With less Giles this season, are you finding it hard to write for the group, now missing that father figure?

Giles left this year, and at first it was hard for all of us. When you get into a big scene, a big Magic Box scene of assigning who's going to investigate this thing, I kept hitting those lines where I'd go, "This would be the line where Giles would say, 'Everybody focus'", and he wasn't there.

For a couple of episodes I felt the absence really acutely. But then you just sort of go "Okay", you get used to the new dynamic, you get to him not being there and you stop thinking that way. It becomes easier and easier to write without him.

The interesting thing [is that] this exactly mirrors what our characters are going through. Our characters, for the first several episodes that he was gone, would actually comment, "Gosh, I missed Giles".

[It's] that feeling of, "Where's the grown up that's going to tell us to start working? Oh my god, we are the grown ups!" [It's] exactly what we wanted to capture. We wanted this to be the year where they sort of realise, "Oh, we're adults now", and all the adult problems that they're dealing with this year are part of that aspect of the show right now. So Giles leaving just worked perfectly.