Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Headscratchers/Season 3

Headscratchers for Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Spoilers abound.

Does the Wishverse still exist in the present as of Doppelgangland

 * It was eliminated when Cordelia's wish was undone, right? It seems like it was pointless to send Vampire Willow home, given that the Wishverse was only going to last a few more minutes past her arrival. Otherwise, if an Alternate Timeline was permanently created, Giles must have felt pretty silly standing there after smashing the amulet at the end of 'The Wish' seeing as, from his point of view, it apparently didn't do anything. Either way, it JBM.
 * I think it's probably there. It's just "Crappy-no-Slayer-verse". You know, like the one with no shrimp or the one of all shrimp.
 * I'd imagine there's only one active timeline at a time, and the rest are just possible, alternate histories. The wishverse is still out there, but it's like a movie that's been paused or stopped right at the point where Giles broke the amulet. You can pull things in and out of it with magic, but it's not moving forward anymore: that timeline ends with the smashing of the amulet. So in a sense, it was totally pointless to send Vamp Willow back (doubly so since she got staked before the amulet broke anyway), but the Scoobies couldn't really bring themselves to stake her, and they couldn't let her run loose in the real world. It was just a way of getting rid of her without killing her themselves.
 * I'd argue that it WAS pointless sending Vamp!Willow back, but also that the Scoobies didn't really know that. As far as they know, it's just an alternate dimension.

Burying Demons

 * Why did Buffy want to bury the demon at the beginning of 'The Wish'? It doesn't really make sense that she would deliberately go out of her way to maintain The Masquerade.
 * It looked like it was in the middle of a family picnic spot. Leaving a dead demon stuffed in a back alley is one thing; leaving it where a bunch of little kiddies are going to stumble over it, poke it with sticks, and catch any weird demonic diseases its rotting corpse contains is quite another.

Ripper's Age

 * Okay, "Band Candy"... adults regress to age 16 on eating magic chocolate. Granted. So why does Giles become Ripper? He didn't become Ripper until he went off the rails as an undergraduate - given that he was take up to Oxford in the Sixties (or earlier, depending how old he was meant to be) he would have needed to be a fairly well adjusted and studious public schoolboy.
 * Rule of Funny aside... this can be fanwanked as Giles simply being smart enough to go to university early. Or adults regress to "late teens" rather than 16. But yeah, the magic chocolate seemed to operate fairly arbitrarily.
 * They didn't become carbon copies of their teenage selves (they retained all their memories of being adults, at any rate), the candy just stripped away their maturity. Giles minus maturity equals Ripper.
 * Pretty much. If Giles ever got turned the result would probably not be him ending up like Dalton in S3, but something that would make Angelus look like Mother Theresa.
 * Sixties 'or earlier'? Giles seems to be in his mid-forties at the start of the series (the same as the actor Anthony Head), so was most likely at university in the late 1960s or early 1970s...
 * Giles says that his "Ripper" phase was when he was 21, when he dropped out of Oxford. He also states in the same episode that he hasn't seen Ethan and the others for over "twenty years". This implies he is about 45 at the time, and would have been at school in the late 60s and at university in the early 70s. About the question, it seems like the candy simply makes you immature rather than a teenager, as not all teenagers are the yobbish morons the adults become on the candy.

Any Soul-Stealer, As Long As It's This One
In "Enemies", how did ? The former would have been a huge Gambit Roulette with some seemingly unaccessible knowledge, the second would be a huge coincidence with some seemingly unaccesssible knowledge.
 * Unless he just turned up one day in the Mayor's office and said "I heard you had a problem..."
 * Here's how he could do it without it being a Gambit Roulette: Which also makes the whole episode one of Giles' Crowning Moments of Awesome.
 * The Mayor says something about how it was hard to summon the demon, which means he contacted it first.
 * Or that he received a communique to the effect that "there is a demon who can help you, all you have to do is summon it."
 * Who says that Giles must have arranged it so that the mayor would contact that particular demon? Here's a possible scenario: the Mayor contacts the demon about turning Angel evil. It's not a stretch to assume that the demon knew of Giles' connection to Angel through Buffy, since Buffy's relationships with both of them were not exactly secrets. As a result, turning Angel evil could well get Giles killed (like Ms. Calendar). Since the demon owes Giles, and presumably doesn't want him killed, he warns Giles about what the mayor is planning. Then they work out the plan to pretend to turn Angel evil. It's still sheer dumb luck that the mayor just happened to contact a demon who owed Giles a favor, but stranger things can happen on TV.
 * We really don't know what EXACTLY the demon intended to do. It possible that the number of demons able to steal souls from ensouled vampires against their will is extremely limited. Given both Spike and Angel's circumstances I'm willing to believe that there are hundreds maybe thousands of ensouled vampires. On a planet of 6 billion I can justify that ten thousand people never randomly bumped into each other.
 * Hell, it's not even that unlikely for it to be dumb luck. It just looks like dumb luck taken on its own, but as a part of the series, it's just statistics. Yes, it was very fortunate that one of Giles' contacts was the demon contracted to steal Angel's soul. But none of Giles' contacts found the Glove of Whomever or identified the fake Watcher before it was too late, none of them were involved with Ethan in any of his various plots, none of them were able to warn him about the gym coach's demon steroids, etc. etc. Giles is a man with a lot of friends in low places, especially considering his history as Ripper. In seven years of fighting on the Hellmouth, it just stands to reason that one of his contacts might strike gold every now and again.

