Let's say the Watcher's Council and its predecessors all the way back to the Shadow Men are directly or indirectly responsible for killing a girl every four years for the past four thousand years. That's a thousand girls. How many guys died in the Normandy invasion again, allied troops? Is that 6% for the US still looking like such a good bargain?

As Cindy suggests, I think John is thinking on a different track from the reason I assembled those statistics. It isn't "1,078,000 casualties" and it's not "6.6% of 16 million casualties". It's an individual having a 93.4% (overall) chance of going home unscathed. Slayers? Have a 0% chance of going home unscathed, because they never "go home". They fight until they die, not in one battle or one campaign, but sequentially until failure.

I'm specifically thinking about the individual, not the aggregate. I don't want to inflict that large-scale hopelessness on one person, much less on 4,000. (It's that classic ethics experiment, right? You can save a whole town from suffering, if you're willing to personally inflict suffering on one person. Me, I spread the suffering around. Why should one person be singled out?)

Actually, beyond the personal concerns, slayerdom is a terrible, inefficient way of fighting evil. One girl (at a time) in all the world? She can't be everywhere at once, and she's it even if she goes to jail or runs away to Los Angeles, and (as demonstrated) it's physically impossible for one person to fight a whole army. The Operant Conditioning Militia could do a better job, if they weren't, you know, corrupt to the core.

Let's say Quentin Travers was personally responsible for say, 20 girls? How does that stack up against the innocents who were saved by the Slayer soldiers under his watch?

(1) I don't think he gets any credit for the slayers "under his watch" saving people; we've not seen him ever offer any useful advice or guidance to a slayer. (2) Say we do give him credit and 200 people have been saved. Doesn't that mean we have to count against him the 20,000 people who weren't saved? The victims in The Harvest, Jenny Calendar, Uncle Enyos, the poor dumb cluck in the teaser of WTTH? Buffy can't be everywhere at once, and what general in his right mind asks a platoon of 20 to win a battle that a whole brigade would find difficult? If it's really a war, why isn't Travers recruiting more soldiers? Why the secrecy?

If Travers -- who didn't invent slayerdom, only exploits it -- is guilty of anything, it is of perpetuating his domain of power at the expense of (a) slayers and (b) the people the slayer can't save. If he had had any vision or creativity, he would long since have been trying to come up with a way to do what Willow did in Chosen. Or at least warning people, for crying out loud.

Nutty speaks for me, with better spelling and grammar.

(1) I don't think he gets any credit for the slayers "under his watch" saving people; we've not seen him ever offer any useful advice or guidance to a slayer. (2) Say we do give him credit and 200 people have been saved. Doesn't that mean we have to count against him the 20,000 people who weren't saved? The victims in The Harvest, Jenny Calendar, Uncle Enyos, the poor dumb cluck in the teaser of WTTH? Buffy can't be everywhere at once, and what general in his right mind asks a platoon of 20 to win a battle that a whole brigade would find difficult? If it's really a war, why isn't Travers recruiting more soldiers? Why the secrecy?

Let's include another example. Let's think about the people who were brain-sucked by Glory, while the CoW used the information that Glory was a god (!!!), in their power play.

I don't think their methods worked for the best. Why keep the existence of monsters, etc., a secret at all. Wouldn't the public-at-large be better served to know such things roamed their world, to know you don't invite cool, pale-skinned strangers into your house, to know it's a good idea to have a wooden stake and some holy water on hand?

The isolation enforced upon the slayer (whether you believe Kendra's experience was typical, ideal, whatever) did it ever really serve the slayer, or serve the cause to which slayers and watchers gave their lives? Didn't Buffy's experience with Willow and Xander show that slayers probably would have been more effective if the slayer hadn't been essentially cloistered? Didn't Buffy's experience/Giles adaptable treatment of her show us that if you let the slayer be a human woman, let her have ties to this world, that she would have been more successful, better off, and later dead? Isn't that what we've been hearing since School Hard, when Spike told us the brochure failed to mention a slayer with family and friends?

All of what you say is true, Cindy, and not just because you're my publicist.

Although I also wonder -- the other great flaw of "one girl in all the world" is, what if that one girl is a blithering idiot, or a grudge-keeping ninny, or a sociopath, or for that matter, what if she's had both legs amputated as a child? Putting all of the demon-fighting eggs into a single human basket was a phenomenally stupid idea.

I'm all for Buffy in specific and the slayer in general having friends, intimacy, information, and the ability to make a decision. But I also have the same problem with slayers that I have with kings -- sure, this one is good, and a leader, and I trust her, but the next one that comes along?

I prefer to let the leadership cream rise to the top under its own power (even if that power is yammering, or ambition, or whatever) than be stuck with whatever rancid thing was raised.

I prefer to let the leadership cream rise to the top under its own power (even if that power is yammering, or ambition, or whatever) than be stuck with whatever rancid thing was raised.

or installed by the Supreme Court?

what if that one girl is a blithering idiot, or a grudge-keeping ninny, or a sociopath, or for that matter, what if she's had both legs amputated as a child?

That's what wetworks are for. I doubt she'd last long enough to be called, if her Watcher gave her the thumbs down.

Yeah, see, and I'm firmly on board the ethical boat that you don't assassinate your own assets, just because you don't like what you got. It would surprise me not one jot that the Watchers would, but the only reason they would need to is the stupidity of eggs-in-one-basket in the first place.

So I can see the practical aspects of the wetworks approach, but I'd prefer to head it off way back at the source, rather than build in the expectation of having to murder a certain (large!) percentage of your soldiers before they've even met the enemy.

They wouldn't be killing their soldiers. They'd be killing pre-draftees.

Better? Probably not. But my vision of the Shadow Men/Council continuum wouldn't blink at it.

Sort of defeats the purpose, though, doesn't it? I mean, isn't the intent of having a slayer, in the long run, to save lives? Even if you accept the premise that the fighting slayer's life must be sacrificed (I don't), it's rather a larger leap to accepting the sacrifice of 10 or 20 ninnies for every actual slayer.

And it's just another sign of moribund "it's always been this way" thinking. Stupid council. They needed to be bought out by some upstart and shook up but good.

You decided on the number of 10 or 20 ninnies per slayer. It may not be that. Do the watchers have any idea who'll be called next? Might they wait and see if their moron/hussy is called before they kill her? Was Giles, good watcher extraordinaire, willing to kill Dawn, sister of a Slayer and someone with whom he had a personal relationship that probably exceeded Council boundaries?

Yeah, but if we're really going to get into the ethics of the whole slayer thing, then we need to deal with the fact that just about any way you look at it, what Buffy's plan in Chosen accomplished (giving a whole bunch of girls the slayer power with asking them how they felt about it, or if they wanted it) was ethically no different from what the Shadow Men did to the first slayer and all that came after her.