Analyse de la saison 4

Sujet: Analyse de la saison 4 Mar 05 Oct 2010, 16:04

Un essai qui analyse la saison 4, trouvé ICI.

Citation :: SEASON 4
September 2002 - May 2003

OVERVIEW OF THE SEASON

A Matter of Choice

If I were to pick one word to sum up the theme of season 4 of ANGEL, that word would be “choice”. More specifically the season was about the fact that we all have the freedom to choose our actions, that that is what makes us who we are, that our choices have consequences and that we have responsbility for those consequences.

As is by now traditional, the permiere laid the foundation for the season’s theme. When Angel confronted his errant son at the end of “Deep Down”, he understood exaclty why Connor had kidnapped and imprisoned him. There was first of all grief for Holtz, a grief made all the sharper by the necessity for him to mutilate Holtz’s corpse in case Angel has turned him. Then there was the mounting suspicion that Holtz had been right all along. There really was no difference between Angel on the one hand and Angelus on the other and the former was fully responsible for all the harm caused by the latter. And of course the cold blooded calculation, the careful planning and execution, the self-control and the sheer cruelty to his own father that Connor exhibited in his actions in “Tomorrow” are also the product of his upbringing by Holtz and his extended stay in Quor’toth. Those actions are reflections both of the self-righteous ruthlessness of the former and the pitiless cruelty of the latter. But, as Angel said, none of these considerations took from Connor’s hands the freedom he has to choose his own path:

“Nothing in the world is the way it ought to be. It's harsh, and cruel. But that's why there's us - champions. It doesn't matter where we come from, what we've done or suffered, or even if we make a difference. We live as though the world was what it should be, to show it what it can be.”

In the same episode, when Wesley freed Justine from her physical captivity, he sympathized with her on the loss of her sister. But he characterized the way she reacted to this loss as a type of slavery. She had allowed that terrible event to control her life, instead of taking that control into her own hands. So long as she did so she was still in a sort of moral captivity. Exactly the same thing had happened to Connor. When he attacked Angel he was allowing Holtz and his upbringing in Quor’toth to reach out from the dead past and reclaim control over him. He was voluntarily giving up his right and his power to control his own destiny. And the contrast with Wesley and Angel was striking. Wesley had, as it seemed to him, been betrayed by Angel and his former friends. Yet he was the one who was instrumental in saving Angel, not because he wanted to reforge old alliances. Rather it was simply because it was the right thing to do. Equally Angel himself, in his sojourn under the waves, suffered vivid torments in which the perfect life he wanted for himself and which he experienced in his dreams was interrupted by hunger and a desire for revenge. In his imagination he reacted badly to these – by draining Cordelia and killing Connor. But, he seemed genuinely horrified by these reactions and, on his return to the surface, he controlled his hunger by only drinking some of Wesley’s blood and disavowed any interest in seeking revenge on Connor. By his words and actions he too asserted his power of choice, his control over his own life in the face of whatever misfortune comes his way.

Much later in the season, in “Inside Out” the writers emphasize the reality of the power that each of us has to control our lives. Skip claims that Angel and the others were merely puppets to be manipulated by Jasmine towards her own ends. By doing so he appears to deny the members of Angel Investigations their power to choose. While explaining now Jasmine had planned all of the events leading up to her own birth, Skip had taunted each of them with their individual parts in her scheme of things:

“You have any concept of how many lines have to intersect in order for a thing like this to play out? How many events have to be nudged in just the right direction? (looks at Lorne) Leaving Pylea. (looks at Gunn) Your sister. (looks at Fred) Opening the wrong book. (looks at Wesley) Sleeping with the enemy. Gosh, I love a story with scope.”

But Gunn has an answer for him:

“Look, monochrome can yap all he wants about no-name's cosmic plan, but here's a little something I picked up rubbing mojos these past couple of years. The final score can't be rigged. I don't care how many players you grease, that last shot always comes up a question mark. But here's the thing—you never know when you're taking it. It could be when you're duking it out with the Legion of Doom, or just crossing the street deciding where to have brunch. So you just treat it all like it was up to you—the world in the balance—'cause you never know when it is.”

And indeed the events of that episode bear out his contention and deny the truth of Skip’s claims. As I pointed out in my review of “Inside Out” the purpose of Skip is trying to convince the others that there is really nothing that Angel or anyone else can do to thwart Jasmine’s plans. When he and Angel first fight, Skip is so confident of his superiority that he boasts of victory before achieving it. When he is trapped in the sand of the Red palm he calls it a child’s trick. When he refers to the Beastmaster he talks of:

“Something beyond your comprehension. To give it voice would rend your feeble brain into a quivering mass of…”

But at each step of the way he is proven wrong. Angel does defeat him, does bring him back to the Hyperion, does successfully bind him and does force him to talk. Finally, despite Skip’s assumption of his own invulnerability, Wesley succeeds in killing him. And above all, thanks admittedly to an improbable stroke of luck, Lorne and Wesley do find Cordelia’s whereabouts and Angel sets off to find and kill her. As Skip says this means Angel has to:

“Kill the woman he loves to save the world. Times like this? Really gotta suck being you.”

But that itself validates the idea that Angel does have freedom of action. It is hard to imagine a more difficult choice for him make. And yet against all his own personal desires, this is something he rationally decides that he has to do.

And in the choice Connor makes later on in the same episode, the writers remind us that with freedom of action comes moral responsibility. Our choices have consequences – for us and for others. Thus Connor was faced with a choice between killing an innocent teenage girl on the one hand and risking the life of Cordelia and their unborn child on the other. He chose to allow Cordelia to kill the girl. This is important because there can be no dispute about the profound nature of the consequences involved in Connor’s choice. There is no more serious a choice than to end the life of another human being. And the writers tried to drive home the moral responsibilities that lay with Connor when he made such a choice. In deciding whether or not to allow Cordelia to carry out the sacrifice Connor was faced with competing philosophies. One articulated by Cordelia insisted that we owed no moral responsibility to others at all; that there are no absolute moral values to constrain how we act towards others and that the idea of responsibility for our choices because of those consequences is an invention. And indeed this was the line that Connor ultimately fell for. However I think that it is clear that we were intended to accept the opposing view, articulated by Darla. This emphasized absolute human values such as the love of a mother for a child, the compassion owed to someone young and vulnerable and the worth of each human life. As I said in my review of “Inside Out” I am not sure that the mere assertion of these values in itself carries the argument intellectually. But Cordelia’s case involved the denial of, for example, the love of parents for a child and advocated a narrow and selfish view of the world. So, I have little doubt but that on an almost instinctive level people would have little difficulty in rejecting her argument and accepting the idea that we do indeed owe duties to others and accordingly have a general responsibility for our actions. And that meant that Connor himself violated those responsibilities.

So, we see the reality of freedom of action both in Wesley’s statement in “Deep Down” about everyone being able to choose for themselves how they reacted to tragic events in their lives and in the argument between Gunn and Skip in “Inside Out” about whether or not Jasmine was in control of their lives. And in Angel’s words about champions who live as though the world were as it should be and in the debate between Darla and Cordelia we see the idea that there are moral responsibilities inherent in free will. And it is from these two basic propositions that everything else in season 4 follows. They provide the basic frame of reference by which to understand and, yes indeed to judge, the events of the season, particularly the choices made by our protagonists and the consequences that those choices had for themselves and others.

We Are What We Do

Of course the exercise of free will is not something that happens in a vacuum. Nor are human beings automatons. Our behavior is influenced by a wide variety of factors: our emotions, the values we have been taught, the accumulated baggage of our past experiences, ingrained cultural attitudes, the weight of authority and many others. It is the differing nature, weight and balance of all these forces that help define the human personality and human individuality. And “Sacrifice” implicitly at least put free will in this context. In that episode, the writers contrasted Angel’s philosophy of “burning out” all feelings and emotions with Fred’s attitude, that to be human meant having feelings and emotions. We are I think intended to see in the latter’s view of humanity the real reason why free will is important. As I said in my review of that episode, it may be supposed that a person’s actions are the product of everything that makes that person who he or she is. When given a choice a person will respond in a particular way because of all their own unique emotional and psychological baggage, their own gifts of reason and intelligence and their formative experiences and environment. It follows therefore that, if we cannot choose our actions, if we are reduced to acting in a given way simply because it pleases another and if our feelings about those actions depend upon what that other thinks of them, then we are not being true to ourselves. We loose our individuality.

