I finished a year of teaching today, here is a reflection I wrote in the like ASH's death.
I published this on Substack, but in the interest of no self promotion, I am copy pasting it here:
Becoming Giles
In memoriam: Anthony Stewart Head (1954–2026)
Jun 06, 2026
Processing img xd4bryibjs5h1...
In the final scene of “The Harvest,” which concludes the two-part pilot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, our teenage protagonists exchange some banter as they walk away from their first victory over the forces of darkness. Giles attempts to orient them toward what lies ahead: “Not just vampires. The next threat we face may be something quite different.”
Buffy is undeterred. “I can hardly wait!”
He presses on. “We’re at the center of a mystical convergence here. We may, in fact, stand between the Earth and its total destruction.”
“Well, I gotta look on the bright side,” she says. “Maybe I can still get kicked out of school!”
Xander and Willow take up the thread. “Oh, yeah, that’s a plan. ‘Cause lots of schools aren’t on Hellmouths.” “Maybe you could blow something up. They’re really strict about that.” Buffy opts instead for “a more subtle approach, y’know, like excessive not studying.” As the three of them walk away, Giles watches them go. Then he turns back toward his library and quietly, to himself, says: “The Earth is doomed.”
*
When I wrote my spiritual autobiography in the autumn of 2017 as part of my application to the Society of Jesus, I wrote that Buffy the Vampire Slayer was the greatest show off all time. I was not embarrassed by this; through my English classes in high school, I came to understand the symbolism of the fantasy stories I had loved since I was a kid. The fantastical elements of the show were not real, but they reflected the way that God and the spiritual world permeated every day life, even the life of a young adult making their way through high school and college.
What I did not write, what I could not write at that time was what the show would continue to mean to me, or what it would teach me about myself in the years that followed.
*
Between 2021 and 2023, during my philosophy studies in Chicago, I rewatched the series with a group of Jesuit brothers. We would gather after each episode, sometimes late into the evening, and talk. About what we had seen. About the theological weight hiding inside the show. About grief and vocation and the cost of love and the way the show kept finding new ways to ask what it means to stay in the fight, to be the slayer.
Rewatching something you first loved as a teenager, but watching it now in community, in formation, as someone who has staked a claim on a particular way of life, is a strange and clarifying experience. You see things you missed. You ask different questions. I was not one of the teenage Scoobies anymore. I was older. And as the episodes accumulated and the characters aged alongside me, it became harder to ignore which character I had grown into.
I own one Funko Pop figure. I am aware of the irony. I hate what those small vinyl objects have come to represent: the reduction of meaning into purchasable sentiment, the commercialization and commodification of any IP. And yet, sitting on a shelf is a small plastic Rupert Giles, librarian, Watcher, the person in the room who has read everything. Buffy’s mentor. Buffy’s father. At the time I bought it, it was still aspirational, and yet I did not fully understand at the time what I was aspiring to.
Processing img x4hqfrjbjs5h1...
*
What makes Giles interesting, and what I came to understand more fully during those Chicago evenings, is that he is not a simple character. He is not merely the tweedy mentor standing at the reference desk. He has a past he is ashamed of, and the show keeps returning to it.
In “The Dark Age,” the second season episode that first cracked open his history, we learn that as a young man Giles ran with a bad crowd in London. He went by “Ripper.” He and a group of friends, including Ethan Rayne, used to invite a demon called Eyghon to temporarily possess them, channeling it for the thrill of it, the way you might use a drug. When one of the friends died during a session, the rest scattered. Now Eyghon has returned to hunt down the survivors, finding Giles in Sunnydale. With Buffy watching, he has to explain to her who he used to be. She says, afterward, that it is strange to see him not as a grown-up but as a person. She means it as a comfort, and he takes it that way, though you can see in his face how much he had hoped she would never know about this part of him.
Ethan Rayne is Giles’s shadow, in the Jungian sense. He is what Ripper might have become if he had never turned back. Ethan loves chaos for its own sake. He is charming and unreliable and he keeps reappearing in Sunnydale to remind Giles, and the audience, that the distance between the librarian and the reckless young occultist is not as great as the tweed jacket would suggest. In “Band Candy” Ethan rigs the town’s fundraising chocolate bars to regress every adult who eats them into their teenage selves. Giles reverts to Ripper: vandalism, a stolen police car, a gun pulled on his old friend. What the show does carefully is let you see why Giles keeps Ripper locked away. The impulsiveness is still there. The anger is still there. What has changed is the choice, made again every day, to be something other than that. To be something better.
