Angel & Faith #2 - "Live Through This", part 2

[boot_the_grime]

My belated thoughts about Angel & Faith #2 (that I didn't post before for no other reason than that I didn't find time for it).

I'm more ambivalent about this issue than about #1, because there are things I really loved, and some things I was bothered by - in the sense that they show how the series might go wrong. However, it all depends on

Comments

[boot_the_grime]

All those examples (apart from the Mayor, which was just impulsive and pointless) were about Giles being pragmatic and removing a threat (or trying to). Whether it was about a good or a bad person is beside the point. I see no reason to think that, for instance, Giles thought that souled!Spike was still a bad person, and he knew that Spike had no control over the trigger, so Spike's moral credentials were beside the point.

Faith, IIRC, wasn't removing any threat when she killed the Deputy Mayor. In Consequences, Giles said that "accidents happen" but didn't add that it was OK since the DM was "consorting with demons" and "was accessory to murder" anyway, as he does in Angel & Faith #2.

I don't recall Giles ever supporting vigilantism and saying "when you go to slay vampires, it's OK if you just go and kill a few criminals while you're at it". If he did, it would have been really odd for him to be Buffy's Watcher for so many years, since Buffy's moral stance on killing humans is completely opposite.

Buffy was tormented by guilt in "Ted" when she accidentally killed what she thought was a human being. But Ted wasn't a nice guy, and had attacked her first. Surely if Giles believed that it's OK to kill humans if they aren't nice, that was the time to tell it to Buffy? But he did none of that.

Giles: Whatever the authorities have planned for her, it can't be much worse than what she's doing to herself. She's taken a human life. The guilt, it's pretty hard to bear, and it won't go away soon.