And because our actions are a reflection of whom we are and must be judged in that light it was crucial that the actions of the members of Angel Investigations be set in their appropriate context. Hence the importance of the episode “Spin the Bottle”. In this episode we were given an interesting insight into the formative characters of each of the members of Angel Investigations.

In Fred’s case, we saw someone who was anxious to believe in the honesty and sincerity of those who were close to her; but also someone who had a very strong sense of evil in the world. This suggested that she had a very black and white view of things – someone was good or bad; there was little room for gray. And this tendency would, if anything, have been heightened by her experiences in Pylea. This was, of course, a world where everything was black and white – a world where you could be executed for simply stealing food. It was also a world where Fred suffered horribly. So, from both points of view, it must have left a mark on Fred. Hence her willingness to judge transgressions harshly, hence her personal bitterness at her own suffering. In short, hence her willingness to murder even though she knew it was wrong.

In both Wesley and Gunn we saw people haunted by their insecurities. We even saw how those insecurities might rub up against one another. As early as this episode Gunn was worried about how everyone else saw him:

"Angel's the man on the card. It's his world. I'm not a leader no more. I don't have that champion's heart like Cordy, and the brains, why that was you. So that leaves muscle."

And as a teenager, he was very sensitive to Wesley’s claim to leadership and to have superior knowledge. For his own part Wesley talks himself up at every opportunity, emphasizing he was head boy at his school and stating what could only be wild guesses as if they were incontrovertible facts. These actions too speak of deeply felt insecurities – as if he would not be respected or trusted unless he proved himself to others. But in fact all he managed to do was antagonize Gunn.

And this brings us to Angel. He clearly feels alone and isolated. He still thinks his father is alive but he feels a gulf of understanding between them and a total lack of sympathy from him. He is also struck by a sense that he is being punished for his sins. He knew he was doing wrong; he knew what he was doing antagonized his father. But he didn’t seem to be able to stop himself. Finally he discovers he is a vampire and at first instead of seeing the possibilities he becomes afraid, again emphasizing his isolation, his irresolution and his lack of purpose. All of this shows us the extent to which Angel feels like a victim – someone who is not worth very much but also someone who is not in control of his own destiny but is used and abused by others.

In the case of each of our protagonists it is clear that the basics of their personalities, and particularly the nature of the personal demons that haunt each of them, are set by the age they are 17. As they go through life, gain in experience and knowledge or suffer the hard knocks that come with their chosen territory, the way they respond to these demons will change. As teenagers they do not have the same frame of reference to judge the world and other people; they lack judgment and perspective. Their feelings about themselves and their place in the world and how they relate to others are therefore so much more keenly felt and obvious. So, what we see in the teen versions of themselves is very much the raw state of the same people. But the important point is that here we do see the aspects of their characters that decisively influence their behavior in the first part of the season.

Angel’s Choices

Let us start with Angel. It’s seems to me that Angel was pretty clear about his own feelings for Cordelia from “Waiting in the Wings”. What he was far from clear about was Cordelia’s feelings for him. Of course for Angel it was how Cordelia felt that mattered. So, initially he deferred to Groo, even going so far as to procure the means for him and Cordelia to “cum-shuk”. He also paid for them to have a vacation together. But in “Tomorrow” when Cordelia called he came running. From this we can clearly see what he feels about her now. And when we first see him in “Ground State” he is in Cordelia’s apartment, trying to figure out what to do next and failing miserably. He doesn’t have the first idea where to go or what to do. In the end he has to turn to Wesley to guide him. Given the recent history between them this is a clear measure of his desperation. And when Wesley sends him to see the Dinza, his feeling of being alone and lost without Cordelia is, if anything, only emphasized. When the demi-goddess tells him that:

“She is far from you, champion, and needs you no longer.”

He can only reply that he needs her. And in “The House Always Wins” we see the idea that without Cordelia Angel is purposeless and directionless is hammered home. He takes everyone on a trip and is very mysterious about where and why:

Fred: “Um, Angel, where are we going?”

Angel: “On a little retreat. The three of us.”

Fred: “Oh, like a spiritual journey?”

Only its nothing like a spiritual journey, it’s a retreat into the past – to Las Vegas where he had spent some time in the 1950’s. And the symbolism of this is clear. After all, what is the opposite of worrying about your future – recalling your past of course. And it was a past before he knew about the Shanshu Prophecies with his ambiguous role in the Apocalypse or his mission of saving souls or his complex relationship with Cordelia or Buffy or even his son. They were indeed less complicated times when he didn’t even have a Destiny. And there, as if to emphasize the point, Angel does indeed loose his destiny when a night club owner steals it from him.

But from both of these episodes we see the reality of the situation – Angel lost his sense of identity when he lost Cordelia. He has his friends, he has his son and he has his mission. But the mission in particular means nothing to him without Cordelia to provide meaning to it all for him. And this provides the context in which we see how he reacts to her when she does return. Almost immediately he finds himself in the middle of a fraught triangle with her and his own son. And again it is his old feelings of insecurity and irresolution that return to haunt him. He cuts himself off from everyone else emotionally and casts himself once again in the role of the victim. Thus, devoid of a higher purpose and obsessed with what has gone wrong in his life he finds himself manipulated into co-operating with the Beastmaster’s plans.

In “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” he hears from Cordelia some welcome and some very unwelcome news:

Cordelia: “Oh, Angel... I love you. I always will. You know that.”

Angel: “I don't suppose we could stop there.”

But she didn’t:

“When I was up there, I could look back and see everything you ever did as Angelus—more than see, I felt it. Not just their fear and pain. I felt you and how much you enjoyed making them suffer. I love you, Angel, but I can't be with you. It's just too soon. Maybe if we just give it a little time...”

Here Cordelia was both expressing her love for him and at the same time rejecting him because of his past. Connor too rejects him partly because he is a vampire and therefore, to Connor, inherently evil but also because he is a self-righteous bastard who, in spite of this, still adopts an unwarranted air of moral superiority. The combination of his own son’s rejection and the thought that Connor sees him in the same way that he, as Liam, saw his own father must also hurt. Hence, in “Spin the Bottle” his impassioned:

"I didn't ask for this. I didn't ask to be attacked. I didn't ask to be a freak. Hell, I didn't even ask to be born."

And then of course Angel sees the two people he loves most in the world betray him. After each has rejected him they then sleep with one another. And “Long Day’s Journey” opens with him brooding over the fact. Not only that, but the episode ends with Cordelia identifying Angelus as the one who had the connection with the Beast and seeming to suggest that he was himself a puppet of the creature. She was the most important person in the world to him. But she was the one who rejected him because of his past. She was the one who chose his own son over him. And now she was demonstrating that she clearly didn’t trust him.

And finally there is the arrival of the Beast. Here I can only repeat what I said in my review of “Long Day’s Journey”. The team is dealing with a creature who is enormously more powerful than they are. This is a creature who can easily and quickly dispose of the members of the Ra-tet, in spite of the incredible power each of them has. And Angel and the others can do nothing against it. When they fight him the Beast wins – easily. And Angel has no sort of authority at all in trying to rally the troops against it in “Long Day’s Journey.”

Angel: “The Powers are sending us a wake-up call, people. Sure, we've been—I don't want to say demolished—beaten. And sure, it's slightly...demoralizing. But from here on out, we're on the offensive. We're gonna find out this thing's weaknesses, we're gonna go in prepared, and we're gonna fight smart. It's time to take down the Beast.”

Fred: “Uh, we're all behind you, Angel, a hundred percent, but how can we be prepared when there's nothing on this thing.”

Lorne: “And weaknesses? It's not a sure bet El Destructo has any.”

