Angel: Not Fade Away

"Good night, folks."

This is it, then. The end. And, my God, that was magnificent.

The plot of the episode could be reduced to “the gang kill every single member of the Circle of the Black Thorn, and some of them die” but, of course, the plot is not the point. This final episode lives and breathes character, feeling, and the positively existential message that yes, doing good may make no difference in the long run in a world that will always be corrupt and unjust, but we do it anyway, with joyous defiance, as something much bigger than our lives. That message lies beneath everything in this final episode.

Angel must keep up appearances, of course, and early on he is made to sign away the Shanshu Prophecy. But then he is, of course, a hero. Heroes do good because of who they are and not because of any reward, just as one does not need to believe in a Heaven to be moral. Neither does Angel, and neither do any of his friends.

But it isn’t all grim; the gang get to spend one last day doing what they love before they probably die that night. So Lorne sings. Angel spends time with Connor, and sees what a well-adjusted and happy young man he is. Spike gets drunk and performs at a poetry slam. Gunn, wonderfully, does charity work with our old friend Annie who, as much as anyone, articulates what the episode is about- if there are, indeed, corrupt forces ensuring that there will never be justice or an end to suffering, the proper response is to get to work and comfort the suffering. Hopelessness achieves nothing, however justified. We do good regardless.

Wesley, tragically, has no possible perfect days; spending it with the god king inhabiting Fred’s body is the best he can do. There is no joy for him, only grim determination and, anyway “I don’t actually intend to die tonight.” Like Hamilton later, this is something he probably shouldn’t have said.

The Circle are all killed, but not without cost. Wesley dies in Illyria’s arms as she lies to him, his last words being to tell Fred that he loved her. Alexis Denisof is simply magnificent in portraying a character who has had a rich and deep arc, and the same must be said for J August Richards, as Gunn’s arc this season has been deeply satisfying. We are shocked to see a dejected Lorne murder Lindsey before walking away forever. We are less shocked to see Harmony betray her boss and then ask for a reference, but that kind of juxtaposition is something I’ll miss enormously.

And so the survivors gather to face the consequences, with no hope of survival but happy against the odds. And then it ends. Has any season finale ever been better than this?

RIP Angel. RIP Buffyverse. You were loved.

Angel: The Thin Dead Line

“Is this morphine?... Well it’s bloody lovely!”

It had to happen: zombie cops. This is an excellent episode, full of social commentary and character development. Wesley takes a bullet while trying to help Gunn and his friends, thus creating a much stronger bond between these unlikely friends from such different backgrounds.

The staff of Angel Investigations (not including Angel these days) deal with two cases. It is initially Gunn, who is working class and black, who deals with the zombie cops and their attacks on homeless kids, while Wesley and Cordelia, both from much more affluent backgrounds, work for a rich client sourced from Wesley’s rich girlfriend. There’s very much a class divide. But Wesley, significantly, makes a personal sacrifice while helping those less fortunate than himself. He shows that, although he’s a klutz, he is nevertheless a hero with integrity.

We meet Anne again, after only a couple of episodes, it is significant that Gunn seems to know her well. Gunn knows a lot of people well throughout the shelter. There is a nice scene between Gunn and thuggish and menacing Jackson. Gunn’s line- “a thug with a gun, keeping the cycle going” is a telling and eloquent piece of social commentary. Gunn, in fact, is promoted to the main character for this episode, and fills the role well.

Angel is also investigating this case, but on the margins. It is he who investigates the police and de-voodoos the precinct in question. Still, when he finally turns up at the hospital, Cordy is dead right that “it takes a gunshot wound to make (him) give a crap.” Angel seems to have repented his behaviour a little, but it’s too late. It now seems to be time for the story arc to take a new turn. There aren’t many episodes left this season. Something big is going to happen, I know it.

Angel: Blood Money

“It’s actually kind of fun when you know the rules. I mean, you know there aren’t any.”

This is an interesting period of the season, with Angel having adventures separately from the gang. They continue to tread water in setting up their agency, something which seemed to be established last time. Angel, meanwhile, continues his single minded pursuit of Wolfram and Hart plus a certain two vampire ladies.

