Season 2, Episode 8 | Aired: 10 November 1997 | Written by: Dean Batali & Rob Des Hotel | Directed by: Bruce Seth Green
The Giles backstory episode. Ethan Rayne returns, and with him comes the revelation that the tweed and the tea and the careful, responsible Watcher persona is not the whole story. Giles had a different name once. He did things he isn’t proud of.
What Happens
The demon Eyghon the Sleepwalker is killing people in Sunnydale — people who all bear the same mark. The mark is Giles’s too. In his youth, Giles ran with a group who called themselves the Bavarian Eyghon cult, summoning the demon into a host body for the pleasure of the ride. One summoning went wrong. A member of the group died, possessed. Giles has been running from that ever since.
Ethan Rayne, one of the original group, marks Buffy with Eyghon’s symbol and erases his own, using her as a decoy. Eyghon possesses Jenny Calendar. Angel, being already dead, attracts the demon into his body — where the resident vampire demon fights it off. Jenny survives. Eyghon is destroyed. Giles’s past is laid bare to Buffy and the gang.
Key Moments
Buffy’s reaction to learning about Giles’s past — not shock, not condemnation, but a kind of quiet reassessment — is exactly right. She doesn’t have a speech about disappointment. She just looks at him differently, and the episode trusts that to be enough.
Jenny possessed by Eyghon is disturbing in a specific way — the body of someone you know as host to something wrong. Robia LaMorte plays the wrongness without overdoing it.
Monster / Villain
Eyghon the Sleepwalker — a possession demon drawn to the marked. Ethan Rayne (Robin Sachs), manipulating events from the sidelines as always.
Notable Quote
“The Ripper. I like it.” — Ethan, about Giles’s old name. A name that tells you everything about who Giles used to be.
Where It Fits
The Dark Age is essential Giles mythology — it complicates him permanently and makes his relationship with the Scooby Gang more honest. It also sets up the Jenny/Giles relationship to matter more: we’ve now seen him vulnerable, seen what he protects himself from, and we understand what losing her will cost him. The show is three episodes away from that loss.