"Wish" Darla were There

 * In "The Wish," where is Darla? She was one of The Master's biggest supporters in the regular continuity, and only left his side to travel the world with Angelus, who in this world was still ensouled. So where was she? It seems unlikely Angel killed here in this Buffy-less Sunnydale, as The Master probably escaped following a successful Harvest. So where'd she go? Wouldn't she be the one most likely to be attending The Master's weird "mass production blood machine thing's activation" party?
 * The entire premise of vampires ruling Sunnydale in "The Wish" doesn't hold under scrutiny, IMO. Why are people still living in Sunnydale? Why haven't they called the army or at least moved out? It makes no sense whatsoever. Also in "The Harvest", The Master's rising is supposed to end the world, In "Prophecy Girl" we see the demons coming out from the Hellmouth because he escaped with the clear implication of them being ready to be unleashed upon the world. In "The Wish" however The Master is content to rule over...The Bronze. Talk about Villain Decay. Maybe Darla just found this behaviour too cowardly and boring and moved elsewhere.
 * That's a problem I've had with that episode too: how much more awesome would it have been to really follow up on the what-if premise from "Prophecy Girl", to have the Hellmouth open, demons wandering the Earth and the traumatized remains of human society clinging to a threadbare veneer of daylight normalcy (in other words, kinda like what we saw in Wishworld Sunnydale, except it's like that everywhere). It's tempting to say that's outside the scope of a TV show, but Joss eventually did exactly that sort of story in Dollhouse, and it was incredible. But anyway, as for Darla, I'd guess that the White Hats fought and killed her in one of their early battles. The Master's disciple Luke is also missing: if Giles and the gang staked Luke and Darla early on, the Master might have captured and turned Xander and Willow into his new disciples as his way of evening the score.
 * Though now that I think about it, maybe there's a little bit of Fridge Brilliance in that first part. Cordelia wished that Buffy had never come to Sunnydale, and Anya granted her wish. If the Master's ascension had caused any apocalyptic problems, though, the Watchers Council would have sent Buffy there in a hurry, and that would've gone against the wish. So maybe the wish not only Cosmic Retconed Buffy's original arrival in Sunnydale, it also retconned the Master's imprisonment and plans to make sure Buffy still didn't have any reason to show up even after his release. Still woulda loved to see a full-blown demon post-apocalypse, though...
 * Also, without Buffy, "Prophecy Girl" didn't happen. IIRC, the Harvest was just supposed to free the Master, using people's energy. When that failed, he had to get the energy somewhere else. According to the Prophecy and his own monologue to Buffy, drinking Buffy's blood (or just any Slayer's ?) is that exact boost of energy and it allows him to escape, all on his own, without vampirizing any additional energy. In the Wish universe, since the Harvest succeeded, he may not have gone after a Slayer just for a power-up. YMMV, but without that power boost, he may not have opened the Hellmouth for demons to escape... or he may not have had enough power to "reign" over more than Sunnydale.
 * You are entirely correct. If Buffy hadn't stopped it, the Harvest would have freed the Master. So in the Wishverse the Master has apparently been running rampant ever since the beginning of season 1.
 * As to where the army is: Sunnydale still has its Mayor, one assumes. Whatever pact he made to turn Sunnydale into a demon feeding ground is still in effect.
 * To the above tropers I submit we simply didn't spend enough time in Wishworld to see the damage. Note that when Buffy does arrive this is clearly a battle hardened Buffy who's been through more trauma, based on her scars and attitude, than our Buffy went through. I think the world is like Sunnydale the Master rules Sunnydale FROM the Bronze, not the Bronze and he probably figured out something. It's probably like Angel After the Fall and the Master has a small relatively unimportant territory.
 * Possible, but not terribly likely. If the Hellmouth had opened that spectacularly, the Slayer would've been sent to contain it a long time ago. That she wasn't implies that either the Wish rewrote the Master's ascension such that no great amount of demons came out, or else that one demon came out, ate a few hundred people, and wandered off, and the rest weren't actually in a mood to follow. Generally speaking, the Wish is simply not nearly as bleak as the episode tries to make itself out to be, and in fact is probably only a slightly worse world than the main reality of the Buffyverse. First off, we know that, despite appearances, the Buffyverse kind of sucks. Demons seriously abducted people to be worked to death in a world devoid of hope for the demon dimension equivalent of thousands of years before Buffy came along to stop it at the beginning of season three, and Los Angelos isn't situated directly atop a Hellmouth the way Sunnydale is.
 * Most Buffy episodes involve the Scoobies taking on a monster of the week, and while most of those monsters of the weak will have successfully menaced Sunnydale, equivalent monsters of the week will have been beaten back by Buffy in Cleveland. Sucks for Sunnydale, but Cleveland is better off. Furthermore, several monsters of the week are somewhere between slightly and extremely likely to take Giles' side of the fight, not the Master's. Amy's mother Catherine, for example, will successfully witch her way onto the Sunnydale High cheerleader squad and thus be invested in the status quo, and side with Giles against the vampiric invaders. Marcy from Out of Sight, Out of Mind might also end up taking Giles' side in the long run. Plus, we know that a different gang of Scoobies was assembled by Giles, one that's likely far more prone to taking losses...But it was only slightly smaller than the Scooby team in the main Buffyverse, which implies that it's had several times as many members as the Buffyverse Scoobies. In addition, the Master and the Mayor are not going to get along, and although neither of them are likely to side with Giles, the conflict between the two gives the good guys some breathing room. The Master also appears to have won, putting the Mayor's ascension plans permanently to rest. Spike came to Sunnydale looking for the Slayer to add another notch to his belt. He probably would've headed to Cleveland instead in the Wishverse, and without Angelus around to even up the odds, he almost certainly would've gotten himself and Drusilla staked by the end of the Wishverse's season two.
 * Darla and Luke are both absent, heavily implying that they were killed off by the white hats (probably as a result of their unsavory new allies), leaving the Master's most vicious servants as Xander and Willow, vampires only two years risen, the latter of whom was no more difficult to remove than any other monster of the week when she showed up in Dopplegangland. Xander and Willow are certainly far more powerful than average vampire grunts, even ones with a century or more of experience on them, but they're not nearly vicious enough to stand up to the likes of Spike, Drusilla, Luke, Darla, and other vampiric heavies from the Buffyverse. Plus, as of the end of The Wish, they're both dead.
 * The biggest threat to the world at large is the Master's mass blood production scheme. Probably the humans fed through the plant aren't killed, just mostly drained and then herded back into a cage to recover and be redrained at a later date. That's slightly better for the captured humans, but it means that the Master's minions have just removed the one limit on vampiric population, specifically that your human population has to be way higher than your vampire population to keep things stable. The food supply is greatly increased and far more stable, allowing the Master to create a positively massive vampire army, do away with the masquerade, and take over the world like a zombie plague.
 * Ultimately, whether or not the Wishverse ends up a twisted hellscape or not isn't decided as of the end of The Wish. It's come much, much closer than the Buffyverse ever has, because Joss is much less reluctant to have the good guys suffer significant losses in the Wishverse for obvious reasons, but both the Master and Giles are down to the wire, very nearly out of resources and struggling to be the last one standing, because whoever ends up controlling Sunnydale is going to dictate whether vampires seize the world from humans or not. Stopping the Master after he gets some real momentum going is simply not possible. Fortunately, it's very likely that Kendra's watcher will direct her to Sunnydale immediately after her activation, since he's sent her to Sunnydale to investigate far less significant goings on in the Buffyverse and was no more aware that Buffy had come back in the Buffyverse than in the Wishverse (where she actually didn't). Thus, ultimate victory or defeat in the Wishverse comes down to whether Kendra, Giles, and possibly Larry and Oz (if they escaped the plant after staking Willow) can kill the Master.
 * That makes Buffy's Watcher not believing Giles about Sunnydale being a hellmouth a little odd, but it would lend an extra layer of meaning to Giles saying that the Master is "the local vampire lord around these parts", if there are other vampires and supernatural figures doing the same elsewhere. And it'd explain why Cordelia's family, and other families with the means to just pack up and move away, still live in Sunnydale: maybe Sunnydale's one of the better places left in the world. As bad as he is, the Master might be the only thing that's keeping the even bigger and meaner demons at bay.

