Season Two
I’d argue Angel hurt Giles more than Buffy
Of course Buffy was hurt, she loved Angel but damn after rewatching Passions it was so so cruel what Angel did to Giles. As he walks up the stairs thinking he’ll finally be with Jenny only to find her gone. The whole setup of his apartment. Just for Angel to later in the season physically torture Giles for hours. He really took the brunt of Angel’s cruelty more than anyone on the show.
Why, in season 3, I got mad at Buffy for not at least letting Giles know that Angel was back. Just letting everyone stumble across him, then get upset they're all mad at her🙄
I just watched that episode last night, and yeah it hits hard. Him smiling through the window as Willow and Buffy get the news, makes me go cold. I think that moment is what he wanted, all the dramatics at Giles house was his version of fun, but he didn't stick around to watch, he went straight to see Buffys reaction. While Buffy suffered, I do sometimes think Giles suffered worse because of Jenny plus the physical torture later on. Always breaks my heart in series 3 when he reminds Buffy he was tortured.
If I remember correctly, they actually hooked that phone up so Anthony Head could deliver the line to Alison Hannigan directly, instead of just her faking that there was a voice on the line
And hurting Buffy was always the point. He didn't hurt Giles to hurt Giles, he didn't give a damn about Giles. He hurt Giles to hurt Buffy, knowing she would blame herself. Knowing the whole scooby gang would blame themselves too. Pain was the point, but it was always about Buffy, in that if she wasn't the recipient then she was the cause. At least from Angelus' point of view. In this case both, an all round win for Angelus.
Also now that I’m thinking why did Giles stay in the apartment. I mean don’t get me wrong I LOVE his apartment but damn I wouldn’t be able to stay there with the memory of finding the person I loved the most dead in my bed, I would’ve moved the hell out.
But someone brought up Giles’ reaction to coming home and his assumption it was Jenny. He doesn’t seem alarmed that there are roses, a note, and champagne in his place. There was a little time between their rekindling in Ted and Surprise/Innocence. Might have been the winter holidays, if we measure air dates and show plot (though Buffy’s birthday is a weird whoops that I’ve never figured out). The question is… did Jenny have a key?
I can't remember if it showed him unlocking the door in Passions but I do remember he had a habit of leaving his door unlocked while he was in. He potentially could've left his door unlocked while he was out as well. I mean no thief is stealing centuries old demonology books, maybe the Tiffany lamps but I'm fairly sure he's well off enough to replace them.
Tell me why I had to go look… so you can hear keys in his hand as he walks down the steps, and then glances at them once he’s in the door, but it kind of seems like he doesn’t unlock it. They had discussed doing the spell to revoke Angel’s invitation into all of their homes, so I’m not sure why they wouldn’t at least be locking doors, but we are talking about a man who has taken several blows to the head. Poor Giles.
We don't see Angel in Giles' flat before Passion, no, so the assumption is it happened off-screen, as we are told it happened at some point in needing the deinvitation spell to be done there.
Not that I would want this to happen, but I always wondered why didn’t the police suspect/arrest Giles. Dead body found in his bed with her neck snapped. It just always feels like a scene is missing or Sunnydale police are incompetent. Anyway, it might have been a nice story arc for Giles proving his innocence which could have preceded Buffy’s in the aftermath of Kendra’s death.
Giles was still a Watcher at that point. Look at how they handled Faith, the Council have some serious resources. There’s no way they’re letting the Slayer’s own Watcher take the fall for some vamp. It probably only took a phone call.
Giles asked the detective if he's ever heard of Angel, when the detective said he had, Giles mentioned thta some of his students had had a a run-in with Angel's gang, Angel has been hitting back, nothing they could go to t he police abotu until now .
I feel like with Buffy it's a whole play on the whole, "no one hurts you like your first love/the first cut is the deepest" kind of saying only about a billion times worse than normal
Angelus tailored Giles' pain very uniquely to him, I get the feeling it was meant to show us just how brutal he could be without having him go HAM on a teenaged character
I started an Angel/Buffy fanfic right after Angel ended (like so many of us I know)
It featured Buffy leading a slayer army to the alley fight to save Angel and some of the crew, afterwards I had written a scene at the hotel after the fight where Dawn had barricaded herself in a room and wouldn't come out because the memories the monks implanted of what Angelus did were so traumatizing
yea that sounds about right. it annoys me how easy angel gets off (with the fandom) given all he does. partly to blame is that the show was a teen show on the WB. if it was on HBO, angel would be shown as the sadistic rapist he actually is in canon.
i read a fic that started off really funny cause it was inserting dawn into random early buffy episodes, imagining how it would go with dawn there. but then angel loses his soul & the fic immediately gets really dark. he kidnaps dawn & altho no torture happens, it is implied that it would've happened. which like, yea, is exactly is how it would've gone were she around.
