Helpless (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

Plot

In the library, Giles shows Buffy crystals as part of a lesson. Later on patrol, Buffy suddenly loses her strength and barely escapes a vampire. She demonstrates her diminished abilities to Giles by missing targets with throwing knives. At home, Buffy learns her father cannot take her to the ice show for her 18th birthday and suggests Giles accompany her instead.

Giles puts Buffy into a trance by having her stare at a crystal and injects her with a mysterious substance. Meanwhile, Quentin Travers, the head watcher, organizes an extreme test for the slayer with the help of Hobson and Blair. Buffy is easily pushed aside when she tries to intervene in a fight between Cordelia and an aggressive suitor. She asks her friends for help figuring out what is wrong.

Angel gives Buffy a birthday book and tells her he loved her from the moment he first saw her, before she was the slayer. Kralik, the vampire intended for the test, escapes his straitjacket while Blair is giving him pills and turns Blair into a vampire. Giles finds Quentin at the Sunnydale Arms building but discovers Kralik is missing and Hobson is dead. Kralik confronts Buffy as she walks home alone, and Blair chases her until Giles drives by and picks her up.

At the Summers' home, Joyce finds Kralik wrapped in Buffy's jacket. Giles admits he injected Buffy with muscle relaxant and adrenaline suppressors as part of the test. Buffy returns home to find a photograph of her mother bound and gagged by Kralik. She goes to the Sunnydale Arms building, beats Blair unconscious, and is chased by Kralik until his need for pills overwhelms him.

Buffy steals the pills and slides down a laundry chute where she finds her mother. Kralik breaks through the door and retrieves his pills, washing them down with water that Buffy has replaced with holy water, causing him to burn from within. Buffy frees her mother as Giles arrives and stakes Blair.

Reception

A BBC reviewer found the slayer test nonsensical and suggested the episode would have been improved by the presence of Faith, the second slayer. The same review called the betrayal of Buffy by Giles and the strain on their father-daughter relationship heart-wrenching. Noel Murray of The A.V. Club described the episode as one of the most overtly horrific, with creepy dark houses and blood-spattered rooms. Myles McNutt noted that the central characters are truly alone in the fight, and that Kralik's lack of world-conquering plans means the consequences are character-driven rather than apocalyptic.

Vox ranked the episode at #71 out of 144 Buffy episodes for the show's 20th anniversary, remarking that subplots involving Buffy pining for her father and Angel's self-indulgent moping diminished the spark of Buffy fending for herself without powers for the first time. The episode ends with Giles being fired from the Council for being too much like a father to Buffy, a charge he does not deny.