Losing Faith

 * "Band Candy", "Lover's Walk", "Gingerbread", "Helpless". Where's Faith? Wouldn't she be helpful in these situations? No wonder she felt isolated from the group.
 * Reference is made at one point to Faith going off on walkabout, hence her absence from that particular episode. Of course, her going on walkabout is probably a consequence of her feeling isolated.
 * True, that's in "Helpless", but the point stands elsewhere. Also, she's contacted in "The Zeppo" but is never even asked to help avert the apocalypse.
 * She's there for the final battle in The Zeppo. We see Buffy yell "Faith, go for the heart!"
 * Hm. In "Band Candy" and "Gingerbread," the adults of Sunnydale have been magically driven insane. Given that Faith is both mentally unstable and older than the rest of the cast, maybe she was part of the problem rather than the solution. Faith on band candy is a terrifying concept. In "Lover's Walk", as I recall there really wasn't a point where it would have made sense to try to contact her.
 * Um, it isn't canon that Faith is older than the others. In fact, most fans get the impression that she's younger. It definitely would have been nice had they explained Faith's absences a little more. Just a line would have been nice.
 * According to the tie-in novels, Faith is one month older than Buffy. IOW, negligible age difference.
 * It's implied it affects everyone, it's just that most teenagers don't notice it because they're, well, teenagers.
 * Faith's story in general is filled with holes that neatly allow you to read her along a whole spectrum of gray. She does bad things and people, including the heroes, do bad things to her. A throwaway line hinting that the writers had some clue of where she was during these bits might have been nice, but unanswered questions work well for allowing people to be sympathetic to her on rewatching...

Jonathan's gun in Earshot

 * This is a minor thing but it always bugged me: if Johnathan was going up to the bell tower to kill himself in Earshot, why did he have that big, high-powered, rifle? It seem to me if someone (especially someone as short as Johnathan) tried to shoot himself with that gun, he'd bumble around, make a complete mess of the whole task, and most likely leave himself horribly maimed instead of dead.
 * My god, that was so weird. How could you even aim a rifle like that at yourself? With a scope and everything? What was he going to do, shoot his foot and bleed to death?
 * Tuck the muzzle under your chin, lean over with the stock against the floor, and step on the trigger with your big toe. People have actually committed suicide this way.
 * No idea where he even got a rifle like that (then again, this is Sunnydale), but it's not like Jonathan is supposed to have tons of common sense. Without knowing a lot about guns, he probably would have gone with whatever he thought looked coolest-- or maybe he assumed using the most powerful thing he could get his hands on would decrease his chance surviving, or having time to experience pain -- or maybe he just hated life so much that he felt that merely dying would be insufficient, and that only splattering his entire head against the wall like a Gallagherian watermelon would suffice. Whichever you pick, it kind of underscores how little he's thought this through, which is oddly appropriate to the scene.
 * Also why go to the clocktower?
 * Dramatic gesture? The clocktower was a secluded place on campus, and high school was at the heart of his woes.
 * In one of the Season 4 DVD interviews, the actor who plays Jonathan mentions that that character always tries to solve everything with 'one big gesture'...
 * Some people stick the barrel of a shotgun in their mouth and pull the trigger with their feet to avoid the possibility of mere maiming that a handgun offers. Maybe he just hadn't kicked off his shoes or put a popsicle stick inside the trigger guard, and couldn't find a shotgun or preferred the idea of a rifle? As to why he was in the clocktower, he would immediately get the notice of everyone on campus not in an inner-building room with a loud enough gun, which would be more traumatizing for those he saw as bullies than an obituary that says "Johnathan[sic] what's-his-face, found dead in his basement after three-ish weeks of decomposition. The coroners guess it might have been a self-inflicted gunshot wound, but they were too busy with the sextuple train-passenger homicide on page three to double-check."
 * Maybe someone else he knew owned the gun so it was the only one he could get his hands on.
 * It was probably his dad's hunting rifle or something. Also, it should be noted that rifles and shotguns are a lot easier to get than a handgun. Handguns usually require special permits and registration, but rifles don't.
 * ...What.
 * He's right, though agreed. Why?
 * Handguns are easier to conceal, which makes them more useful for things like armed robbery. If someone robs a store with a rifle they can't just stick the gun in their pocket after they've gotten away, which makes them stand out more and thus are more likely to be caught.
 * As a minor, Jonathan cannot legally purchase a firearm. And until Season 6, he didn't really seem like someone who'd be likely to have black market connections. As someone above said, there's a good chance the gun was his dad's, or another relative's, and he had to settle for whatever he could get his hands on.
 * The meta reason is so that we (and Buffy) would suspect him of being a mass murderer. Neither of us would suspect him if he went to the tower with a handgun, since that's not gonna kill anybody up there. With a rifle though, it seemed definite that he was gonna start picking people off.
 * Fridge Brilliance; it could have been for this very reason; so that someone would care enough to stop him. As a suicide attempt, it's mildly clumsy, as a cry for help...

