As I said, with the exception of the season 2 finale, Xander pretty much always endured some comeuppance for his misdeeds (especially when it came to the piping hot mess that was his love life). In season 7, however, he was only doing his part to save the day when he ran afoul of Nathan Fillion’s Caleb, a cruel, women-hating priest and servant to the season’s big bad — the intangible force known as the First Evil — and got a thumb driven into his left eye for his efforts. Actor Nicholas Brendon was understandably miffed when the show’s creatives declined to give him a heads-up about his character’s fate, too. As he once explained during a Reddit AMA:
“They didn’t tell me. I read it. And I’m like ‘What?’ and I read it again and I’m like ‘WHAT?’ And yeah, wearing an eye patch sucks, but at least you get to flip it up between scenes. And — again — it looks amazing in the comics.”
The “comics” Brendon referred to are the Dark Horse “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” comic books, which are canonical to the TV show and continue the story from where season 7 left things. I can’t vouch for the overall quality of the comics (let’s just say they go places), but they have allowed Xander to evolve beyond being a Joss Whedon stand-in and become something of a replacement for Buffy’s mentor and Watcher, Rupert Giles. To be certain, he remains a deeply flawed character whose toxic tendencies can still get the best of him, but the older Xander is also someone who makes an active effort to be a better person. If only the man who created him had gone in a similar direction.