The Ethan episodes are, among other things, about the persistence of the past in the present. You do not graduate from who you were: you carry it. The question is whether you carry it as a wound that controls you or as a knowledge that forms you.
This was not an abstract question in our Chicago conversations. We were Jesuits in formation, which means we had all arrived with histories. Some of us had run from things. Some of us had returned from places where we had been lost. Ignatian spirituality takes seriously the idea that God works through everything, including the parts of your past that embarrass you, and that consolation can come through the memory of what you were as much as through the hope of what you might become.
*
The episode that stayed with me during the rewatch was “Helpless.” Giles, following the orders of the Watchers’ Council, secretly drugs Buffy on her eighteenth birthday, draining her of her Slayer strength, as preparation for a brutal test the Council has mandated. He does this even though he disagrees with it. He does it more out of institutional loyalty than out of moral cowardice. It is a question of higher duties, of what we in the Jesuit world called “The Magis.” When Buffy finds out, she says: “I don’t know you.”
He cannot defend himself, because she is right.
But then, because he is Giles, he intervenes to save her anyway, and the Council fires him. The head of the Council delivers the verdict with a precision that would be cruel if it were not also, unexpectedly, the truest thing anyone says in the episode: “Your affection for your charge has rendered you incapable of impartial judgment. You have a father’s love for the child. That is useless to the cause.”
The Council means this as a condemnation, but the show means it as a transfiguration. From this point forward, Giles is no longer Buffy’s Watcher in any official sense. He stays anyway. He shows up not because his job requires it but because he loves her. The institutional role is stripped away, and what remains is the relationship, which the Council could not account for, because the Council, like every bureaucracy that has confused its procedures for its purpose, does not understand that love is not a liability. It is the whole point.
There is a moment in “A New Man,” the season four episode where Ethan returns one last time. Giles is at a low point. Buffy has gone to university. She has new mentors, new frameworks, a whole world he is not part of. She forgot to invite him to a party. He sits in a bar, half-drunk, and says aloud to no one: “What am I? I’m an unemployed librarian with a tendency to get knocked on the head.” Ethan appears from the shadows, charming as always, and suggests they have one more night together as the men they used to be. And Giles goes, partly out of loneliness and partly because the offer contains a version of himself that still has a clear role. Ethan drugs him and turns him into a demon. This is played largely for comedy, but underneath it is a serious question: what does a mentor do when the people he mentored no longer need him the same way? Who is he then?
The answer the show eventually gives is: the same person he was before. Just freer.
*
In the sixth season musical episode, “Once More With Feeling,” the whole town of Sunnydale has been cursed to sing their innermost thoughts aloud, involuntarily. It is either a nightmare or a sacrament, depending on how you look at it. Giles sings a song that the show frames as an internal confession he cannot make directly to Buffy:
I wish I could say the right words
To lead you through this land
Wish I could play the father
And take you by the hand
Wish I could stay
But now I understand
He has already decided, by the time he sings this, that he will return to England. He believes that his presence, his readiness to absorb her problems and provide answers, is preventing her from becoming what she needs to become. He loves her enough to make himself absent. It is a precise act of care: the recognition that proximity can become a kind of harm, that the mentor who stays too long can inadvertently teach the student to become complacent, ignorant of how to manage by themselves. Ignatian spirituality has a name for the disposition Giles is practicing here. It is called indifference, in the technical sense: the freedom to hold even your most cherished attachments loosely, because the goal is not your own selfish continuity but the other person’s flourishing.
*
It has been a difficult year for those of us who grew up in Sunnydale. We lost Michelle Trachtenberg, who played Dawn, Buffy’s little sister who arrived without warning and was loved fiercely anyway. We lost Nicholas Brendan, whose sometimes problematic Xander was nevertheless the heart of the group. Then, Sarah Michelle Gellar confirmed that Hulu would not move forward with Chloe Zhao’s reimagining of the series. Something that might have been a continuation was quietly closed.