Anya's Power Center
Of course that theory hinges on Anyanka never having granted a wish like it before, which is highly unlikely ("I wish I'd never met him" seems like a likely request) and it's also sort of implied that she'd done it before ("I had no idea how much of a difference this spell would make" or something). On the other hand, that might also explain why this spell was different to the previous ones and required so much more effort to maintain; this one changed massive swathes of lives, not just two. Hell, considering how much changing the past is A) frowned on and B) stated to be really freaking hard if not actually impossible (albeit not in those exact words, but they make reference to "changing the past" when they talk about resurrection) at other times in the series, it seems strange that Anya gets a free pass to remake history as she sees fit. It's possible that any reality altering spell would only be temporary/would only last until the spell was terminated (i.e. by destroying the power center). As a final possibility, the spell might not have been complete when Giles destroyed the power center. Possibly it takes a certain amount of time for the new reality to take prescience over the old one; once that time is up, destroying the power center does nothing. As an added bonus, this would explain why Cordy still remembered the old timeline (seeing as the usual point of wishing you'd never met someone is that you wouldn't remember, surely). Once reality finished asserting itself, she would have forgotten along with everyone else, leaving aside the point that she would also have been dead. Of course, this is all just so much Fan Wank. The obvious explanation is that A Wizard Did It.
 * Possibly another case of "I forgot, OK?" on Joss Whedon's part, but bear with me: in "The Wish", Anya's first appearance, Giles says that destroying her power center will cause all the wishes she's ever granted to be canceled and it works, so supposedly they were, but in season 6 (and some other cases I can't really remember), it's explicitly shown that the wishes weren't undone - this guy Anya turned into a demon decades ago was still a demon. It's even shown at a certain point that she caused the Russian communist revolution, so wouldn't that have been undone as well? I realize this is probably just Broad Strokes, but I had to.
 * We don't know that all of Anyanka's wishes were made using that specific amulet. Perhaps their power fades over time, or they're only good for a certain amount of wishes, and Anyanka needs too keep using new ones. Indeed, since Giles got this info from a book, it's implied that this might have been done before.
 * Then again, Anya herself seems to have forgotten about that by the time we get around to "Selfless" in Season 7. Even according to D'Hoffryn, the ONLY way to reverse it is with the life and soul of a vengeance demon (maybe because he just wanted to get his own bit of vengeance on Anya, but that doesn't explain why she wouldn't already know).
 * Anya used the girl's wish to summon the spider demon, smashing her power center would have likely just banished it.
 * It always made sense to me that the amulet caused a snap-back in "The Wish" because shifting between potential time-lines wasn't just a one-shot spell. It required a constant will of effort to prevent the timeline from snapping back into place (And indeed, into time; once the spell ends, no time is seen to have passed). It wasn't a standard wish, and therefore the amulet was essential to its continued effectiveness.
 * It does fit with Halfrak's praise of Anya later, though. She brags about how Anyaka was an amazing artist with wishes, and she could twist and turn them into masterpieces of vengeance. She also never mentions any of those wishes being retroactive. Putting the two together, maybe granting a history-altering wish was a completely new idea that Anyaka had been wanting to try, which is why she was talking to Giles about how "I never knew Cordelia's wish would be so exciting". It's probably really just a Retcon, since Giles knew from his research that the amulet would break her wishes, but it fits in with her later character and reputation.
 * Remember when Xander got split in two? Willow mentioned something regarding her dissolution of the spell, that their natural state is to be together and the magic is doing all the work, she just has to break it and they'll snap back. Maybe there's a statute of limitations on this sort of thing. How long can a person, object, or even reality itself be under the effect of a transmuting spell before the magic becomes ingrained into its central being? Let's say Anya's spell to turn Olaf into a troll. At what point does it stop being a spell, and he starts just being a troll? For older magicks such as that one, that could be why nothing changed; the Amulet isn't doing anything anymore, they've passed their statute of limitations on ending the magic, and that's just the way things are now. Cordelia's wish, on the other hand, was recent. The magic was still working.
 * When Anya explains about how the troll is her ex-boyfriend she mentions that she turned him into a troll because he cheated on her, and then was offered the gig as a vengeance demon. She didn't use the power center to turn him into a troll, so losing it wouldn't undo the curse. She's implied several times that she used to do witchcraft but chooses not to any longer (also she seems to be quite bad at it, see Tabula Rasa).
 * Maybe destroying her amulet only undid her previous curses in the Wish alternate dimension because that's where it was when destroyed? It still caused her to lose her powers because it was the same Anya in both dimensions rather than an alternate, but it only effected the dimension that she was in. That's my Wild Mass Guessing on the matter, anyway.

The Zeppo
For every episode not named The Zeppo, not only is X usually to be found right by Buffy's side wherever trouble is, but Xand has even saved Buffy & Willow's lives multiple times (usually by simply being there and assisting in an escape - see The Harvest {pulling Buffy to safety}, The Pack {charging the zookeeper}, Phases {staking Vamp Theresa}, and Go Fish {again pulling Buff to safety})Xander had never been a minor character -- yet the storyline of this ep seems to make use of him as if he were. Neither was he incompetant in crisis, but the rest of the Scoobies treat him as if he is, something they had never done before, and never do again. Now it is cool to see Xander captian his own adventure, and establish his tryst with Faith ... but it's normally best for the like minded to skip through the first few chapters of the ep ...
 * I've always felt that this episode was well out of joint with the rest of the series - it gave a Day in The Limelight to a character who already spends most of his time in the limelight. The wierd thing about it was that in order to give Xander an heroic storyline, they had to start him in a place that several notches lower... Unfortunately they started him several notches below where he normally is for the series, geeking him and klutzing him to a point where, for the first ten minutes of the show he's nearly unrecognizible.

