I had to write this post – the review was one thing, but I had to write more. I have to talk about this in a context where I can spoil what happens. And I will – this is about the climax that they have between building to since the beginning of Angel & Faith, without any of the misleading or half true comments that are required in writing reviews without spoilers.
Where issue #21 ended, the spell to resurrect Giles was being cast when it was interrupted by Whistler, Pearl, and Nash. The spell was still going, and the issue ended on an ambiguous note, unclear whether the spell would work or not. When it picks up again, they desperately attempt, one last time, to get it to work. That is not the spoiler, as it’s all in the preview pages, but what comes next is (FINAL SPOILER WARNING DON’T CLICK ON THAT IF YOU WANT TO AVOID SPOILERS):
Giles is brought back… in the body of a twelve year old.
I… Just… Wow. Every time I read this issue, more than a week after reading it for the first time, I still have this huge smile on my face. I had expected a simple, probably underwhelming resolution – he was brought back, or he wasn’t. I guess it shouldn’t surprise me, since the show never exactly took the simple way out (see the climax of Season 2 for a particularly devastating example), but this still caught me off guard, probably because it’s so far outside of what I would expect to happen – I don’t know how much time it would’ve taken me to come up with this idea, or even if I could’ve, and I love seeing stories that go in a direction that unexpected.
But the real genius is that they made this funny. Angel is best known for his incredible brooding skills, so making redemption for one of his worst crimes (which is arguable, but that’s how he sees things) into a comedic situation is both ridiculous yet inevitable. In an interview, David Boreanaz suggested a similarly ridiculous ending to the series: Angel finally has his humanity restored, and as he walks out into the sunlight… he’s hit by a truck. Something about that felt like the perfect end to his story. Here, Angel has undone his worst crime, and not taking it deathly seriously feels oddly like the perfect tone.
Does this fit with the established rules? It’s taken as fact that someone can’t be brought back from a natural death, and having your neck snapped is not overly supernatural. To preempt the arguments, go back and reread the first volume of the series. Angel’s argument about how he can collect Giles’s soul and restore his body are quite persuasive, even though it does sound like he’s trying to convince himself more than anything. I didn’t even think of this problem until more than a day after I read the issue, and there are good arguments for how it works, so I don’t have a problem with it bending the rules slightly.
Now what about the fact that he came back in a twelve year old body? This is what I never saw coming. The logic is interesting – his aunts, who were very steeped in magic, pictured him as the boy he was when they inadvertently showed his magical potential – but he’s slightly older than that. Giles says himself that he could feel it coming and resisted, which mostly explains it, even though the logic is a little weird, especially considering that they had his adult body there and intact. That doesn’t bother me much, though. Like I made sure to emphasize multiple times, this isn’t just a joke. There is a very fundamental change in Giles and his relationships with others and what he can contribute, even though he retains his memory and personality from just before he was killed. In the Buffyverse, they’ve bent the rules before if it told a better story, and I think this is just a continuation of that. We might not see it all here, but if they’re going in this direction, it’s because they have some story to tell. At this point, let the blind speculation begin.
I get the feeling that Giles will be a major part of the next season. He could be a major supporting character in one series, or even get a series of his own. Either way, this puts him in a place where a lot of interesting stories can be told. One of the reasons that he was killed in Season Eight was because his character didn’t work in the comics the way he did on the show. Buffy didn’t need a father figure anymore due to character development, and Mr. Exposition doesn’t work as well in comics as on TV. He’s not that person anymore, even though he has all the memories, and this new dynamic could add to many different stories. I’m not sure which ones yet, as that would require knowing what happens at the end of the season and knowing who survives, and that is far from certain. Christos Gage has said that two people aren’t going to live through the finale of this season, and while I can speculate until the cows come home (and then I can speculate about the cows, or something like that), I can’t tell you with any certainty who I think they’re going to kill (please don’t kill Faith – sure, they’ll probably make that story good and I’ll eventually come to terms with it, but please don’t make it come to that), but as long as they don’t kill Giles, which would be a huge letdown, he’s likely to be a major part of the next season.
Now we know what the title of the arc means. It’s an inversion of the usual cliché, and I was quote interested in exactly what it meant for where the storyline was going. But now we know – Angel brings Giles back because of his guilt, and Faith got so caught up in wanting a father figure (they even had an arc called Daddy Issues – I may hate that term, but it’s a legitimate description of Faith’s problems) that they completely ignored everything else to go all in with the resurrection.
Yeah, that means that the resurrection is not the end of the story this season. Even though the season long arc has finished, there’s still Whistler’s plan to bring back magic to worry about. In a way, this reminds me of “Primeval”, with the difference being that I like this issue a lot more than that episode: even though the ostensibly main plot is over, there’s still one more thing to deal with, explicitly because of the characters’ actions. Faith and Angel have been ignoring Whistler, and now they have to deal with him when they could’ve possibly stopped him before he was capable of doing so much damage.
Speaking of Whistler and the imminent final battle, Nadira is now joining the battle after having been absent. Her absence felt a lot longer than it actually was — she was last in issue #19, but because issues come one month apart, it felt like she had been relegated to the background. I didn’t immediately recognize how important she was. Back in issue #1, Nadira told Faith that she was going to kill Pearl and Nash, then she was going to kill Angel. The final battle of this season involves those three on different sides of the battle, so I honestly don’t know what her effect will be in this battle. Her character has been established enough that she can believably take either side for emotional or logical reasons, which is very impressive for a side character first introduced in issue #1, but has made the most of the little time her character has had to develop and gain complex emotional motivations that I can’t quite untangle.
Looking over all this, I notice that I’m being oddly positive. I’ve spent a lot of time gushing about this issue and its rather bizarre twist. However, equally weird things have happened in the Buffy series that I have reacted to with puzzlement (the Twilight storyline from Season Eight) or frustration bordering on anger (Buffy thought she was pregnant but was really a robot. Yes, that was a thing that happened). I also spent a lot of time speculating about what might happen in Season Ten, assuming that they have a very good reason to resurrect Giles and a plan for following through. Thinking about it, I might not be this positive if I was talking about something in the Buffy series. Yes, it’s probably bias speaking, but the fact that the writing has been so much better in this series means that I’m willing to give them benefit of the doubt – I reacted to the weird and insane direction this comic went with unbridled enthusiasm, yet was more hesitantly enthusiastic for the less weird direction that the most recent Buffy comic went. If there’s anything to learn here, it’s that doing good work in the first place makes people more enthusiastic about anything you might do.
And for one final thing, this would cause some really interesting fanfiction if people actually wrote it using the comics (they don’t). There are several moments making a joke of a Faith/Giles pairing that would be perfect for shippers to grab onto and extrapolate from, and fanfiction is known for not caring about age gaps or any age-related weirdness. Making some guesses about their ages and the timeframe of the comics, Faith is 25, while Giles is in his early 50s but in the body of a 12-year old.
With that disturbing final thought, goodnight everyone.
Zac Kandell (known mostly on the internet as Mischlings) had no idea how to end this article, so you’re left with that disturbing conclusion. Follow him on Twitter at @Mischlings, which shouldn’t be as disturbing most of the time.
The Red Shirt Crew Blog and Podcast Network 