Worse than that they are always at least one step behind the Beast. This is a creature with an agenda. Angel and his team are continually scrambling to keep up with that agenda. Angel Investigations only found out about the Ra-tet when the Beast had killed three of them. They only discovered what the Beast wanted from the Ra-tet when there was just one left. They tried to protect Manny but somehow Angel and Cordelia were apparently drugged and someone stole silently in and killed him. They had no idea where the Beast was going to carry out the ritual to darken the sun. They only stumbled upon that secret by accident. And, even though they have a plan to stop him, it fails miserably. The sun is darkened and “Awakening” begins with a sense of utter helplessness as people watch the darkness descend. Nor has the team any idea where to even start to bring the sun back. It is no wonder Gunn observes:

“Face it man, we're losing ground. Pretty much the only victory we can claim is that we're not dead yet.”

Finally in “Awakening” we see the accumulation of all of Angel’s insecurities: about not being able to establish a relationship with a son who loves and respects him; about Cordelia over her unwillingness to trust and believe in him and her willingness to choose his own son over him; and about his inability to deal with the Beast. These insecurities were what ultimately led him to agree to the return of Angelus.

Wesley’s Choices

Wesley’s choices too are influenced by his personality. As we have already seen from “Spin the Bottle”, TeenWesley was someone who wanted to do the right thing. But he also wanted others’ recognition of his contributions. And he was afraid that no-one else valued or trusted him. So, he pretended to knowledge and skills he didn’t have. AdultWesley had abilities that TeenWeslery could only dream of. But he still had the same insecurities and those insecurities drove him to prove himself to others. In “Souless” Angelus taunts him about his status in the group:

Wesley: “You must hate it—that Angel fights evil.”

Angelus: “Eats you up inside, doesn't it. Seeing all those idiots flock around him, calling him a champion. Anyone ever call you a champion?”

Wesley: “I do my part.”

Angelus: “Right. Like letting Lilah suck Lorne's brain. Or, here's an oldie but a goodie: Faith. Good job being her watcher. She turned out to be a peach.”

Wesley: “And you managed to get your soul back, not once, but twice, saving the world several times in the process. Nobody's perfect.”

Angelus: “Then there's kidnapping the fruit of my loins. Smooth.”

Wesley: “He survived.”

Angelus: “I guess you just can't understand that special bond between dad and son, given that your own father's ashamed of you…”

For everyone, Angel is the Champion and Wesley the loyal sidekick. And his father especially seemed to have held him in something approaching contempt. It was his desire to prove he was more than just a sidekick and to prove his father wrong that led Wesley to embrace so strongly the idea of bringing Angelus back. After all, by doing so he ensured that he rather than Angel resumed leadership of the team. In addition he would be the obvious candidate to wring the necessary information from Angelus. And by discharging these important functions well, he could at last receive the credit he felt was due to him. But there must have been some voice within Wesley that continued to nag away at him about his failings. As Angel pointed out, he did ultimately fail with Faith, far from saving Connor he was the cause of his banishment and Lilah did trick him. His own internal doubts even began to manifest themselves over his decision to bring back Angelus. Under the surface confidence about his ability to control the vampire we see at the start of “Awakening”, Wesley seems full of uncertainties.

“Watch the monitor when I go down. Pay attention to everything he does, everything he says. He'll try to confuse you, to play on your emotions so you drop your guard. If he succeeds—even for an instant—we're all dead. I spent my life training for this, and I'm still not ready. He's smarter than I am, and a great deal more focused. He'll exploit everything Angel knows about me and go for the jugular.”

But in spite of these doubts Wesley chooses to go ahead with his interrogation of Angelus and significantly he did so alone. The truth is that this is typical of the way that Wesley deals with his insecurities. Just as TeenWesley’s insecurities manifested themselves in his need to demonstrate his book learning or his prowess at martial arts, AdultWesley’s insecurities manifested themselves in a willingness to make rash judgments such as kidnapping Connor and a refusal to accept that he could be wrong in such judgments. His determination to bring back Angelus was all part of this pattern.

And it is in this context that we must see his designs on Fred:

“You want to impress the girl. Move in, get her to love you, and after a couple days of flowers and chocolate covered cherries, you'll bend her over the kitchen counter…”

This puts his attraction to her in a fairly disturbing light. It suggests that for Wesley she is a prized object and that he is engaged in a competition for possession of it. It suggests that Wesley isn’t really in love with her. Rather, Angelus is saying, this is all about making Wesley feel better about himself. We find some support for this view in the different ways in which he and Gunn react to Angelus' threat to Fred. Gunn’s reaction is highly emotional. Wesley’s is cool, calm and collected; almost looking with detachment at the danger Fred was in. And then there is the scene when he forcibly kisses her. She is trying to tell him that there is nothing wrong with the way he feels about her but he says:

“Yes there is.”

as he moves in almost to take control of the situation and certainly showing scant respect for her wishes. There may indeed have been some exaggeration to Angelus' words. But undoubtedly there is a dark side to Wesley's feelings for Fred.

Sujet: Re: Analyse de la saison 4 Mar 05 Oct 2010, 16:05

Citation :: Gunn’s Choices

And here we see where Wesley and Gunn’s insecurities rub up against one another. Gunn too suffers from exactly the same insecurities as his former friend; they just manifest themselves in a slightly different way. His relationship with Fred has been at times almost saccharine in its sweetness. It is nevertheless quite obvious that he does have a great love for her. His willingness to do what he firmly believes is wrong and kill Professor Seidel to save her from the consequences of her own actions is proof of that. And in “Soulless” we see his almost panicked reaction when Angelus grabbed her. His problem is that he cannot believe that she loves him. Of course in the aftermath of Professor Seidel’s murder she did push him away. But he sees far more than just that between them. In “Supersymmetry” we are shown that he feels quite acutely the fact that he cannot share in her interest in Physics. As I have also pointed out, it is hinted in “Spin the Bottle” (and later confirmed in “Players”) that Gunn saw himself as just the muscle, and as such didn’t play that important a role in Angel Investigations. And as the season wore on Gunn came more and more to resent the way in which Fred and Wesley were so intellectually compatible and the closeness with which they worked together. He saw this as evidence that Fred didn’t really value him and that she did feel a closer bond with Wesley.

But it isn’t just his insecurities about Fred that haunt Gunn. In “Soulless” it is interesting that Angelus chooses to taunt him about something other than his relationship with Fred:

Gunn: “Keep talking. I'll sweep out the cage when I'm done.”

Angelus: “Oh. Provocative. Get me all riled up. You think that's what your boss would want?”

Gunn: “Don't have a boss.”

Angelus: “You might want to tell Wesley that. “

Gunn hates to think of himself as having a boss – especially Wesley. Indeed in “Spin the Bottle” his adverse reaction to TeenWesley’s pretensions to leadership:

Gunn: "Don't be given me orders. I run my own crew."

Gunn is a proud man. But like Wesley’s rashness and certainties, his pride is really a mask for his insecurities. When he sees Wesley working behind his back to take something valuable from him - be that something the leadership of the group or Fred - he reacts badly. He becomes the angry, passionate young man we first met in “War Zone”: the one who cannot bring himself to trust others, the one who looks to lay blame when things go wrong and the one who thinks that retribution is called for when they do.