Giles' Epic Failure as Faith's Watcher

 * I really think Giles holds a lot of responsibility for how things went bad with Faith. He was officially her Watcher until he was fired, and it was his job to express concern for her well-being. He was basically paid to look after her, but he never did. This was a teenage girl who had seriously been through the ringer. Seeing her Watcher brutally murdered was just the tip of the iceberg in what was presumably her life of utter suckage. In Sunnydale she was lonely, unhappy, and living in a dingy motel room (and who knows how she got the money to pay for it), but we never see Giles make any effort to reach out to her, improve her situation, and provide her with some stability, direction, or even half the affection he showed Buffy. He could have at least asked the Council for some money to provide her with better living conditions. Gwen Post did more than Giles to reach out to Faith, even if she was just faking it for evil ulterior motives. And it was quite clear from Faith's interaction with Gwen and the Mayor that she wouldn't have been too proud to accept any help, attention, and approval Giles might have provided. In fact, evidence suggests the opposite: she would have soaked it up, and it would have made her more mentally stable. It's a shame that the only people who truly expressed an interest in Faith's well-being at this point in time were the bad guys. I think that Giles' neglect of Faith is a major oversight on his part as both her Watcher and, more generally, as an adult.
 * You do realize that the Watcher's job is to train the slayer to kill things and then point her at the things to be killed. It's not his job to keep her sane, comfortable or well adjusted. He's gone above and beyond with Buffy and that has tainted the view of what's expected. Notice how Giles' affection and indulgence of Buffy is considered a very bad thing by the Watchers. I'll grant you it's a failing on his part as an adult but he's not required to do anything for her benefit, Watcherwise.
 * It is, however, part of the Watcher's job to ensure that the Slayer has basic sustenance, instead of requiring herself to be fully self-supporting and with a full-time job of killing vampires. Buffy was an exception to this rule because she came prepackaged with an independent support system (her family, natch), and by the time she lost that Giles was just too used to it to change. But if you want an example of how a factory-standard Slayer works, we have Kendra. Does anybody here believe Mr. Zabuto wasn't making sure she had three hots and a cot, without making her scrounge for it herself? Can we even imagine Kendra having a normal job?
 * If Giles had asked the Council for money to aid Faith's living conditions, they would've laughed in his face. The Coucil are a bunch of arrogant dicks. They don't give a damn about the slayers.
 * What the above troper said. If Buffy or Giles had asked the Council to give Buffy a salary after her mother died they would have told him to sit on it, so they sure as hell weren't going to give Faith a salary when she could have gotten at least a part-time job (however crappy) during the day. She's unemployed, 17 years old, and a high school drop-out, yet she lives at the motel, travels around, feeds herself, and buys trashy outfits. Her philosophy of "Want. Take. Have." AKA stealing, could explain it, but I think she'd need a more reliable source of income for all that. It is true however that Faith's situation in early season 3 makes Giles look at best distracted by other concerns (Buffy's drama) and at worst callous. The obvious explanation for it is that the writer's didn't think "how come the only adult who has no other dependents doesn't at least visit Faith to see how she's doing?" therefore Giles doesn't think of it either. Probably if he dropped by her motel sometimes people would think he's her pimp or her john. As for Giles not showing her any affection, I give you her first interaction with Giles where she hits on him, when Xander saves her live she has sex with him, and she hugs the Mayor suggestively and calls him "Sugar Daddy" when he gives her a new apartment. Any man that's nice to her, clearly due to her bad experiences with men in the past, she interprets it as a quid pro quo situation and she responds the way she thinks they want her to. It isn't that Giles doesn't have the will power to gently turn her down, it's just that when someone's brain has been screwed with as spectacularly as Faith's was, it's very difficult to help them correct their thinking to what's healthy without some kind of therapy, and what therapist could Faith have possibly talked to? Giles openly giving an underprivileged, emotionally damaged, orphan teenager money, hugs and "private talks in his office" looks so much worse than when he does those things for Buffy, whose mother knows about their relationship. Faith might have felt like he thought she owed him something and grown resentful of this so-called debt. If he or Buffy pissed her off she likely would have turned on him on a dime, as she did to Buffy a quite a few times, even used his generosity against him to get him arrested (she IS kind of crazy and doesn't think of consequences). He had Buffy and the gang over at his place before they graduated high school because he trusted them as his friends. Giles didn't have Faith over at his house because he barely knew her and she had so many trust issues, and she betrayed them about four months after meeting them, not really enough time for him to let someone get close, let alone for Faith to let someone in. Yet Faith has a certain respect for Giles, if the "canon" Season 8 comics are included (I haven't read much of those because my walls can't take that kind of abuse but I know the general Giles and Faith storyline) along with the few interactions the two characters get in the show. She is pissed when she finds Giles critically injured in "Revelations". She appeared to want the kind of relationship with the Mayor that Buffy had with Giles, but she never blames Giles for what happened to her. She both verbally and physically lashes out at Buffy, Willow, Xander, Angel and Wesley, but never attacks Giles. Here is my fanwank, based on what we see of their relationship: it's possible that he was her source of income until she broke with the group for good, and all of their scenes were off-screen. If Giles has Buffy in the library to witness him handing over cash to Faith (so there's no paper trail), and Joyce knows about it (Joyce was the one after all who wanted Faith over for dinner more than once) he has people to back him up if something goes awry. In Season 1 of "Angel" she picks Wesley to torture over Cordelia because she has no personal grudge against Cordy - she blames her problems partially on Wesley for his failure as her Watcher and for turning her in to the Council:

"FAITH: Did you ever wonder if things would have been different if we'd never met? What if you had Buffy and Giles had been my Watcher? Think we'd still be here right now? Or would Giles be sitting in that chair? Or is it just, like, fate? There's no choice. You were going to be here no matter what... Not that any of this is your own fault... I feel it's kind of my duty to tell you that if you'd been a better Watcher, I might have been a more positive role model!..."