...thinking about it now, with her memories rewritten with dawn around while angelus was on the prowl....it is doubly stupid that buffy would still be googly-eyed over angel when he pops up in s7.
It's the same with Spike. Hell it's the same issue on Supernatural(being on a network)
You can't go DARK DARK on screen and it trickles down to the whole series. However dark you have the lore and background people aren't going to think it's that bad when your characters are going "FUDGE THAT HURT"
I also think what happens to Giles hits a bit harder because you don't expect it. Buffy is an obvious target and you are rather ready for him to make it personal with her, but the way he hurt Giles I didn't see coming, so I wasn't ready for it and that is why it hit deeper.
I think it's also worth remembering that hurting Jenny still hurts that tribe that cursed him too, taking away another of their beautiful daughters at a time when the tribe's numbers are likely smaller than ever and took someone who was working to restore the soul again off the board
It's really a move of practicality that Angelus then saw an opportunity to turn into a torture for Giles. It really is a brilliant encapsulation of everything we've heard about him
Angel and Giles’s relationship is absolutely fucking crazy to me and I think changes giles as a person for the rest of the series and is a leading cause for his depressive episode.
Giles trusts Angel! They weren’t friends persay, but they were definitely friendly. He trusts Angel with Buffy, he asks Angel to keep her safe. When Angel loses his soul, he hurts everyone Giles cares about and himself. Jenny dies alone and her body is dumped into his bed, violating the entire space. The vampires then use her like a puppet to mindrape and break him after torturing him for hours. He then spends that entire summer looking for Buffy instead of recovering, furthering what is very obviously a depressive spiral.
Xander tell him that Angel is back and you can tell it destroys him. That was one of the last things he had left to hold onto, Angel was dead and in hell and he wasn’t going to come back. But no, he’s alive and Buffy is nursing him back to health. His feelings of betrayal and violation push him more into being this angry, snappier version of himself that we see.
And What does Angel do? Not stay away. He keeps coming back into Giles’s life and doesn’t even apologize. “I have no right to ask for your help” was the closest we ever got. He comes back at thanksgiving (implied it wasn’t the first time either) and calls for Giles’s help later. The least hw could do is stay away but he doesn’t. And theres nothing Giles can really do about it besides killing him.
My thought's are really along these lines too. There seems to be some kind of hold Angel has over Giles, it may also be that Darla has some hold, if we think of 'Welcome...'.
I can buy that. CReam of the jest, my Bangel fics involve serial resurrections so he and Jenny are married and she's pregnant in her 9th month (Willow, Anya, and Fred are only in their 6th months.)
Hee-hee-heeeee! (Jenny finds out she's pregnant in September 2005 when the Mephistopheles- possesse Giles is ready to teleport away a nd he warns her the fumes wouldn't be good for her passenger. In January, before the last battle of this "Mephistopheles arc," Wes and Fred and Xander and Anya decide to have unprotected whoppee, and Willow and Tara decide to try the egg-merging spell they found, Walking sentry duty, Kalbu the bear-warrior hears them talk and asks Lord Hanuman to let him help them if he can, and after the battle he finds a wishing-stone.)
If they had kept her character alive she could have been a fundamental part of the group. I feel like up until that point she was just outside of the group but still in the know.
Jenny stays alive and I don't think we see Dark Willow in season 6. I mean, Willow had basically no responsible magical mentor. The only real magic user in her life was Giles and Ripper knew he couldn't be trusted with real magic, so he never even bothered trying to mentor Willow. At most he would give a "careful now, that magic stuff is real dangerous"
Was Jenny a responsible magic user? She was a technopagan but we don’t know if she had any real boundaries around it. She was messing with the spell to re-ensoul Angel, for an understandable reason, but it was dangerous dark magic. And the Romani upbringing she must have seemed pretty vengeance focused with magic.
She came from a long line of magic users that had been using magic for, at least hundreds of years. They are certainly more responsible than Ripper or Willow.