And the Consequences Are…

Angel therefore feels powerless in the face of the Beast, beset by feelings of inadequacy and perhaps even doubts about his own latent potential for destructiveness. And he seems to see in others the mirror image of his own suspicions about himself. Wesley and Gunn too are caught up in their own conflicts. Wesley seeks to resolve his through his ambitions to win Fred and to play a decisive part in defeating the Beast. And these ambitions provoke a powerful reaction from Gunn because they inflame resentments already fanned into life by his own feelings of insecurity. When taken together with the team’s collective feelings of fear and frustration over the Beast, this makes for a poisonous mixture. The team understands that, until they know much more about Beast, they are at huge disadvantage. With feelings of powerlessness common to most of them and a lack of trust and confidence in one another and a consequent inability to rely on the normal team spirit, they make at least one catastrophic misjudgment and perhaps miss a number of opportunities. It is doubtful if anyone on the team, in their right minds and under normal circumstances, would say that bringing back Angelus was a good move at any time. And when there was already an enormously clever, unpredictable and uncontrollable killer on the loose, when LA was plunged into darkness and about to become a magnet for every evil creature in the hemisphere, as it was at the end of “Long Day’s Journey”, adding another should have been seen as self-evidently a profoundly stupid idea. But these were not people in their right mind or operating under normal circumstances. Their inability to get anywhere near dealing with the Beast reinforced by their own internal divisions has left them in a state of despair. And in that state of mind they ran an irresponsible risk. And that risk did have serious consequences: not only the bringing back of Angelus but the way he was allowed to escape. Don't forget, as I observed in my review of "Calvary" the team were so caught up in their own petty squabbles and jealousies that they were not thinking straight. Angelus not only constituted a danger that they suddenly felt unprepared to deal with, he was also exposing the weaknesses and wrongdoing of each of them. They would have taken any risk to get rid of him. And when Angel seemed to be back, they almost fell over themselves to accept that he was because that was what they wanted to hear. As I pointed out in my review of that episode, in Christian theology, Calvary represented far more than just pain. The cross of Calvary represents the cost of sin; a cost paid in suffering by God made Man for the redemption of sinners. So what we begin to see in "Calvary" is the cost of the wrong choices that Angel, Fred, Gunn and Wesley all collectively and individually made and that cost is a serious one.

The most significant of these in personal terms was of course Lilah’s death and what it meant for Wesley. But in many ways that was the least of the team's concerns. Angelus' escape brought with it the threat of much more serious harm. Not least among these is the potential loss of Angel, either because Angelus’ stay becomes permanent or because he had to be killed. Then there was the risk to everyone else in a still-darkened LA of an especially dangerous and ruthless killer being on the loose. As (ironically) Cordelia pointed out in “Awakening”:

“Angelus is the jumbo family-sized bad of bad ideas. He'd be a danger to all of us. You made the right call. Wesley, the others...they don't get it."

But even though Angelus actions on his release failed to live up to their advance billing, the mere fact that he was loose was enough to distract the remaining members of Angel Investigations, thus allowing Cordelia to remain undetected until it was too late to prevent her from giving birth to Jasmine.

And it is important that we should not simply think of the consequences of our protagonists wrongdoing in terms of Angelus. The extent to which the team’s failings contributed to the swath of destruction that the Beast cut though LA is arguable. There seems on the face of it little enough that they could have done. On the other hand, they scarcely put their best effort into it. In the aftermath of “Apocalypse Nowish” Angel retreated into his room to brood about Cordelia and Connor. He wasn’t even thinking about the Beast. And when Cordelia tries to tell him that Connor thought he was connected to the Beast because he was born in the same place that the Beast surfaced, Angel initially doesn’t realize what she is telling him and even when he does understand refuses to engage properly with the information – despite its potential importance:

Cordelia: “Listen up, daddy dearest. The fact that this hell beast you're all looking for crawled up out of the ground in the exact spot where your son was born seems precisely what we should be talking about right now.”

Angel: “Same spot? Really?”

Cordelia: “You said you already knew.”

Angel: “Of course I knew. Doesn't mean anything. Could just be a, you know….”

Cordelia: “Coincidence?”

And also in “Habeas Corpses” we see the continual sniping between Wesley and Gunn over Fred.

Gunn: “Right now we need to regroup, think about getting back out there and mixing it up with that demony thing.”

Wesley: “That's not what Angel would do.”

Gunn: “Thanks for your opinion, and I don't remember asking.”

If they had spent as much time trying to understand the Beast and what his vulnerabilities were, perhaps they like Angelus could have figured out where his vulnerabilities lay and even exploited them. After all, the Beast seemed to want to make a connection with Angel. In “Long Day’s Journey” has asks him to join with him. If Angel hadn’t been so preoccupied about his injured pride and hadn’t been so concerned about Cordelia doubting him, might he not have played along and waited until he found a moment to strike?

Better still might not Angel at least have figured out much earlier that something was wrong with Cordelia? As we have already seen Cordelia had been central to Angel’s own crisis of confidence in himself. She confessed that she loved him but told him she could not be with him because of his evil past. She then chose to be with his own son rather than him and eventually slept with Connor. She was the one whose vision established the connection between Angelus and the Beast. These were all crucial factors in establishing the basis for Angelus’ return and in Awakening she was the one who finally broke his resistance to that return. These were all crucial factors in establishing the basis for Angelus’ return and in Awakening she was the one who finally broke his resistance to that return. Then she outmaneuvered Angelus into revealing what he knew about the Beast, when Angelus had manipulated everyone else. Moreover, she not only seduced Connor (in a way that was very uncharacteristic of her) but was also the one who suggested to him that he was connected with the Beast, thus simultaneously helping to create a divide between him and everyone else in Angel Investigations while at the same time creating a very close bond between them. And there are other clues as well. Wesley assumes in “Soulless” that the Beast killed the Svear. But as we had already learned, the Beast had previously needed Angelus to kill them because it could not itself do so. So, if it wasn’t the Beast who killed the Priestesses’ family and it wasn’t Angelus, who was it? Then there was the theft of Angel’s soul and Manny’s murder. There are striking similarities between both of them. Both were inside jobs and neither matched the Beast’s modus operandi. All of this evidence pointed to Cordelia. And if Angel and the others had been more focused on the task at hand instead of their own private concerns, they may have been able to prevent the birth of Jasmine.

All in all our characters have a lot of consequences on their collective consciences.

Free Will

As I have already observed our choices are the product of who and what we are and many different influences are brought to bear in shaping each of us. And sometimes these influences are negative ones. We are all prey to anger, jealousy, sorrow and fear. And emotions like these may be triggered or exacerbated by the foibles or our own individual psychologies or by malign past experiences or a combination of both. And while we have no direct control over these influences; they may nevertheless have a profound effect on us. This is who we are and the price we pay for our right to be ourselves is a high one. Human nature can be a selfish, irrational and undisciplined mess and when it is it can have evil effects. But this is why free will is so important. The fact that we each have it means that we are not bound to react to these outside influences like robots. Free will means that, no matter what the temptation to react to a given set of circumstances emotionally, we always have the power to choose otherwise, even when we fail to do so.

And it is in this context that Faith’s intervention is so important. In the episodes from “Salvage” to “Orpheus” she was able to make such a difference because she had no selfish agenda of her own. She wanted to help – especially Angel – and she put that above her own personal interests. We can see this quite clearly from the moment Wesley told her about what had happened to Angel. When Wesley first asked for her help she pointed to the limitations of her circumstances:

“Well, uh, I hate to wet the paper for you, Wes, but I'm kinda unavailable right now. Maybe you want to check back in a few decades when my parole comes up.”

But when she realized why her help was needed she didn’t hesitate. Her immediate response was:

“Step away from the glass.”

Escape from prison was risky even for someone like her. Then there is the fact that the Government takes an understandably dim view of escapees. She could either look forward to a life on the run or a stiff increase in her sentence on her return to prison. Furthermore there was the question of her own redemption. Serving time for what she had done was after all a necessary part of that process. There was much in these considerations that deserved careful weighing. But none of them played any part in her decision because she was not thinking about herself at all – she was thinking about Angel. And it was that fact that marked her behaviour as so different to everyone else (including Angel) up to that point. And it is this fact that helps her see with stunning clarity why releasing Angelus was such a bad idea:

Faith: “Unleashing Angelus to help you stop this demon who put the lights out. That's just...”

Wesley: “The Beast. The demon who put out the lights—called the Beast.”

Faith: “Gas to the flame's all I'm saying.”

If Angel Investigations had looked at the matter with similarly uncluttered minds they would have seen that too. It is the same clarity of purpose that she brings to saving Angel. She tells Wesley straight out:

“I'm not gonna kill him, Wesley. Angelus. I don't care what you thought you sprung me for. Angel's the only one in my life who's never given up on me. There's no way I'm giving up on…”

Here I do not think that we see a personal agenda as such. She is identifying her intent to save Angel with his own philosophy – Angel at his best, if you like.

