Rupert Giles and Responsibility

I am a very passionate fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Giles is one of my favorite characters.  He’s smart, educated, thoughtful, likes to read and research, has a vast knowledge of demonology and witchcraft, and has a beautiful singing voice. However, I decided to explore some of Rupert Giles’ more questionable choices in Season 6 and his professional/personal responsibility to the group:

Rupert Giles and Responsibility

When we first meet Rupert Giles, his role in the life of Buffy and her friends is clear. He is a member of the Watcher’s Council assigned to be Buffy’s watcher, as every slayer needs a watcher. It is his job to guide, train, and assist Buffy with the burden of saving mankind from the demons. As her friends join her in the pursuit, he is also guiding and training them as well, albeit to a lesser, more subtle extent. As the years pass, though, Giles’ role and his level of responsibility to Buffy and her friends becomes much more complicated. Season 3 brings the first surviving second slayer, Faith, dividing Giles’ responsibility between Buffy and her friends and Faith. This responsibility if officially removed later in the season with the Watcher’s Council fires Giles and replaces him with Wesley as Buffy and Faith’s new official watcher. Giles now has no official connection to Buffy, her friends, or Faith but continues to support them as Faith turns to evil and Buffy fires the Watcher’s Council from her life. This leaves Giles in a responsibility gray area.

Giles is now working with Buffy and her group because he wants to, because of his emotional connection to them. He feels a closeness and a personal responsibility to Buffy and her friends, as they have worked together through many difficult situations over the previous three years. This vague, emotional sense of responsibility works fine for most of the next two years.

Giles becomes a business owner when he buys the Magic Box and employs Anya as his employee. He now has the responsibility of being a business owner, with all that entails as well. The business is also a magical hub for magic users in the Sunnydale area, so Giles also has the responsibility to his customers to be knowledgeable and careful regarding his inventory and its use.

In season 5, a new ‘person’ joins the group in the form of Dawn, a mass of energy known as The Key that can be used to unlock all the dimensions and destroy the world that is transformed into a sister for Buffy and inserted into Buffy’s life. As Buffy’s sister, and as a supernatural creation, you would think Giles would also feel a sense of responsibility toward Dawn. Until the sixth season he does, working together with everyone to keep Dawn safe from Glory. He was no doubt strongly motivated by preventing the world from ending, but keeping Dawn safe and exhibiting a sense of responsibility for her both were seen from Giles in season 5.

Two important events happen in season 5 that effect Giles’ later confusion about his role and his responsibilities. The first is a visit from the Watcher’s Council, which does two things: calls into question Willow’s developing abilities as a witch without proper training and registration and reinstates Giles as an official watcher to Buffy. The first situation, while seemingly unimportant in the episode itself, has Willow being questioned by the council about her abilities, her training, and whether or not she is registered. This brings up some questions about Giles. As a member of the Watcher’s Council previously he would have been aware of rules related to becoming a witch and either chose to ignore these rules as Willow slowly became more powerful, or didn’t feel it was his responsibility to be involved with Willow’s development as a witch. Considering Willow is Buffy’s best friend, and most of Willow’s magical development up to that point was in the interest of helping Buffy do her job, it seems unlikely that Giles would not feel a sense of responsibility toward Willow’s education. Perhaps Giles’ growing discontent with the methods of the Watcher’s Council contributed to his not caring about Willow doing things by the book.

The second important event in season 5 that causes Giles’ to question his role and his level of responsibility is Buffy’s death. Buffy dies at the end of the season and is buried in the cemetery. As a newly reinstated watcher, Giles’ official responsibility to Buffy has ended because Buffy is no longer alive. Giles’, in a move that seems understandable at first, moves back to England as he no longer has a slayer. The problem with this is that it disregards any personal responsibility he may have previously felt for Buffy’s friends and for Dawn. It also shows little regard for the responsibility of being a business owner, as he all but hands his business over to Anya. It’s understandable that what happened to Buffy would upset Giles, another reason he would want to leave Sunnydale. But her friends, who he’s worked with and guided over the years, still have to go on living on a Hellmouth. Dawn is now both motherless and sister-less. Does Giles’ grief for Buffy override his sense of personal responsibility for the rest of the group and what happens to them now? This initial decision to leave Sunnydale may not seem as understandable now as it may have to begin with, but it is Giles’ second departure that calls into question everything we know and understand about Giles and his motives.

Season six begins with what is surely the catalyst for Willow’s downward spiral into Dark Willow, and should have been Giles’ first red flag regarding his personal responsibility to the group. Yes, Giles is certainly alarmed by Willow’s decision and her magical ability, but he doesn’t seem to take this into consideration later. Willow messes everything up in this one decision. Bringing Buffy back did not save her from eternal torment in a hell dimension, it rips her away from eternal peace, making every waking day of her new life a comparative nightmare. Buffy is further traumatized by having to wake up underground, clawing at the lid to her own coffin. Buffy is then presented with her new unfortunate financial situation, the reminder that she is now a single parent to a teenager, and is still expected to save the world on a regular basis. Giles shows an enormous lack of empathy to Buffy’s situation. While he does help her pay off some accumulated debt, he seems otherwise oblivious to Buffy’s burden.