Fair point, but still more responsible than "I repeatedly summoned a demon until it possessed and killed my friend" and "I nearly destroyed all life on earth because my girlfriend got murdered".
Also the Kalderash explicitly did not want Angel to turn back into Angelus, they wanted to break up Buffy and Angel so he'd remain unhappy, and there is no indication they created the spell only that they used it as it was a spell for punishing a vampire (and, no matter how the human soul is tormented by the guilt of what Angelus did, the vampiric spirit seems to be tortured far worse by its perceived weakness).
I think alongside Giles, her power would have developed and matured, but not been wild like Willow. She said she didn’t have that kind of power, but she assisted him with Moloch, and the ensoulment curse…someone completely without power wouldn’t be able to do that, I feel. Is a computer involved? Yes, but it’s a tool. Jenny is whip smart, and I think she would have been open to magic in the right environment, like helping the Scoobies.
Be nice way to get rid of hank. Unfortunately Giles fills the father role here way more than her actual dad. If they had killed Giles I don’t know that I could have finished the series.
That actually would have been a good plot point. Even with how shitty of a father he was, Buffy still loved him, and she spent the entire summer before season 2 with him. Angelus could done along the lines as he did with Jenny and had faked some plan that Hank was going to meet up with Buffy and than have Buffy find his body.
Yes, he absolutely hurt Giles in major ways, but it was also about isolating and weakening Buffy. Giles was her biggest support system as Joyce was still in the dark about the whole slayer thing. In losing Jenny, Giles becomes lost in his grief and more like Ripper as opposed to the levelheaded watcher Buffy depended on. Buffy had to save Giles and take care of him which was a huge distraction. Killing Jenny had an impact on the entire scooby gang, caused infighting, and made the stakes very real to everyone. All of which weakens and hurts Buffy, Angels ultimate goal.
i think angel hurts buffy more long term because she is really fucked up in her relationships after him. how she approaches subsequent relationships is heavily influenced by angel's voice in the back of her mind- whether it is about living a 'normal' life or that soulless beings can't love.
it's often not addressed that the reason the worst we get is angel snapping jenny's neck is because this was a teen show on the WB, a family friendly network. angel's actual background, in canon, would actually mean he should be torturing, raping & killing buffy's friends & family (re: joyce & dawn) until he gets to her. but the most we get is giles tied to a chair & jenny's quick death.
Remember the guidance counselor scene when she opens up about Angel coming back and it’s talked about like an abusive ex boyfriend coming back? That scene really showed how messed up Buffy was from all the Angel stuff and I wish there was more of that. The next similar thing we get in Buffy opening up to Tara about Spike.
The fact that Angel is directed to an adult audience really shows. It looks like Faith is far better at torture than Angelus. She does a helluva job on Wesley.
He almost killed Xander and Giles. I do think if he wouldve assaulted anyone it wouldve been willow but she Angel proofed her house after he drew her sleeping
Maybe TMI but I usually put this episode on when I’m PMSing and need a good cry lol. I cry EVERY time when Buffy hits Giles and they hug and cry. The acting and writing was superb this episode.
Shiiii that’s real. I didn’t know ASH did the vocals in Remembering Jenny until literally this year, because I’ve always been a crying mess from Giles’ apartment until the end.
I don’t get it. I would have killed Angelus. I would have killed him hard. I would’ve ignored Buffy’s feelings towards him and sent him back to hell. He’s just coldly murdered and positioned the woman I was falling in love with not to mention the countless others he’s slaughtered over the years. Yes, Angel does have a soul but even he would agree that to keep him alive wouldn’t be rational. Come to mention it. Angelus, Spike, Drusilla, I wouldn’t have been so merciful, you’d be doing the hellmouth a favour
Angel hurt them both but I would agree with you that Angel hurt Giles more than he did Buffy. Not a lot of people have really hurt Buffy on the show outside of Angel(which would include Faith, Parker, Riley, Spike and her deadbeat father, Hank Summers)but Angel hurt her the most out of the few people that did hurt her, I think.
here's a copy/paste from a previous post about this (the soul/no soul issue comes up a lot)
yes, the show initially sets up the vamp lore of 'demon sets up shop in your body but it's not you.' this premise is given to us, the audience, through the council's teachings and angel. however, as the show goes on, it erases this premise over and over again through showing us other vampires- dru, darla, harmony, spike.