Importantly this commitment to help others does not come naturally to her. Implicit in it is a commitment not to cross certain lines because to do so would be wrong. But all the while she was faced with the temptation to lash out in anger whenever she was hurt in a vain attempt to make her own pain go away; thus reverting to the person she had once been. In “Sanctuary” we saw only the very beginning of Faith grappling with the wrongs she had done. At that stage she was clearly still unable to shed the guilt that she felt, accept the responsibility of what she had done and deal with that responsibility through change. But this is what we see here in a very realistic and satisfying piece of character development. Faith has changed because of her past and because she has learned to understand and deal with it. She remembers too well where her past rage and confusion led her – misery and despair. And she also knows that she only became a different and a better person by accepting certain things were wrong and by taking responsibility for her wrongdoing and not trying to justify it.

At the beginning of “Release” Wesley tells Faith:

“I need to know you're in the game, Faith. All the way.”

Here he is only concerned about winning and he believes that, in order to defeat Angelus Faith has to be prepared to do whatever it takes for the purpose. This reflects his own approach. When Angelus seizes Wesley and threatens to break his neck if Faith attacks him, Wesley encourages her to do it even if it cost him his life. Later he takes a shotgun to hunt the vampire, saying he doesn’t want to kill him (a shotgun isn’t going to do that anyway):

“but if we get another chance, I want slow him down long enough to tranq him.”

Fred’s incredulous reply says it all:

“By blowing his legs off?”

And most telling of all is Wesley’s treatment of a drug addict. He stabs her in the shoulder and twists the knife to get information out of her.

When Angelus was holding Wesley helpless in his grasp, he tells Faith:

“Take your shot, and save the world. Come on. What're you waiting for? It's all about choices, Faith. The ones we make, and the ones we don't. Oh, and the consequences. Those are always fun.”

For Angelus himself there is no real choice. As Cordelia tells Connor:

“Angelus cannot fight his true nature. It's who he is.”

But for the humans in ANGEL, there are choices. Both Wesley and Angelus for entirely different reasons want Faith to resolve the confusion within her by releasing her anger and channeling it into violence. But she chose against violence. She chose the road of self-sacrifice. She made her choice. And that choice was made because she was prepared for the consequences of it. She was ready to give up her own life to save another because it was the right thing to do. She was not prepared to sacrifice the drug addict or Angel on the altar of her own rage. This was the example against which Angel and the others were weighed in the balance in season 4 and found wanting.

In “Epiphany” Angel described his new mission in the following terms in a conversation with Kate:

Angel: "Well, I guess I kinda worked it out. If there is no great glorious end to all this, if nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do. 'Cause that's all there is - what we do, now, today. I fought for so long. For redemption, for a reward finally just to beat the other guy; but... I never got it."

Kate: "And now you do?"

Angel: "Not all of it. All I wanna do is help. I wanna help because I don't think people should suffer, as they do. Because, if there is no bigger meaning, then the smallest act of kindness is the greatest thing in the world."

This statement sets the standard by which Angel and the other members of his team must be judged. It defines - or should define - the consequences towards which Angel and the others should be working. It was this value that Wesley demonstrated in “Deep Down” when he forgot his own personal bitterness at Angel and rescued him. It was this value that, in the same episode, Angel upheld in his message to Connor at the end of “Deep Down”. But these were standards and values that ultimately Angel and Wesley and all of the other members of Angel Investigations would not live up to. And I say “would not” rather than “could not”. No matter how understandable their insecurities and the temptations they faced because of them, they could all have chosen differently. That they did not could only be because they were prepared to hand control of their lives over to their own wants and needs.

They chose differently to Faith and in making that choice they must accept responsibility for its consequences. That is what we mean by free will. That is the price human beings pay for being who they are.

Redemption

There is a lot to admire in the concept for this season. The gradual unfolding of ANGEL the series as almost a televised novel continues to be impressive and interesting. Season 4 grew organically from season 3. There, Angel had been transformed as a character. In season 1 we saw that, as a vampire, Angel could not change and could not grow because he was not part of life. He needed nothing for himself. He hoped for nothing for himself. But the prospect of becoming human gave him hope that this could change. That was part of the reason why he became so obsessive about his “big win” with all the dire consequences that had. But in the course of season 2 he realized that humanity did mean something to him over and above being a means for his own salvation. In particular in “Epiphany” he realized that he could not take responsibility for releasing Angelus onto the world a third time. Moreover he also came to understand that his friends meant something to him and that he couldn’t let them die. In coming to both realizations, Angel accepted that his connection with humanity was his redemption. It was the feeling of belonging. It was not being intent only on living for what you could get for yourself, with all the pain and misery for others that meant. And here again I turn to Doyle’s words in “City of…”. I have quoted them before. I make no apologies for doing so now because they are so prescient:

“It’s about letting them into your heart. It’s not about saving lives; it’s about saving souls. Hey, possibly your own in the process."

This is why letting other people into his heart is the way Angel saves his soul, a soul that is burdened and damaged not so much by the evil a vampire named Angelus caused many years ago but by the century or more of retreat from humanity that was the legacy of those crimes. Redemption in this sense means to identify what is scarred, broken and in need of healing in your life. It means to try to change your life to become a new creation and to begin to live a different life. And this was Angel’s experience in season 3. He made that connection. He gained that sense of belonging. He grew his friendships. He had a son. He fell in love. But it was this connection with humanity that made him – and Wesley, Gunn and Fred too – vulnerable to the attraction of revenge and the pain of loneliness, jealousy and anger. And that was the story of season 4. So again what we get very strongly is the sense of the development of a single story that develops naturally rather that a collection of loosely linked separate events. nd that adds to the depth and interest of the thematic development as well as the characterization.

But not only that. I love the way this series is continually showing us Angel way forward and then turning his chance to progress on its head by then revealing the dangers and traps into which this so-called "progress" leads him. As I have already said, season 1 ended with the promise of Angel becoming human and season 2 was all about the way he became obsessed with this “big win” and as a direct result nearly came to grief. The sense of belonging that Angel managed to achieve in season 3 was a fulfillment of his promise in season 2 to connect with others. But it was that very connection that made him so vulnerable to the temptations that led him away from his mission and towards a preoccupation with his own selfish desire for Cordelia. The nature of these temptation was different to those which nearly cost Angel his soul in season 2. The latter were the legacy of his vampire past. The temptations we saw in season 3 are one aspect of his newly found human connection. As such this season represents a further stage in his development as a character; it even ironically represents in one sense progress on his road to redemption. But it also shows us that, no matter how much Angel changes, his redemption is always work in progress. No matter what headway he makes, his struggle must continue. All that happens is the nature of the questions he must face change.

And perhaps most fascinating of all about season 4 is the fact that it points squarely to the reason why Angel’s search for redemption may be ultimately unwinnable. As I have often stressed this interplay between the best and the worst of our characters is for me the heart of ANGEL as a series. It places the emphasis not on fighting evil or even on actually helping others but rather on the struggle to become a better person. But the tragedy for human beings is that there is no aspect of the human experience that is all good or all bad. Some evil things produce benefits. Many good things are achieved at a price or have undesirable consequences. Human relationships (to take a relevant example) bring great benefits and many pleasures. It is why we seek them out. Love and parenthood are held up to be ideals to which we should all aspire. Yet even they have their downsides. Even they can create a narrow self-absorbed focus that can cause great harm. And if this is true redemption is a journey without an end - a search for El Dorado, the eternal but unachievable goal.

Of course none of this means that the season is without problems thematically. There are in fact a number of fairly serious ones. It should be obvious from the forgoing that the writers spent a great deal of time and took a good deal of trouble laying the foundations to explain our characters’ actions. Unless they were believable and indeed unless the audience could sympathize with them while at the same time acknowledging they were wrong, the arc would be fatally undermined. My problem is that all too often I found the characters actions unbelievable and unsympathetic.

