Never Leave Me - Cultural References

Cultural References

• The episode's title, "Never Leave Me", is a line from the song "Early One Morning", the trigger used by the First against Spike.
• When Andrew is at the butcher shop, the butcher says "This is a butcher shop, Neo, we don't sell toothpaste," a reference to The Matrix and Andrew's new "look".
• As Andrew jumps to kill the piglet, he shouts "That'll do, Pig", a famous line from the movie Babe. He also directly references the sequel, Babe: Pig in the City, claiming it was "underrated".
• Andrew and the First in the guise of Warren use several Star Wars references.
• Anya references The Roy Rogers Show when asking if a trigger mentioned by Xander in the context of brainwashing is the horse.
• Travers' words are quoted from a September 9, 1941 speech by Winston Churchill, who in turn was paraphrasing the final two lines of the William Ernest Henley poem "Invictus".
• Spike's line "saw a man about a girl" is a reference to Good Will Hunting.
• Xander says that in the movies a sleeper agent "completes his task and either blows his head off or steals a submarine", possibly references to The Manchurian Candidate and the 1971 aborted-pilot Madame Sin respectively.