#the library isn't that bad it just doesn't have enough checkpoints

[chahleybros]

Library.mp4

I beat Halo CE on the Xbox a month or so ago. Working on a highlights video right now, this is a small snippet.

[coraniaid]

Did Buffy (or anybody else) tell Faith about the Cruciamentum?

On the one hand, the answer seems to be yes: at the very least, Faith immediately guesses why Wesley is in the library at the beginning of Bad Girls ("New Watcher?") and later makes it clear she knows he is there to be Buffy's new Watcher as well as hers ("You're actually gonna take orders from him?"). So she must at least have been told that Giles had been fired, if not anything about why. And Buffy does start spending a lot more time with Faith immediately after the events of Helpless (both in Bad Girls and in The Zeppo) so she'd have had plenty of opportuntiy to tell her if she wanted to (and if she was going to talk to anybody about it, why not Faith?). At the very least, it would be pretty shitty not to warn Faith that she had a Cruciamentum of her own to look forward to (assuming, of course, that Faith is actually younger than Buffy, which I think on balance she has to be even though there are some hints that she isn't).

On the other hand, Faith's implicit argument that Buffy shouldn't take orders from Wesley seems to boil down to the fact he's "pretty much just a dork" and not refer at all to the fact that the Council who sent him almost got Buffy killed not less than a month ago. And would Faith "I have a problem with authority figures" Lehane really be as quick to forgive and forget Giles's actions as Buffy herself seem to be? (We move on very quickly from Buffy's "you bastard [...] if you touch me, I'll kill you." Would Faith?) If Faith knows about it, it's kind of odd that Giles role in the Cruciamentum never comes up in any of Faith and Buffy's arguments in Consequences. When Buffy suggests they tell Giles, why doesn't Faith remind her that Giles is also an authority figure who can't be trusted, one of the "nine times out of ten" somebody's public face isn't their real one?

The resolution, I suppose, is that Buffy doesn't tell Faith about Giles's role in the Cruciamentum because -- as far as the show is concerned -- it already didn't happen. The test itself will only be brought up once again, in Season 5's Checkpoint (funnily enough, the only Season 5 episode to remember that Faith exists), and in a way that suggests Giles had no involvement in it at all.

Although this season is much more serialized than the first two, it's still a lot more episodic than what will come in two or three years' time. What matters from Helpless is that Giles was fired. The actual details as to why are something we don't only not need to know, we're actively encouraged to forget them. Giles's betrayal of Buffy's trust won't be brought up again, and much of the subsequent plot only makes sense if you pretend it didn't happen at all. Indeed, it's arguably vital to Faith's character that she doesn't know about it: she exists in this story to be a Buffy who doesn't have a good relationship with her Watcher and is envious of the Watcher Buffy does have. That doesn't really work so well if Faith knows Giles was willing to repeatedly drug and lie to Buffy before sending her off powerless to fight a vampire. Who would envy that?

This episode might be about consequences, but -- not for the last time -- the show is very selective about which actions have consequences and who gets to suffer from them.