(Continued) Giles was her Watcher, but she seemed to regard him as really Buffy's Watcher, which is the way the gang all seemed to secretly feel. Wesley is her Watcher for three episodes, during which they hardly talk, and he made more of a negative impression on Faith than several months of Giles "ignoring" her. Faith's fall was inevitably going to happen at some point even if Giles and the Scoobies had spent all their free time trying to make her feel special and wanted. The responsibility for Faith's turn to the Dark Side lies with the people who traumatized her as a child, not with the reticent British men hired to train her and who didn't give her free shit in return for her constant disappearances and attitude of "back the fuck off". It's entirely possible that Giles did neglect her, but I don't think their later interactions bears this out. Giles has a habit of giving people a lot of space to work personal problems out on their own (such as "Dead Man's Party", "The Freshman", uh, Season 6), just as he insists on privacy when it comes to his own issues ("The Dark Age"), but ultimately he's there for people in trouble, to help them physically, emotionally or financially, even when they're not Buffy. It's truly unfortunate that the writers barely fleshed out Giles' relationships with characters other than Buffy and Willow, and stopped giving a crap about writing him in character by mid-Season 7 when Faith came back on the side of good.
 * Just because Faith herself doesn’t seem to hold Giles at least partly responsible for her downfall (which I don’t believe was as inevitable as you describe it) doesn't mean he wasn't partially at fault in actuality. Certainly, Faith was screwed up long before she ever came to Sunnydale, but she wasn't completely shut off from people. There's no reason to suggest that Faith would have reacted badly to Giles taking an interest in her well-being. It's made fairly clear in the series that she didn't really have much of a problem with authority figures (beyond them ending up dead all the time), and in fact, she was looking for some adult guidance and support, even if she wouldn't admit it. When you consider the crap authority figures she’s likely had in the past and the fact that her one good authority figure was gruesomely murdered in front of her, it’s kind of amazing how fast she took to Gwendolyn Post and the Mayor. Post, in particular, is the best example here. She didn't shower Faith with affection and physical goods like the Mayor; she was strict and no nonsense and didn't take any of Faith's attitude, but she still expressed an interest in her, even if it was only as a Watcher. Faith might have grumbled about it, but she was still ready to follow Post's instructions (and I don't think it was simply because Post was playing on her fears). I think if Giles had taken a similar interest, things might have gone quite a bit differently. We can discuss how poorly the Watcher's Council treated Slayers and use that as one of the reasons Giles didn't step up to care for her more extensively, but that doesn't explain why we pretty much never see him acting as a Watcher in the most basic sense towards her. That was something that was his job. I find it understandable why he wouldn't get involved in Faith's life, and I really do understand that he had a lot to deal with regarding his own life and Buffy's life, and it's completely human for people to get wrapped up in their own issues. But I still think, if we go by what we actually see (or rather don't see) in the series, that he should be held accountable for his lack of action regarding Faith, whether it's understandable or not. Faith is ultimately responsible for the things she did, but other people, before and during her stay in Sunnydale, helped drive her to that point. I think Giles’ was one of those people not because of anything he did, but because of what he didn’t do. He wasn’t on Faith’s radar as someone to get back at because he didn’t do anything to her. For me, it's just as bad that he didn’t do anything for her either.
 * Look, yes Giles could have done much more for Faith but he was already busy with his job as a librarian, his own personal life, his life as a Watcher which includes copious amounts of time researching demons, handling Buffy and the regular Scoobies, and on top of that we're going to pile complete responsibility for Faith's emotional problems on him? Could he have done more? Yes. Realistically would any person in a situation like Giles been able to help? No. Is it fair to place so much blame on him for Faith? No, especially not when he'd only been around her for a few months at the most. It's kind of like blaming a girl's suicide on the therapist she's been seeing for a few weeks and saying that it's his fault he didn't do more. Realistically, Giles is only at fault because he didn't go out of his way to make Faith his number one priority when he had no reason to do such a thing until after Allan Finch was staked and by that point it was too late. You're just biased because you saw both sides of what was happening but if you lacked knowledge of what was happening to Faith, you'd probably act in the exact same way Giles did.
 * Well, Slaying is more important than his library job, and ensuring the continued well-being of the Slayer is more important than any research that isn't of 'the world is ending this afternoon so we need to figure this out in the next two hours' level importance (non-time-dependent research can be postponed) so yes, we are indeed going to blame Giles for this. Everything you listed is of ultimately lesser importance than Giles' duty of care to the young woman who is his charge. The only thing that would be of equal importance would be ensuring a similar level of sustenance and emotional support for Buffy -- but Buffy already has family and friends helping out with that, and Faith has no one. So Giles is guilty of, at minimum, a severe failure to properly prioritize.
 * One of the reason, EVERYONE initially took Gwen Post at face value was that they all expected Faith to eventually have her own Watcher. She had had until he/she was killed by Kakistos afterall. Even if she was now living in Sunnydale, in the same location as the other Slayer, it didn't necessarily mean that Buffy's Watcher was also her own. It wasn't until Wesley arrived to replace Giles as Buffy's Watcher that it was officially stated that Wesley would also act as Faith's Watcher. In that context, Giles may not have wanted to "step on anyone's (future) toes" by going beyond the current official limits of his mandate. Yes, yes, it was only in regards to his duties as Watcher, as a human being and an adult, he might have helped Faith regardless... But you can bet the Council would have held it against him regardless and used it as further proof that he was to close to the Slayer(s).
 * I had never really considered this before, but once I read it, it's clear that Giles really could have done more. Several posts have implied or stated that Giles didn't know Faith for long enough to bond or influence her. But the fact is, Dick the Mayor knew her for far less time and came to think of her as a daughter and she genuinely cared about him too. (He also saw her as a instrument, but he was obviously very distraught when Buffy put Faith in a coma; his connection to Faith is how Buffy taunted Demon!Dick to get him to follow her to the explosive-filled library.) Imagine for a second, what if Giles had been as kind and supportive towards Faith as the Mayor was? (Assuming Buffy didn't get all crazy possessive, that is.) As far as Faith interpreting a guy's kindness as quid pro quo for sexytimes, again, look at the Mayor. She did think that way at first, but the Mayor gently but firmly rebuffed her advances and told her that her happiness was rewarding enough. And Faith accepted it. She was a little stunned, maybe, that there was a guy being decent to her without trying to get in her pants, but she really, really wanted a family, and when the Mayor offered to be her father figure, she went for it. Makes Faith a much more tragic character to realize that she was really just starved for genuine affection, and if Giles/the Scoobies had tried to make her feel like part of the group, she may have never gone so dark. She wasn't evil; the Mayor was just much nicer to her than anyone else (besides maybe Joyce, but Buffy is very selfish, possessive, and jealous). As for "Faith should have known better anyway," don't forget that however badass and full of swagger she may be, she's still a teenager lacking in real maturity. If Faith had felt like she could count on Giles's support, even if she had still killed the deputy mayor, she would probably have told the truth, gotten some therapy, and the Council would have smoothed things over with the law. Really, as someone who had himself gone through a dark, rebellious, dangerous phase, Giles should have been more attentive and Watchful with Faith.
 * Actually, Buffy is also pretty responsible as well. Faith was clearly desperate for a family and to be included, but Buffy is, as mentioned above, selfish, possessive, and jealous. We're meant to sympathize with Buffy feeling like Faith is pushing her out, but how petty was Buffy really being? Faith was making friends with her friends, and getting attention from her Watcher (who, let's not forget really was Faith's Watcher too). Buffy's reaction was "Oh no, Faith's taking the spotlight away from me!" I would argue that Faith was just being a little sister and trying to be a part of Buffy's life, but Buffy has never been the best big sister (even with Dawn, she was never very sisterly for long--note the episode "Potential" for proof long after the whole Key business/back-from-Heaven depression has worn off). If Buffy had tried harder to make Faith be part of the family, maybe Faith would have started following Buffy's example instead of being the bad influence on Buffy.
 * I'm rewatching the show recently, and I've noticed there are a lot of forgettable lines in season three about Faith shrugging off everyone, going missing for day/weeks on end, and being generally antagonistic towards Buffy and Giles' attempts to reach her. She is starved for attention and love, but she's also traumatized into a "I don't need anyone but myself" attitude and openly pushed back against attempts to reach her with words and kindness. For example, her initial blowoff of Buffy's christmas invitation through the bs excuse of "I have this big party I'm invited to," because she (correctly, in this particular example) assumes Buffy's just being nice out of obligation. People who have been through the kind of trauma Faith's been implied to have had, tend to see everyone around them as a potential threat. Faith reacts negatively to Buffy and Faith's attempts to reach out to her because she sees it as, "What's in it for you? You're not doing this because you care about me, so where is your gain?" If there is no clear answer to that, then she perceives it as either a trick or something they're being forced to do, and has no desire to be a part of either. With the Mayor, there was a more clear-cut, "You do this, this, and this for me. In return, I give you money, a home, and the affection you desire." It was never presented as a wholly selfless desire to help her, and that made her more comfortable opening up to him, because she didn't have to look at him with paranoid thoughts of "What are you REALLY after?"

