, Part Four").

In Season Six's "Seeing Red", Warren gains the power of the Orbs of Nezzla'khan, two orbs which grant him superhuman strength and invulnerability, respectively. In this state, he is more than a physical match for Buffy and easily overpowers her, until Jonathan betrays him by telling her to destroy his orbs. During this time, he merely fights with sheer brute force, as opposed to the advanced martial arts skills that Buffy commonly employs.

Appearances
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Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 5

 * "I Was Made to Love You"
 * "Intervention"

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 6

 * "Flooded"
 * "Life Serial"
 * "Smashed"
 * "Gone"
 * "Dead Things"
 * "Normal Again"
 * "Entropy"
 * "Seeing Red"
 * "Villains"

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 7

 * "Conversations with Dead People"
 * "Never Leave Me"
 * "The Killer in Me" (a spell cast by Amy started turning Willow into Warren)
 * "Storyteller" (in Andrew's fantasy only)

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8
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 * The Long Way Home
 * Time of Your Life
 * Retreat