In “Ground State” and “The House Always Wins” Angel appears completely self-absorbed. Such is his preoccupation with what Cordelia means to him that he forgets about helping others. He even abandons the helpless in LA to try to reconnect with his past as a vampire who was cut off from humanity. But isn’t the whole point of his character that he has to live with the constant memories of what Angelus did to so many innocent people for generation after generation? Once he has understood that it is only by helping others that he can deal with the damage that these memories have caused to him how can he do anything else but help the helpless whether Cordelia is there to help him or not? To say he hasn't the courage, will or perseverence to follow his mission without outside help (and that is what it amounts to) is a travesty of the character.

The other thing that rings false is the way he treated his son. At the end of “Deep Down” Angel literally drove him onto the streets to fend for himself. Was this any way to help the boy? He is after all still a minor. But he was left to fend for himself in an environment with which he is unfamiliar, with no money and no way of making a living. And given his advanced abilities and his warped and twisted sense of values, this is a recipe for disaster and not just for Connor either. The boy needed active intervention. Lilah’s characterized Angel’s strategy as

“This is that "guilt is it's own punishment" thing, isn't it?”

If that is true, it doesn’t even begin to address Connor’s problems. But even giving Angel the benefit of the doubt and assuming that there is method in this madness, he is clearly prioritizing Cordelia at his son’s expense. The writers don’t even make a half-hearted attempt to suggest otherwise. The one and only time Angel turns up where Connor is living is, as he admits, to see Lilah because he wants information from her to help him get in touch with Cordelia. Then, later after Cordelia slept with Connor Angel was far more concerned about his injured pride than he was about his son. There are laws about adults having sex with minors for a very good reason. Connor was especially vulnerable. He was a violent and emotionally unstable teenager. For someone like him to develop a sexual relationship with an older woman was to invite all sorts of problems (as later events amply demonstrated). But that didn’t even occur to Angel. It is very difficult to see in him the loving father he was supposed to be.

And indeed, not only are his actions all too often unbelievable. They also risk forfeiting sympathy. As I have already said what drives Angel here is a sense of insecurity, his feeling of being a victim driven by circumstances and people beyond his control. But in too much of season 4 we see Angel as someone whose view of the world is essentially venial and self-centred. There is too little to make us aware of his better qualities. In the case of the Tyrones in “Long Day’s Journey into Night” we see genuine love side by side with a Shakespearean self-destructiveness. But in that episode, and especially in his dream in “Awakening” Angel seems only to be thinking about himself.

Nor is he the only victim. In Wesley’s case we were again reminded of his ruthlessness and his lack of empathy. He quite deliberately gets between Gunn and Fred. In this he is thinking of what he wants, not what Fred does. And he shows no sign of worrying about the effect that this will have on his former best friend. And in Gunn we also have good reason to doubt his love for Fred. The way that he treats her at times almost like an inanimate object who has no view of her own is pretty disturbing. We are being reminded that he is a proud man who sees Wesley working behind his back to take something valuable from him. Again I sometimes found myself running perilously short of sympathy for these characters because too often the emphasis on their selfishness and pettiness wasn't balanced by more sympathetic qualities.

But the greatest problem with the season’s arc lies in the way it fails to make our characters address the issue of responsibility. The idea of personal responsibility is central to ANGEL as a series. Personal responsibility means understanding and accepting where you have gone wrong and making amends either by changing your behavior or by fixing (insofar as you can) the harm you have caused or both. Without personal responsibility redemption is impossible. But that sort of responsibility is what is lacking in season 4. As I have already said, throughout the first part of the season we saw our protagonists making stupid and indeed immoral choices. But we also understood that they were not made out of malice but out of human weakness. In ANGEL we are given an absolute standard for evil -vampires like Darla, Drusilla and Angelus. We are intended to see a distinction between them and even humans like Lilah. Ultimately even they are redeemable. And certainly there is a distinction between them and Angel, Wesley, Gunn and the others. Sometimes what they do is simply questionable. At other times it is clearly wrong. But I do not think we are meant to see them in the same light as someone whose basic orientation is evil. And it is in the way that they recognize that they have done wrong and try to make amends or at least try to do better in future that the writers show us the difference. The key example of this came in “Orpheus” when we saw Angel in a flashback feed off a dead clerk in a donut shop. That too was an immoral choice made out of weakness rather than malice. But Angel understood that it was wrong; he took responsibility for it and tried to do something about it. He separated himself even more from humanity – ending up as stinking alley guy who existed on what rats he could catch. He still wasn’t on the right path but that would come later. But the point was that just because someone makes a mistake or takes a wrong path is not the end of things. The whole idea in “Orpheus” was that there was always a way back, but you needed to fight and fight and fight again.

That is itself an important reassertion given everything that happened this season. But it only makes sense if (like Angel with the dead clerk in the donut shop) you understand what you did wrong and promise to change. And it is here that we come to the real problem. The message of fight and fight and fight again was intended not just for Faith but principally for Angel, Wesley, Gunn and the others. It is a message that they can and must put the past behind them by discarding their selfishness and insecurities, by thinking of others first and fighting to do better. They failed to prevent the damage the Beast caused. But the Beastmaster is an even greater threat and defeating it would surely be for them a form of redemption from their past failings. But that central point about responsibility and change is utterly lost. Before "Orpheus" we had last seen Angel in “Awakening”. There he had a self-indulgent obsession with his own narrow concerns and was so consumed by self-doubt that he was persuaded against his will to bring Angelus back. But in “Orpheus” he shows a clear judgment about where Faith (and by extension he) should go from here? At the end of the episode, before Cordelia’s interruption he is about to give a “rally the troops” speech:

Angel: “So, we're back.”

Wesley: “It would seem.”

Angel: “Look, I know things have been…”

From this, from the symbolism of Angel being back and from the guidance he gave Faith, we are I think meant to see this as the decisive turning point of the season, especially for Angel himself. From that point onwards he was ready to do whatever it took to defeat the Beastmaster. This included actually being prepared to kill Cordelia in “Inside Out”; it meant beating his own son up and leaving him behind in “Sacrifice” and it also meant emptying himself of all feelings. This is an Angel whose behavior is certainly different to the Angel of he first part of the season. But these changes are unaccompanied by any indication that Angel understood why his earlier behavior was wrong or even that it was wrong at all. The closest the writers seem to get to dealing with responsibility in this sense is in “Sacrifice” when Fred and Gunn and talk about the death of Professor Seidel and explicitly refer to their joint and collective feelings of guilt. But even here there is no recognition that their behavior had consequences beyond that single death. And so you cannot really say that any member of Angel Investigations accepts responsibility for their actions. And without such acceptance redemption from their wrongdoing is impossible.

And they demonstrated this fact in “Home”. As I said in my review of that episode, you would think that, after Angel was restored in “Orpheus” and especially after having fought so hard against Jasmine, he and the other members of Angel Investigations would have a renewed appreciation of the importance of free will – the power to control our own destiny and not be blown around at the whim of fate or the designs of others. But far from taking responsibility for the mistakes of the first half of the season he and the other members of his team repeat those mistakes in a yet more egregious fashion by joining Wolfram and Hart while all the time knowing they were going to be manipulated into helping evil. As Angel himself warned anyone who took the limousine rise to the Wolfram and Hart offices:

“Before the ride's even over, before you even cross through their doors, you'll be corrupted.”

Worse than that they all did so for largely personal reasons – Angel to save his son, Wesley to try to save Lilah and Gunn to become something better than just “muscle”. And most alarming of all was that Angel went behind the backs of his son and his friends and took away their power to make a fully informed choice; the very power he fought Jasmine for, the very power that made us human.

This calls into question how much Angel in particular actually does believe in free will? And if he doesn’t then how can he be said to have accepted responsibility for his actions in the first half of the season? How can he be said to understand that he made the wrong choice by accepting what Wesley referred to as a form of enslavement to the worst in his character? What becomes of his journey towards redemption? If his actions are not governed by his own choices but rather by dictates of his emotions then what future does his hope for redemption have? After all, fundamentally redemption means for him overcoming the accumulated baggage of inherited characteristics and experiences which together so strongly affect his behavior for the worse. That must be a matter of making conscious, responsible, moral choices and not dancing to Wolfram and Hart’s tune. In short, where now for Angel? That is the question that the season leaves us with. And we can have no confidence that he has the right answer. That is a depressing note on which to end the season.

