Spinning through the town.

If filming schedules had allowed Brad Kane to return to Buffy as Tucker Wells for season 6, his presence would've gone beyond making a few parts of season 6 make a little more sense. We'd also have gotten Jonathan as part of the Scooby Gang in season 7.

Tucker was supposed to be the leader of the nerd trio, which offers better reasoning for why they went after Buffy as their official nemesis. Given that neither Jonathan or Warren have any real grudge against her - Jonathan's a small, weak coward who wants the easy way out as we saw in "Superstar" but still liked her and her friends, and Warren's a creepy misogynistic asshole but didn't hold anything against her after season 5 - having that extra motivating factor beyond James Bond/Venture Brothers-type genre conventions. To imagine Jonathan going along with it because he wants to be accepted by other men is already part of the show. To imagine Warren going along with it and eclipsing Tucker in terms of mundane human evil would've made for a strong plot thread running through the season.

To imagine Tucker and Jonathan in the school basement in "Conversations With Dead People," for Tucker the one to deliver the "I still care about them" speech and Jonathan the one to kill his friend to open the seal, is in keeping for both characters. Tucker tried to murder his classmates because a girl turned him down: for him to talk about time going by and everything dropping away would show his capacity for change and growth. And it'd be just at the end of his life, in the classic Whedon mode. Jonathan stabbing his friend in the gut because his other friend told him to would show that he's still a small, weak coward who hasn't changed much. He's forgiven a lot because of Danny Strong's performance and the Class Protector award scene. Much of what he does later in the series breaks the goodwill granted to him. From everything we saw of him up until then, he totally would've stabbed a friend in the guts for an empty shell of a promise.

I love what Andrew brought to season seven, and his turn in "Storyteller" is simultaneously a great metatextual and narrative episode. I'm glad we got what we did of him, and what Tom Lenk brought to the performance. Even so, putting Jonathan in Andrew's place would mean more than just another good character added to the cast list. It would've been the culmination of seven seasons of a slow-burning character who wasn't even named for his first few appearances - up until "Go Fish," Strong was just listed as "Student" in the credits. Imagining Jonathan begging Buffy for mercy as she holds him over the seal and seeing him finally become strong enough to be accepted by a group he holds in such esteem, becoming the person he always wanted to be at the end of the world, is very much the kind of narrative the show would've taken joy in telling.

But shooting schedules didn't allow. So we got Andrew being the most delightful guestage ever to appear on TV, up to and including Theon Greyjoy, and Strong giving the "I still care about them" speech to break our hearts and then going off to win Oscars and Emmys and punch Roger Sterling in the crotch. So it pretty much works out.