In the alley behind the Bronze, Ford sees Buffy stake a vampire; he reveals that he already knows that she is the Slayer, having found out shortly before she was expelled from their previous school.
Giles explains that she was Spike's lover, supposedly killed by an angry mob in Prague, but Buffy tells him that she is still alive and that she saw her with Angel.
Ford approaches a reluctant Spike and asks to be made a vampire, offering to give them the Slayer in return.
As Buffy is upset that her friends went behind her back to find out about Ford, she professes her love for Angel but says she does not know if she can trust him, and asks him to tell her the truth about Drusilla.
Angel admits to a stunned Buffy that he had been obsessed with Drusilla, once a sweet young woman, and tortured her and killed her family until he sired her; turning her into an insane demon.
Ford's vampire self emerges and Buffy stakes her former friend, before wondering sadly if life for her as a Slayer will ever get easier; she implores Giles, "Lie to me."
The book that Ford helps the vampires steal, by allowing one of them to escape in exchange for a meeting with Spike, is the encrypted manuscript associated with the "du Lac Cross," the key to the code, which plays an important role in "What's My Line."
"[1] Similarly, Mark Oshiro notes that "there’s not a single character in 'Lie To Me' that doesn’t tell a lie, and it’s one of the more clever attributes of this episode.
They range from smaller lies (Giles’s opinion on monster truck racing) to the whoppers that threaten lives (Ford’s plan for his vampire-devotee friends).
"[2] Myles McNutt writes that the episode demonstrates that "the show will not shy away from some dark conclusions for the sake of trying to force this series into definitions of good and evil which fail to take into account the show's inherent liminality": [I]n an episode that’s all about playing with expectations (Buffy seeing Angel’s meeting with Drusilla as him being unfaithful, the Lonely Ones discovering that pop culture has not exactly depicted vampire culture accurately), Whedon pulls the rug out from under us: Ford isn’t evil so much as he is misguided, driven to his reckless path by terminal brain cancer rather than some sort of evil spirit.
It’s a starkly human image of corruption, and that scene with Ford and Buffy in the club discussing the ethics of it all is just really well handled.
Ford mapped out his entire story as if it were a movie, from the cheesy lines he shares with Spike[1] (in another great scene) or in his expectation that Buffy will completely understand and perhaps even accept his plan once she learns of his condition.
"[5] Paste Magazine, in a similar list, ranked it at #52, saying it "has one of the more ominous cold opens of the series" and "speaks to mortality and the age-old wisdom of 'Be careful what you wish for.'