We start with Wesley and Gunn playing risk at Cordelia’s, doing nothing. The gang has no plan, no office, nothing. But they succeed magnificently against a conveniently off-screen baddie and end up with a new office, albeit one that isn’t as posh as the Hyperion. So much for them. They’re comic relief in this episode.

As far as Angel is concerned, his new attitude is challenged when he comes face to face with Anne, who has changed many times since we first met her in Buffy. Her latest persona is that of a single minded charity worker, who cares deeply about the homeless children to whom she is dedicated, to the exclusion of all else. She cares not that Wolfram and Hart will be taking 95% of the cash from the charity ball they arranged. Nor does she give a monkeys that this may be used for deeply nefarious purposes. For her, nothing exists beyond the cause. Her social conscience may be myopic, but at least she has one. Angel has no social conscience at all right now.

Angel’s scheme may be clever, cool, and knocked down Wolfram and Hart a peg or two, but it is deeply cynical. Angel doesn’t even bother to expose them, knowing that this will be covered up, and he wishes to do nothing more than rattle them a bit. Still, at least he’s sufficiently affected by Anne’s scolding to hand over the money to her, which she gladly accepts despite the literal blood on it. That’s single mindedness for you! This episode contrasts single mindedness in the cause of others (Anne) and single mindedness for selfish purposes (Angel), and it’s clear which is morally better.

Of course, we get more competition between Lilah and Lindsay, ending in an interesting bit of information from their new boss, that Angel is a “major player” in the forthcoming apocalypse. The prophecies do not detail what side he is due to be on, so our evil lawyer friends seek to darken his soul, seemingly with some success. Lilah and Lindsay, they will be reassured to know, are just expendable foot soldiers in this cause. This may be something of an episode of the week, but there is a lot of arcy stuff going on in the background.  

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Anne

"If we can focus, keep discipline, and not have quite so many mysterious deaths, Sunnydale is gonna rule!"

Well, here I am, the prodigal son returned, and the Fates have dealt me an episode that feels rather appropriate in the circumstances. This blog is now back to normal, so it's time for me to plough through Season Three of Buffy. This happens to be my favourite season, I'm afraid, boring and conventional though that opinion may be.

This episode is, let's just come out and say it, simply sublime. It's also a sort of statement about the following season, breaking new ground in a number of ways, the most obvious of which is the subtext. It's not been unusual for Buffy to use monsters and supernatural phenomena as metaphors for aspects of teenage life and young people's issues, but this episode deals with a social issue which is much more gritty and adult: homelessness.

We begin by seeing Buffy living hand to mouth, in a dead end job, in a crummy apartment in LA. This is our first example of Joss Whedon using the big city as the setting for more adult problems which, in spite of the metaphorical supernatural elements, feels much more gritty and "realistic". This is not the world of adolescence, authority figures and parental support; existence is much more tenuous. The contrast between "Anne", with her tenuous and poverty-stricken life, and the homeless people she passes, is only a matter of degree. It's made very clear that homelessness is something that could happen to anyone. And premature aging and death is an obvious metaphor for what homelessness does to you.

Of course, Buffy isn't "really" poor, as she could return to her mother at any time, but I think the point still stands.

The homeless are, of course, ripe for exploitation. I'm not sure I'm getting all the subtext of who the bad guys represent (this may be a specifically American thing), but a certain piece of blatant symbolism later on gives a definite indication that they're supposed to be capitalists of some kind. Buffy leads the workers against their oppressors armed initially with a hammer, but soon acquires a sickle too. And the camera lingers far too much on Buffy posing with a hammer and sickle (in fact, this is one of the iconic poses) for it to be possible to deny that the intent is to represent revolutionary socialism. And I, much though I'm sometimes tempted to wish for an equal and opposite left-wing counterweight to our excessively conservative political discourse, am no revolutionary socialist. Still, I'm not sure Whedon is either. Buffy does, after all, begin her revolution by asserting her individuality, and ends by returning to her bourgeois lifestyle.

Oh, and it's nice to see Chanterelle again, now calling herself Lily but with no fixed identity. It's already clear that her arc is going to be one of increasing confidence and self-reliance. She's an interesting character.

