10 Dumbest Decisions In Buffy The Vampire Slayer
9. Weakening Buffy Without Telling Her – Giles (Season 3, Episode 12)
In ‘Helpless’, Buffy starts to lose her powers. Her strength, speed, and endurance falter and she can’t figure out why.
As it turns out, Giles has been injecting her with a compound as part of the Tento di Cruciamentum – a test every Slayer has to go through when they reach their eighteenth birthday. But when you stop and think about it, Giles really didn’t need to give Buffy this compound at all.
It would have been much easier if he’d told Buffy what the Watcher’s Council were forcing him to do. The pair of them could then have worked out a way of fooling the Council into thinking she’d taken the compound.
What’s more, Giles actually intervened during Buffy’s trial, so he lost his position as Buffy’s official Watcher anyway. As such, he could have just ignored the Council from the outset and accepted the consequences.