Giles becomes increasingly dissatisfied with Buffy’s inability to reconnect and actively participate in her regained life. He also is upset by Buffy’s increasing dependence upon him to help parent Dawn, as if this is a completely outrageous notion. Giles is, however, the oldest person in the group, generally turned to by all for guidance and wisdom, and has been acting as a father figure to Buffy for five years now. Why, suddenly, does this fatherly nature now no longer extend to Dawn? Why shouldn’t it? Does he no longer have that personal responsibility to the group as earlier discussed? Perhaps this responsibility deteriorated with Buffy’s death and now all bets are off when it comes to Giles and his loyalties. Giles see the enormous mountain of responsibility that has been piled on to Buffy in addition to her usual burden of protecting the entire world and he comes to the conclusion that he is standing in Buffy’s way from handling this mountain successfully. Giles literally sings one and a half most passionate songs about it, one of which is a duet with Tara. Tara sings her concern for Willow using too much magic, but Giles focuses only on what he now considers his main problem. They may be singing together, but they are singing two different tunes.

Perhaps a hidden, subconscious part of Giles craved that small bit of freedom he felt when he returned to England after Buffy’s death. After five years of death and mayhem and monsters, it must have been an overwhelming relief to at least believe that it was no longer his responsibility, and perhaps part of Giles wanted to have this again. Maybe this was why he was so stubbornly determined to focus on the idea that he was enabling Buffy’s indifference and inaction in the face of her responsibilities, and that the only way she could succeed was to make her deal with it on her own. He certainly no longer thought about any personal responsibility or watcher responsibility in regards to Willow, the rogue, unregistered witch using too much of her power. While he expressed his concerns to her on multiple occasions, this concern was relegated to ‘Tara’s problem’ as Giles zoomed in on his Buffy issue. He clearly felt no responsibility toward his store, he’d left that in Anya’s greedy little hands before and she managed just fine without him.

Giles also didn’t think about Dawn. As Dawn is both Buffy’s sister and a supernatural creation, you would think he would have both a personal and a professional feeling of responsibility toward Dawn. Leaving Dawn behind is another example of Giles either not caring any more after Buffy’s death, or failing to consider all the responsibility he still had. That, or Giles was so focused on his own selfishness that little else mattered at the time. Either way, Giles’ decision to leave for the second time was a poor one, and exhibited little personal or professional responsibility for the people he left behind or their situations. The events of season six would prove that Giles made the wrong decision, as it affected everyone he left behind.

Buffy descended into her own pit of self-loathing. She went from feeling nothing to feeling self-hatred as she began a sexual affair with Spike the vampire, started work at a fast food restaurant as she had no other job skills or experience, and rapidly had her confidence undermined by real life villains, three awful white guys.

Willow’s magic use grew completely out of control. She became addicted, she put Dawn in danger, and she alienated her friends. The final catalyst was the death of Tara, which drove Willow to descend completely into darkness, kill a human being by flaying him alive with her mind, and attempt to destroy the entire world.

It wasn’t until all of this had happened that Giles felt it was his responsibility to return to Sunnydale and try to stop Dark Willow from destroying everything. It didn’t occur to him that Buffy was failing to thrive, or that Willow’s transformation could have been prevented. Where was he when Buffy was having to flip burgers to support herself, her sister, and her two unemployed lesbian witches? Why was Giles oblivious to the plight of these people he’d professed to care for so much? He knew before he left that there was trouble and that everything with the group was unsettled. He still chose to leave, and he clearly returned planning on being the hero that solves everything. Unfortunately for him, this doesn’t quite turn out like that, and that’s a good thing. He didn’t deserve to be the hero.

As if that all wasn’t enough, Giles then has the audacity to tell Buffy that to be strong sometimes you have to ask for help. This doesn’t make any sense, because the reason he left is because he thought helping her was enabling her. At least now he’s decided to stay, especially once he discovers he has an overabundance of professional responsibility in season 7. It certainly flows with season 6’s theme that Giles makes poor choices that affect everyone around him; Buffy and Willow do the same thing. Xander does it later on. Anya even gets in on the action a bit. Spike doesn’t know what to do with himself. Just like real people in real life, these larger than life characters all went through this period of questioning themselves, and making poor decisions, and negatively affecting their friends. Perhaps this all started when Giles decided he no longer had any responsibility to the group and left the first time. All of them were cut loose in the world, and all of them stumbled along the way.