But what of Sunnydale, after that extraordinarily long summer? Everything seems to revolve around Buffy's absence but, of course, Whedon isn't afraid to have a bit of metatextual fun with this. The fact that Willow doesn't find the quips coming as easily as they do for Buffy is essentially a cheerful admission that Whedon-esque dialogue is hardly realistic; people in real life just aren't as witty as that, especially in times of stress. But the point is, well, who says realism is so great, anyway?

The whole inevitable sequence of Cordy and Xander being nasty to each other and then finally snogging is played for laughs, too; it's become so familiar now that it can be presented almost as slapstick. And Whedon manages to get around the massive plot convenience of Oz having to repeat a year by pretty much just coming out and admitting it.

The scenes with the biggest emotional punch both involve Joyce, though. At first we think that she and Giles have built up a connection but then she turns on him. And, of course, we end perfectly, with a silent hug between mother and daughter.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Lie to Me

“Everybody lies.”

Interesting, isn’t it, how Joss Whedon can take a fairly ho-hum premise for an episode and, in both scripting and helming the thing, turn it into a sublime thing of beauty? This episode is, at first glance, a fairly standard brief; everybody lies to Buffy and there’s a bit of subtext about how vampires being evil is far cooler and less dorky than any of that Anne Rice stuff (and, I’d imagine, Whedon would probably apply such thinking to Twilight today, not that I’m likely to ever experience that particular series of novels / movies).

Even the opening shot, with the abandoned playground in the dark, is utterly gorgeous. As is Ford, Buffy’s curiously never-before-mentioned old flame / friend from LA. He’s a good looking man. I probably might, and I’m not even gay. He’s certainly a cuckoo in the Scooby nest though; I love Xanders’s comment that he’s imposing himself “only in the literal sense”. Still holding that long-extinguished candle for Buffy, I see.

The basic theme of this episode, which ties right into the character stuff, is that everyone lies to Buffy, and none of them for the best of reasons. Ford is plotting to betray and incidentally kill her from the start. Angel lies about speaking to Drusilla, because (arrogantly making the decision for her about what she needs to know) he doesn’t want to know that it was he who originally drove Drusilla mad by psychological torture, finally turning her into a vampire on the day she becomes a nun. That’s some fairly heavy shit, and most definitely is the sort of thing that a girl ought to know about a potential boyfriend.

You have to give him credit for the best line in the episode, though: “A hundred years just hanging out, feeling guilty. Really honed my breeding skills.” I love Joss Whedon scripts. The only trouble is that everyone else’s scripts just seem so unwitty by comparison.

Angel, Willow and Xander all lie to Buffy as they keep her out of the loop while investigating Ford’s dodgy dealings. Xander, in particular, doesn’t exactly have the best of motives. Even Giles lies to Jenny Callendar about enjoying their date with the, er, monster trucks, although in his case he can hardly do otherwise.

The naïve kids in the goth / metal club are also liars of a sort, especially as it’s themselves they’re lying to. Deluding themselves into thinking that vampires are drippy, handsome, cute fluffy bunnies who will make them immortal. I’m loving the dig at a popular culture idea of vampirism that has since become annoyingly ubiquitous, although I’m a little annoyed at the negative portrayal of goths / metalheads; aside from their dorky leader, Ford’s friends are rather sexily-dressed, attractive and look like the sort of people you’d find in a perfectly normal late ‘90s rock club. I mean, this place is the spitting image of Nottingham Rock City back in its ‘90s heyday. (I don’t mean to say that Rock City has declined in any way, just that I no longer frequent the place, being nearly 35 and no longer living in Nottingham). Oh, and this is the first time we meet Chanterelle.

Ford comes across as quite fun in his meeting with Spike; we have the lovely metatextual joke that he demands clichés while Spike finds them utterly tiresome. But, just as we think he’s a fully-fledged, black hat-wearing baddy, he pulls the rug from under us; within six months he’ll be dead from brain cancer at seventeen. And he genuinely missed Buffy. That doesn’t, as Buffy says, excuse mass murder, but suddenly there are shades of grey and Buffy learns again that life is complicated.

There’s a nice ending for Giles, who really shows what a great father figure he can be now that he’s seemingly decided to cut Buffy a bit of slack after the events of Reptile Boy. We end on another of his lies but, again, it’s a little white one.