Sujet: Re: Analyse de la saison 4 Mar 05 Oct 2010, 16:05

Citation :

Plotting the Season

When I look back at the course of season 4 I am struck by its ambition. The season combines many different elements. After a somewhat slow start, the writers began to tease us with hints of a coming apocalypse. And it wasn’t too long before that is what seems to have arrived with the appearance on the scene of the Beast, the rain of fire, the obliteration of Wolfram and Hart and the blotting out of the sun. But it quickly transpired that everything that had happened up to now was only in preparation for something else. And in trying to find out about this the team brought about Angelus’ return. This gave them a whole new set of problems to deal with and also brought the revelation that the Beast had a master and that Cordelia was it. This was soon followed by the discovery that she was pregnant. With the brief appearance of Faith, the destruction of the Beast, the despatch of Angelus and Angel’s return the way was open for the final piece of the puzzle – the birth of Jasmine. That is a lot to pack into a season. But more importantly these weren’t just random events thrown together.

From the start of the season the writers had mapped out an arc. They had deliberately tried to create an overarching structure within which they could weave all of these different elements together into a single storyline. Not content with that they also tried, in this story, to encompass not only some of the outstanding issues left by season 3 in particular but also events in earlier seasons which we though we understood. First of all there was the Tro-Clon. Much was made of this in the earlier part of season 3. All we knew was that it was an overwhelmingly significant event for the World at large, that it was directly related to Connor, that Holtz was somehow involved and that it was the result of a confluence of events. But then it was quietly forgotten and no attempt was made either to show that the Tro-Clon was unfolding, what its significance was or how Connor related to it. And it was far from clear what events flowing into one another might bring about the world changing events promised. Well, in “Inside Out” things were made clear. Among other things this “confluence of events” included:

[list][*]Doyle’s death and Cordelia’s inheritance of his visions;
[*]The Wolfram and Hart plan to use Darla to win Angel over to the dark side and the way he reacted to it;
[*]The birth of Connor
[*]The appearance of Holtz in the 21st century;
[*]Cordelia agreeing to have demon DNA and later ascending to a higher plane;
[*]Wesley’s kidnap of Connor and Holtz’s snatching him into Quor’toth;
[*]Connor’s arrival back in LA. [/lis]

Without all of these you would not have had the sexual liason between Connor and Cordelia which led ultimately to Jasmine’s birth – with all the intended consequences that entailed. So they too became incorporated by reference into the season 4 arc as forming part of the confluence of events that caused the Tro-Clon. And the Tro-Clon itself - obviously this was Jasmine's birth. This was indeed, in Skip’s own words, “a story with scope”.

I will, however, enter a caveat here. While I admire the ambition, I do think that the writers overreached themselves just a little. I find it a little hard to accept that Jasmine was in fact able to manipulate all of the events she was supposed to have. Is it credible for example that Jasmine had anything to do with Wolfram and Hart’s planning in relation to Darla? More importantly, however, some of the things that crucially affected the course of events would have had to be micro-managed to make them fit in with a pre-conceived plan. For example, there was the way Doyle fell in love with Cordelia and passed his visions on to her. Or there was the way that Cordelia fell in love with Angel. Are these things really susceptible to manipulation? Then there was Connor’s banishment to Quor’toth. That was never Holtz’s plan. He originally intended to bring the child up in Utah.

But the ambition was not only to be found in the scope and complexity of the storyline itself. It also lay in the way that these different but interconnected elements were organized and structured so tightly. A lot happens but in a logical sequence with one development organically leading on to another. I think I can illustrate this by looking at the structure of the season:

Episode 1 (“Deep Down”): resolved the cliff-hanger with which season 3 ended;

Episodes 2 to 6 (“Ground State” to “Spin the Bottle”): established the psychological and emotional challenges besetting the members of Angel Investigations, especially Angel. It also set up the basis for the triangle involving himself, Cordelia and Connor and for good measure foreshadowed the apocalypse;

Episodes 7 to 9 (“Apocalypse Nowish” to “Long Day’s Journey”): saw the arrival of the Beast, his establishment of a superiority over the team, the team falling apart and the decision to bring back Angelus;

Episodes 10 to 12 (“Awakening” to “Calvary”): Angelus returns, further divides and weakens the team and escapes. We also see the emergence of the Beastmaster in the form of Cordelia and the first hints of a plan that involves Angelus.

Episodes 13 to 15 (“Salvage” to “Orpheus”): Faith and Willow between them rescue the situation, capturing Angelus and releasing Angel. This provides the first turning point in the season.

Episode 16 (“Players”): a stand alone episode important only because the sub-plot sees Cordelia’s identity as the Beastmaster revealed thus precipitating the final crisis.

Episodes 17 to 21 (“Inside Out” to “Peace Out”): Jasmine arrives and reveals the true nature and purpose of the season long developments before she is finally defeated.

Episode 22 (“Home”): Angel buys Connor a way out of the mess that the two of them have made of the boy’s life.

So what we have here is a coherent plan in the sense of a systematic and intelligible arrangement of different elements leading to a single end. Early on we get a hint of the coming danger and see very clearly the cause of all the trouble the team has in dealing with it. Then we are confronted head on by what seems to be the danger. Here the main interest lies in the complications the writers thrown in, mainly instigated by the internal conflicts that have already been flagged up. This includes the first great set-back (Angelus) and its resolution. Then finally we are confronted with the emergence of the real problem (Jasmine) and the rest of the season is about resolving it. It is because all the complexities and twists are contained in this very simple but classical structure that we do not get lost in them even as we try to understand what is happening. In addition little or no time is wasted on irrelevant or extraneous matters. Everything is concentrated on moving the story forward. Events proceed at a furious clip and our attention is never distracted from the main story.

Of course arcs are nothing new for the series. As we have seen, ever since season 2 ANGEL has in fact become very arc heavy. Often individual episodes do not tell a self-contained story but are there principally to further a multi-episode one. And even those episodes which, on the face of it, do stand alone often contribute thematically, or in terms of plot, towards the greater picture. So in season 3 we had “Carpe Noctem” which was a self-contained story about Angel swapping bodies with another. But the real point of this story was not what happened in it but the light it cast upon a major theme of the season - Angel’s relationship with his friends. In contrast, later on in the season we had “Loyalty” which had no real stand alone plot of its own but which advanced the “Connor Kidnap” arc by allowing us to see and understand Wesley’s suspicions of Angel. But not even in season 2 have we seen the arc so dominate a season. I described that season as an example of the principle of subordination. As I pointed out in my overview of it, there were plenty of stand-alone episodes like “Guise will be Guise” and “Untouched”, "Happy Anniversary" or "Disharmony" that developed character or explored issues that were relevant to the arc rather than being arc-centric episodes as such. Here there was plenty of freedom for the writers in telling a story that was independent from the main arc developments, albeit within the constraints imposed by the need to develop the arc. And of course the end of season 4 was taken up with a completely independent storyline - the “Pylea” arc. These episodes all have an existence that can be said to be independent of the arc to one degree or another even though, in the way the story was told or the theme developed, they nevertheless served its overall purposes. For example, let us take episodes such as ”The Trial” or “Reunion” and “Reprise” which were principally intended to further the arc in terms of plot development. But all had plots that worked very well as stories in their own right. There was, therefore, a more episodic feel to much of season 2 than there was to season 4. Here, as we have seen, there was room for only one arc and, after “The House Always Wins”, most episodes were so primarily focussed on the arc that they did not work at all taken isolation from it. Only "Players" has an plot that is completely separated from the arc and perhaps only “Habeas Corpses” and "Long Day's Journey" have self-contained plots which work in their own right. All the others unashamedly only exist to create the next plot point for the arc. So, for example in “Souless” the battle of wills to see whether Angelus could be made to co-operate against the Beast was really a dead end which only served to set up the vampire’s escape. This was not the subordination of individual episodes to an arc. In season 4 the writers seem almost to attempt to break free of the constraints of episodic television and to tell a single story in multiple weekly parts which exist really only to serve, advance and develop the arc.