And then Tony Head.
I found out on June 6, my last day of teaching in Lebanon. The end of my regency. I was already close to tears because of the students I was leaving, and the news arrived in that gap.
*
The year in Lebanon was not what I expected. I do not want to over-romanticize it or over-darken it. Formation years are strange by design: you are placed somewhere unfamiliar, given responsibilities you are not entirely prepared for, and asked to pay attention to what happens inside you when comfort is removed. I had students I came to love with a love that surprised me with its weight. I had days I wanted to give up. I had mornings of prayer that felt like genuine conversation, and mornings that felt like sending letters into a void and hearing nothing come back.
On the last day I had my students in class, I struggled to keep the tears in. This surprised me, because the year had contained genuine difficulty. But difficulty and love are not opposites. I am still learning this, or learning it again.
*
As the series progresses to its final season, Giles returns from his self-imposed exile to teach the Scooby gang some final lessons. He helps his pupils becomes mentors themselves to a new generation of chosen ones. In the series finale, as they prepare to close the Hellmouth, their final battle, Buffy, Willow, and Xander begin talking about what they will do after the fight is over:
BUFFY: So… what do you guys want to do tomorrow?
WILLOW: Nothing strenuous.
XANDER: Well, mini-golf is always the first thing that comes to mind.
GILES: I think we can do better than that.
BUFFY: I was thinking about shopping—as per usual.
WILLOW: There’s an Agnes B in the new mall!
XANDER: Good. I could use a few items.
GILES: Aren’t we going to discuss this? Save the world and go to the mall?
BUFFY: I’m having a wicked shoe craving.
XANDER: Aren’t you on the patch?
WILLOW: Those never work.
GILES: And here I am, invisible to the eye, not having any say...
XANDER: See, I need a new look. It’s this whole eye-patch thing.
BUFFY: Oh! You could go with the full black secret-agent look.
WILLOW: Or the puffy-shirt, pirate-slash-poet feel. Sensitive yet manly...
XANDER: Now you’re getting a little Renaissance Fair on me.
BUFFY: It’s a fine line.
Giles watches them go down the hallway towards their final battle with an ironic smile. The camera holds on his face. He says, to himself, the line he spoke at the end of the pilot seven years earlier:
The Earth is definitely doomed.
The line has not changed. Everything else has. The first time he said it, it was a sigh of exhaustion at what lay ahead. The last time he says it, it is something closer to gratitude. These are his people. They are alive. They are already planning where to shop. Buffy ends with the town of Sunnydale destroyed and the survivors standing at the edge of a crater where it used to be. The apocalypse is over, and they are unchanged, which means they were never really changed by the darkness at all. The Earth is doomed, and they will save it again, and what matters is not the saving but who is standing next to you while you do it.
*
When I wrote my application to the Society, I was trying to articulate why I wanted to be a Jesuit. I wrote about setting the world on fire with the love of God. I wrote about the beatitudes. I wrote about the three vows as a means of finding the true self. These were all things I believed, and I still believe them. What I could not have written then, because I did not yet know it, was something simpler and harder. I wanted to be the kind of person who takes the people in their care seriously.
I wanted to become Giles. Not Ripper, with his reckless hunger for intensity. Not the institutional Watcher, loyal to a structure that had confused its procedures for its purpose. Giles after “Helpless.” Giles in the musical, honest about what his staying cost. Giles in the finale, watching them walk away toward the mall with that ironic smile that is also, unmistakably, joy.
On my last day of teaching in Lebanon, I looked at my students and I understood something I could not have understood at 19 or 25. The goal is not to be needed. The goal is to love them well enough that they do not need you, or at least not in the same way, or at least not always. To give them whatever you have, the attention and the honesty and the willingness to show up, and then to let go when the time comes.
Giles goes back to England. He comes back when it matters. He is not the hero of the story, and he knows this, and over seven seasons he makes his peace with it. He makes his peace with it so thoroughly that by the end, watching the people he loves walk away from him toward their own destiny, he can smile.
*
Rest in peace, Tony. The Earth is definitely doomed. We’ll manage.
Processing img dxidttjbjs5h1...
Posted Jun 7, 2026, 4:47 AM UTC