Spike's Invitation to Buffy' Home
Apparently, after Buffy teamed up with Spike and thus had to invite him to her house, she didn't perform that ritual that revoked the invitation. Are you kidding me? I thought it'd be like a requisitive, like washing your hands after you come home from a hard day of garden work! What, just because he promised to skip the town they suddenly decided it wasn't worth the trouble?
 * She also had no intention of killing Ben after getting him to promise to skip town, even though he certainly would've reverted to Glory and come back with a killer vengeance if Giles hadn't smothered him. Buffy is a naive moron who's way to trusting.
 * Spike said he was skipping town with Dru, and it did sound like he wasn't coming back. While he IS a vampire, he did make it clear that he's not stupid and he's not suicidal like Angel or Dru, trying to bring the world to an end. He's looking out for himself, and picking a fight with the slayer isn't normally a good idea. Besides, Buffy didn't come back to her house after that; after saving the world, she skipped town and didn't come back for months, as shown in the Season 3 premier. I think it's excusable that with all the stuff going on, the fact that she had invited Spike, who's seemingly a non-threat at the time, into her home just slipped her mind.
 * There's only two people who know that Buffy invited Spike into her house, Buffy and Joyce. The latter wouldn't know to bring it up with the gang as she has no clue a "de-invite" spell exists, and the former was gone all summer and has long since stopped thinking about it by the time she's gotten back.

Angel's Blame For Angelus
Why didn't Buffy just say "it wasn't Angel that did those horrible things, it was Angelus"? Angel wasn't himself, literally. He IS his soul, and his soul was removed, leaving only the demon Angelus that tortured Giles and killed Jenny. While I forgive Xander and Giles for not being too friendly towards Angel after that, why did no one remind them Angel now has his soul and he's a good guy again? I guess Xander was still being a petty, jealous loser and Giles did sorta lose his love interest to him and got tortured by him, but still, they should've realized earlier that the Good!Angel was back.
 * They were probably afraid that Angel would lose his soul again, she and Xander saw Buffy and Angel in an intimate moment. I think Giles and Xander had good reason to still be bothered by him either way.
 * Angel's soul is not his personality, it's his conscience. Angelus is present all the time, lurking just beneath the surface, and the only thing stopping Angel from succumbing is the presence of his soul, which knows right from wrong and makes him capable of remorse. Consider the human beings in the Buffyverse who do horrible things, all while having souls; Angel doesn't do good because he's a good fairy inhabiting the body of a beast, he does good because his Superego got forcibly reinstalled after over a century of murder and sadism and the guilt trip is going to last him for the rest of eternity. The creature that tortured Giles in his basement, thus, didn't die when Willow did her hospital bed mojo. Giles finds it pretty unsettling and doesn't want it in his house.

Faith, the Watcher's Council, and Gwendolyn Post
A few things concerning Faith and Watchers don't really make sense to me. After Faith's Watcher died, why wasn't she assigned a new one? Gwendolyn Post came and everyone assumed that that was her new Watcher, but it turned out that she had been kicked out of the Council. So where was her real replacement and how come they never sent one? And for that matter, how did Gwendolyn even find out about Faith needing a new Watcher in the first place? And on the topic of Watchers, why are there so many Watchers to being with if there's only one slayer?
 * A number of reasons seem perfectly logical. First as we learn in Season 7 there are at the very least dozens of potentials at any given point and there seems to be no reliable way to know who's next in the Slayer line. It's at least implied between Kendra and a few of the potentials in seven that Buffy is unusual in that she wasn't trained for years. Also research can get tedious and while on the show a band of teenagers and one experieced adult are always able within a few days to identify a demon or find a prophesy within a few hours, days at worst I imagine that in most cases a call back to England would be in order. As for Gwendolyn post there are seers in the world, that's how they tracked down potentials in Season 7. I suspect it works even better on slayers, like the difference between finding a cell phone and finding a cell phone that's transmitting. Word of two slayers probably got around really quick. The only real question is how did she know Faith was watcherless.
 * It's entirely possible she didn't. The "I'm your new Watcher since the old one died" story could have been made up on the spot, after she got to Sunnydale. She probably would have done a little recon before strolling into the lives of not one, but two Slayers, and a Watcher in contact with the council. She would have seen that there was only one Watcher for Buffy and Faith, and known it was Buffy's (because presumably the Slayer's Watcher is fairly well known among other Watchers) and made her plan from there. On the other hand, the seer she used to find Faith in the first place told her that Faith was Watcherless.
 * As for why there are so many Watchers to only one or in this case, two slayers: Aside from training and safeguarding the potentials, it is hinted throughout the series that the Watchers are the ones doing the global threats that spring up everywhere. As a slayer is normally taken to a place that has a problem, say a vampire nest or cultists bringing about some demon god or something, taking out the big problem emerging, then leaving when she's done and her Watchers escort her to whatever apocalypse is happening somewhere else. Buffy and Faith are the exceptions, Kendra was the rule. The Watchers, seeing as how the ones we've seen have magical abilities and are rather good in a fight from their training and aren't wet behind the ears like Wesley initially was, probably also serve combat functions and fight demons and vampires. To put it another way, The Watchers are the mystical army, the Slayer is their superweapon in case of escalation.