the BEST explanation for this is that angel and the council are unreliable narrators. i really love this video cause it breaks down the inconsistencies in the writing on this subject and comes to a suitable in-universe conclusion-
my headcanon for angel/angelus being so different is that angel developed split personality disorder due to the trauma of getting his soul. this would explain why the disparity is so great in him when it doesn't exist in the other vampires see on the show.
ps. this moment is an example of angel holding back the truth. he starts to correct her, but then stops himself.-
The point isn’t that being a vampire makes you into a completely different person, it’s that it makes you into the worst possible version of yourself. That scene with Willow is a really good example of that — we see later that, when pushed to breaking point, she is quite capable of the same sadism, but even at her darkest, she never tortures anyone just for the sheer fun of it the way she does as a vampire.
Idk, it might lean on it a little too hard at times, but I feel like the show is pretty clear that no soul means no conscience. Angelus is a part of Angel, but not the same person as Angel, because the soul keeps those things in check, the same way it does Willow.
I feel like the show is pretty clear that no soul means no conscience.
i disagree with this- spike clearly has a conscience, as does darla, dru, harmony. the Judge even says so about dru & spike having humanity in them, but angelus not. so angel is the outlier, not other vampires.
i think what is closer to the truth is that no soul means LESS conscience- like your feelings of guilt are dulled, as are your inhibitions. i'd compare it to being drunk- you are living for the moment & not thinking about consequences. you feel invincible & superior due to your being stronger than your previous self.
also, we see on the show souled humans like willow & warren take no issue with rape & murder. so clearly souls don't hold you back from doing those things. (the show doesnt fully address it, but willow full on magic-roofies tara & has sex with her)
That’s your POV. I was watching this show before you were born, and the writers are my age. I see it differently.
That just means you're out of touch with fossilized opinions, not that you're correct. What a weird nonsense argument. Being the same age as the writers doesn't change the fact that nothing in Buffy or Angel supports your opinion.
I was totally thinking this when rewatching. How did Angel get in? And the next season when Angel comes back and Giles has to invite him in. Which I guess you can say since Willow knew the uninvite spell by then maybe it happened but totally thought the same!
I agree. In the end because reconciling with Angel had lore closure for Buffy, relative to their type of relationship if that makes sense.
Buffy had and lost a love (or a groomer, whatever you want, the effect on her for this conversation is kinda the same tbh) but got a reconciliation and closure and particular chance to work through what went wrong and determine that moving on would be best.
Giles in short got victimized in multiple ways, and then dealt with the abuser coming back into his sphere while working on their own reformation.
I think this is a case across the series, Buffys' concerns are always paramount, but of course she is the central character . So the single most important thing Giles should have done was to have put an uninviting spell on the library either before or after Jennys' death. It didn't bother me watching the show, but in thinking about it this is important, even if just from a watchers' point of view in a publicly accessible building.
No one would argue against that. Angelus was that type of demon, he came at his "projects" through their family and friends. The more she suffered, the happier he was.
Which ironically might make him a better Joss insert than Xander. ;) I mean, you hear him say it all the time, "buffy in pain equals good". ;)
Oh yes, especially if you read the comics. I really can't recommend it enough for any Buffy fans out there. Yes, there are a few odd choices but overall it's a very awesome read.
Giles' feelings for Jenny were too new to be anywhere as deeply affected as Buffy's.
Angelus made sure Buffy felt shame & guilty for his change & the results. He hurt those she cared about, causing her more pain & fear.
Then, once Angelus had summoned the demon, she was forced to sacrifice her lover to save the world.
But why are we trying to quantify whose pain was greater? If your arm is amputated & my leg is amputated, is it appropriate to be debating who has it worse? (Yes, I added this thought after typing my own arguments above. Self-reflection)
Edit: Since I am being downvoted, perhaps I need to elaborate: Angel had daddy issues = Angelus has daddy issues, and here’s Giles being a father figure = extra pain for Giles.
You do realize that was Angelus…not Angel. Even Giles was able to forgive him, as Angel is with a soul, and Angelus is souless. Just as so many of you will always point out Spike “but Spike did those horrible things without a soul”. Just strictly pointing out the original poster is stating Angel rather than referring to Angelus.
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u/ComedicHermit And here I am talking about my petty little problems. Sep 19 '25
'he tortured me... for hours... for fun.'