Giles in Season 7 - Something I had forgotten

[hobgoblinn]

So I posted the last part of "In Loco" I'll probably get to before Summer of Giles, and while doing the formatting, I had been listening to Sondheim's "Merrily We Roll Along." For those who aren't familiar with the show, it runs backward through the lives of three friends, starting with them all estranged, their lives outwardly "successful" with all the things they thought they wanted, and ending with them together watching Sputnik passing overhead, their whole lives ahead of them. It asks the question, "How did we get there from here?"

I thought it might give me a new perspective, going back through the Buffy canon from the end. And so far, yeah, it's been interesting.

But something just happened that threw me completely. In the episode "Touched," Giles listens with the others to the Bringer speaking through Andrew's body, about how it serves the First Evil and how it will be around long after they're all dead. The Bringer is bound and helpless. And Giles picks up a knife and cuts the Bringer's throat to silence him.

Just trying to wrap my mind around this. I know it's often been remarked how Giles is anti-Giles in this final season. But I'd appreciate thoughts on this and what it might say about Giles, here and post Chosen. I can't write this story if I can't get back in the head space of these characters. And I'm not sure this Giles is someone I can understand well enough to write, or even to edit what I have to finish this.

Comments

[usedtobeljs]

Season Seven is deeply problematic from a writing standpoint, so my answer is a mixture of Doyleist (extratextual reasons) and Watsonian (character reasons).

Watsonian: yes, Giles has a warrior-side, and has done since the character-reworking in "Halloween" and "The Dark Age." He says in "First Date" that this is a war, and he's behaving accordingly. And he does not rely on Buffy to solve the problem. (It's important to me that he doesn't torture the Bringer, however.)

But I would also note, as Barb says above, that the man has lost the institution by which and against which he has defined himself his adult life. He has lost friends. He has lost resources and backing. He has been doing the work of a dozen men since then, travelling continually on the grim job of collecting Potentials, exhausted and stretched past bearing. AND, to extend and slightly counter sahiya's point, no one has hugged HIM (except Anya and Co in "The Killer in Me" when they tackle him in the desert). He's had no comfort or support -- not from Buffy or Willow, certainly, who are taken up with their own concerns.

Doyleist: Because the thrust of the show is "It's All About Buffy," in Season Seven the writers *take away* any Giles character work they've done to save room for more feel-sorry-for-Buffy moments -- Joss and Co wrote and then discarded scenes in which (in LMPTM) he talks about how killing Ben has affected him, and in Chosen how the First had appeared to him as Jenny.

[willowgreen.livejournal.com]

Doyleist: Because the thrust of the show is "It's All About Buffy," in Season Seven the writers *take away* any Giles character work they've done to save room for more feel-sorry-for-Buffy moments -- Joss and Co wrote and then discarded scenes in which (in LMPTM) he talks about how killing Ben has affected him, and in Chosen how the First had appeared to him as Jenny.

That's very interesting and quite sad, because it didn't work--IMO Buffy was less sympathetic in Season 7 than at any other time in the series. I don't want to get started on an anti-S7 rant here, but I particularly disliked the way Giles and Willow were written that season--it took way too much fanwanking to connect them to the characters they'd been before. In what was most likely a case of self-protective denial, I'd completely forgotten about Giles killing the Bringer. It never made any sense to me, PTSD or no PTSD.