Why not the Wishverse already?
Buffy didn't come to Sunnydale until she was in high school, and from the sound of it, there wasn't a Slayer there until she came. The hellmouth's been there forever, why wasn't the town already the disaster that it was in the Wishverse? You'd think that without Buffy there, chaos would have reigned much sooner. Unless the Wishverse was the sole result of the Harvest being successful (interestingly, no Luke in the episode, but that's probably because they couldn't get the actor again or something) and nothing else, but still, Sunnydale seems like it should have been far worse if it's been plagued with vampires and demons since way before the Slayer came to protect the town.
 * Without a Big Bad, the random killings are just that. There were certainly high mortality rates before, but Wilkins ran a tight ship and kept his town under control. When the Master arrived, however, there was now another major player in town causing chaos. One Harvest later, and he runs the place.

The difference between solar eclipse and sundown...
Not sure if this belongs in Headscratchers or Fridge Logic but, did anyone else notice that the solar eclipse in the season finale apparently lasted for the rest of the day?
 * A Wizard Did It, literally.

What was the Mayor thinking?

 * So. the mayors brilliant plan was to ascend to a super demon. A super demon that is really large and noticeable, and not stealthy in any way. A super demon that can be killed by explosives. What on earth was the mayor thinking? That he'd muck around and kill a few hundred people before the army noticed and shot him with a missile launcher? How on earth was this a benefit over being completely invincible?
 * I always wondered about that until Angel introduced us to, a modern-day worshiper of Illyria who secretly worked his whole life to bring her back. Looking back on it with that in mind, Wilkins was probably a similar worshiper of Olvikan, and his long-term goal was to ascend and become Olvikan's new vessel on Earth. The transformation wasn't a means to an end, it was the entire end-goal in itself; that the transformation also retained some of his human personality was just a lucky break for Buffy. Also, going by his dialogue to his vampire henchmen about how he had to feed to "sustain the change" (and the last ascension of Olvikan being stopped by a volcanic eruption) the form might be vulnerable in its newborn state in a way that, if Buffy and the class hadn't intervened, would have worn off.
 * We don't really know that the transformed state of the Mayor is any less invulnerable than the Mayor was previously. Yes, we've seen the Mayor recover from quite a few injuries, some of which certainly would have been lethal, but his giant snake demon form was also supposed to be unkillable by most means. We don't know that the Mayor could have regenerated from being exploded into paste any better than his transformed snake demon form could.
 * Actually, its explicitly said in dialogue that Wilkins is invulnerable only during the 100 days before the Ascension.

Willow never liked Faith?

 * Reading about the site I've it said a few times that Willow never liked Faith. Somehow that's not how I remember it.
 * In Faith Hope and Trick everyone liked Faith except Buffy.
 * In Beauty and the Beasts Faith was going to watch over Oz, who is highly offended and sees it as overreacting.
 * In Homecoming Faith was going to go with Buffy, but joins the others in trying to get her and Cordelia to make up instead.
 * Revelations has Faith's watcher trick her, leading to a confrontation with Buffy over Angel. For Willow's part she is more concerned that Buffy kept Angel a secret.
 * After Lovers Walk Willow has far more important things to worry about than Faith's loss of...ah faith in humanity.
 * As far as I know Willow's feelings towards Faith do not come up again until Bad Girls, when she feels Buffy is rejecting her because she has a new Slayer girlfriend.
 * From Consequences onward, things really go downhill. Willow learns of Faith trying to frame Buffy for murder, and sleeping with Xander. This was also the episode that had Faith's infamous attempted rape and murder of Xander, which may or may not be known about.
 * From here anything else that happened, Faith kidnapping her, poisoning Angel, the body swap and such would certainly give Willow reason to not like her. I'm just curious in how people say Willow never liked her when in the first half of the season Willow thought Faith was cool.
 * All true, but remember that Willow has every reason to say the most hurtful thing she can to Faith at that moment, whether its true or not. And as far back as "Press the 'Deliver' key!" in the pilot, we've seen that Willow is willing to lie for the sake of petty revenge.

Rich's Tattoo of Lily

 * Why get a permanent tattoo of a temporary name?
 * Not to be mean, but he didn't look particularly smart to me. And he probably didn't know it wasn't her real name. "Lily" basically wants to escape reality, so she probably genuinely thought or at least hoped they'll be together forever.
 * He did know, because he picked it himself. And "Lily" tells Buffy the name will do "for now."

Slayer's Blood

 * Why would Faith attempt to kill Angel with a poison to which the only antidote is the blood of a Slayer? She is a Slayer. I suppose it could just be explained by Faith being too cocky to consider that Buffy might be able to hurt her, or just too reckless to bother seeing if there was an antidote, but surely the Mayor would have checked these things even if Faith didn't. When Buffy's Love Interest is being slowly and painfully killed by a poison which can be cured by killing her nemesis's Dragon, what did they expect to happen?
 * They expected Faith to win the fight, because Buffy's too distracted worrying about her dying lover to bring her A game. They didn't know Buffy very well.
 * I haven't read all of the comics so maybe this comes up again but between the two shows this is the only vampire poison ever shown. It might be the only one in existance. My honest opinion would be that the Mayor and Faith were either unaware of what the cure was or hoped/expected that Buffy would do what she ultimately did and sacrifice herself.
 * As far as I know, the cure was only mentioned briefly in one of Giles' books. The Mayor of course doesn't have access to Giles' resources, and it's possible that this one book was the only known reference to the cure of that particular poison. I mean, they couldn't exactly have googled it to find out what the cure was, and if the Mayor and Faith didn't have the exact book needed to explain what the cure was, they probably assumed that Buffy and Giles wouldn't have it either. In fact, as far as anyone knows, that poison might have had many other antidotes, but the only one known to Giles was Slayer's blood. Dealing with supernatural stuff is harder when all your info comes from a small number of obscure grimoires and tomes.
 * The Mayor almost certainly did not know. Faith was visibly surprised when Buffy told her that the cure for Angel's poison was her blood, and Wilkins would never have concealed knowledge this tactically important (and relevant to Faith's own continued existence) from Faith if he'd had it.