The danger with an arc if of course that you can loose an audience along the way. This technique places a premium on viewers being interested enough. In stand alone episodes you had to have relatively straightforward plots (usually with no more than one major twist or turn in direction) and relatively simple background. These were easily understood and the resolution came at the end of the hour, allowing closure for the viewer. The longer the arc, the more complex the plotting, the more twists and turns it might have and the greater the accumulation of relevant background knowledge. And the viewer would at the same time have no real expectation of a pay off until the very end of the season. This is very off-putting and not only to the occasional or casual viewer. It puts a real premium on the ability of the writers to

Make us care about the characters enough to keep tuning in to see what happens next; and
Keep our interest sustained as we do so by maintaining tension and suspense and by continually surprising us.

Well, I think that the season 4 arc certainly succeeded in the second of these tasks. First of all, throught the season we get a very powerful sense that something important is at stake. In this context “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” is important. When Lorne reads Cordelia he describes what he found in the following terms:

“Do the words "slouching towards Bethlehem" ring a bell? Or how about despair, torment, terror? And I'm not referring to little missy's choice of song, either, although that was horrifying in its own right. What I saw was jumbled. It was pieces, flashes. It was enough to make my skin crawl away and scamper under the bed. Evil's coming, Angel, and it's planning on staying."

And from that moment on there is a sense of something evil approaching. The signs and portents that recurr throught “Apocalypse Nowish” reinforce the idea that this is something that will have a uniquly powerful impact. And of course when the Beast appears it seems to fulfill our expectations with the slaughter at the Kimball Building, the rain of fire and the destruction of Wolfram and Hart. And when we then discover that the Beast is just the precursor of some greater event and that it is answerable to a Master who has in mind something even worse than it, our expectations are raised still further. Indeed, in this context, I have to say that it is one of the strengths of the season that it is so dark, descending at times into the realm of true horror. I have already mentioned some of the things that the Beast did early on. But for me a standout example of the darkness of the season is the attack on Wolfram and Hart in “Habeas Corpses”. It’s not only the sheer strength of the Beast demonstrated by the futility of the lawyers’ defenses. It is the methodical, almost emotionless way that it goes through with its gruesome task. But more than that, it is also brutal – unnecessarily so. Those it slaughtered were defenseless and no matter what they had been involved in they were also human. And Gavin’s death in particular gave it a lot of impact. The fact that a character we knew was murdered brought it home to us what was really happening here. And as time went on we saw fewer and fewer people moving and more and more dead bodies. Add to all of this the dark, claustrophobic atmosphere of the enclosed building and the sudden raising of the lawyers as zombies and you have a very strong sense of horror. But that was only one example. Regularly throught the season there were moments of savagery or evil – the killing of Manny and of the innocent victim sacrificed by Cordelia to bring about Jasmine’s birth among them. The writers even paid attention to the old aphorism: “kill babies” when we saw the aftermath of the slaughter of the Svear Priestesses’ family. The threat and danger posed by the evil facing Angel Investigations was always a very strong feature of the season.

And of course this means that the poor decisions that the members of Angel Investigations make all have real consequences. It was one of the difficulties with the arc in season 2 that, apart from the slaughter of the lawyers in the wine cellar, Angel’s decision to fight a war against Wolfram and Hart rather than fighting the good fight had such minor consequences. But here the fact that the Beast was so far ahead of them and the Beastmaster was able to manipulate them so comprehensively had very real consequences: the death of Manny, the girl in “Inside Out”, the darkening of the sun and the invasion of LA by legions of vampires. The sense that a lot depended upon our “heroes” and they could not always be trusted to do the right thing added considerable punch to the season.

In this context though I have to say that the reappearance of Angelus was something of a disappointment. As I pointed out in my review of “Salvage” much of the dialogue that Angelus was given was of itself highly entertaining. But overplaying Angelus as a “fun character” I think meant he lost a great deal of credibility as an opponent for Faith. And, while it was clever of him to manoeuver Faith into fighting the Beast, in some ways that lost him even more credibility. It shows that, deep down, he is afraid of her. Not only that, his vanity when he first met the Beast was all too evident:

“Look, you may have played those suckers at Angel, Inc., but I don't like having my strings yanked, and I don't like being kept in the dark... Figuratively, anyway. And if your boss was half as smart as he thinks he is, he knows I won't take orders from a lackey. What? You don't like "lackey?" Hmm. Or how about, uh, toady? Or lickspittle? Lickspittle's nice. Oh, wait, I got it. Flunky. That's it. You're just a big, stupid, butt-ugly,) slow-moving flunky. Ah, come on, Rocky. If that's all you got, you better throw in the towel and call it a night. When the Beastmaster's ready to peek out from behind your skirt, have him give me a call. “

This sort of attitude never suggests competence. And the fact that he killed the creature for no good reason makes him stupider than he thinks he is. He knows the Beast has a master, knows the master is very powerful, has evil intent and wants to make a deal with him. Why not use the Beast to find out more about this person? Indeed why take the risk that the Beast’s death might bring back the sun. And as if to prove my point Angelus finally falls for a trick with swinging chains shattering darkened glass that was so obvious that even I saw it coming. No, hard as it may be to believe the creature that was so menacing in “Innocence” and “Passions” actually turned out to be the weak point of this particular stage of the arc. This undermined the effectiveness of the whole crucial middle part of the season which was built around Angelus. It would have been so much better of he had been a more threatening presence.

The next great strength was the fact that, in spite of its ambition to tell a single story, the season was one where the issues constantly evolve and change. And crucial to this is the sense of mystery invoked by the writers. From “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” it becomes clear that something is coming – something big and something bad. The first question is: what? At first the answer seems clear as the Beast appears and begins his campaign of slaughter. At that point the plot appears to ask, not what is going to happen but how can Angel and the others stop what is happening? And that is a formidable enough question. But with the return of Angelus, as we have seen, we learn that the Beast has a Master and that Master wants something else. We then have to find out what thatsomething else is, who is the Beastmaster, what is its purpose for Angelus? So here, as well as the horror, we also got the suspense. We do not understand what is going on so we are apprehenssive about what might happen next. This is a classic way of sustaining interest.

Not only that, but to help the audience try to understand what is happening the writers left us with a series of clues. The story is generally told from the point of view of Angel and the team. And to the extent that it is we, like they, have to try to understand what is happening on the basis of limited information. There are occasions when we are vouchsafed information denied to them (as for example when Cordelia killed Lilah and we realize that she is the Beastmaster). But even then, while this allows us a slightly more elevated view of events the better to appreciate the conflict between Cordelia on the one hand and the team on the other, our vision remains limited and we are always trying to guess what the ultimate intention of the Beastmaster is and how Angelus fitted into things. So it is on these clues that we have to rely. And of course half the fun is not only in recognizing and interpreting the clues but telling them apart from the red herrings.

In “Habeas Corpses”, the Conduit said to Angel, Wesley, Gunn, Fred and Connor:

“The answer is among you”

At the time it wasn’t clear what this was referring to. But it fitted in with the idea that someone had a connection with the Beast. Initially Cordelia hinted that the person in question might be Connor, especially since the Beast entered the world at the same place as Connor did. But in “Long Day’s Journey” she identified that person as Angelus and therefore by extension Angel. So, both came under suspicion for Manny’s murder.

But all the while the evidence against Cordelia was accumulating. She has been central to Angel’s own crisis of confidence in himself. She confessed that she loved him but told him she could not be with him because of his evil past. She then chose to be with his own son rather than him and eventually slept with Connor. She was the one whose vision established the connection between Angelus and the Beast. These were all crucial factors in establishing the basis for Angelus’ return and in “Awakening” she was the one who finally broke his resistance to that return. Moreover, she not only seduced Connor but was also the one who had earlier suggested to him that he was connected with the Beast, thus simultaneously helping to create a divide between him and everyone else in Angel Investigations while at the same time creating a bond between them. And there are other clues as well. Wesley assumes that the Beast killed the Svear. But the Beast needed Angelus to kill them because it could not itself do so. So, if it wasn’t the Beast who killed the Priestesses’ family and it wasn’t Angelus, who was it? Then there was the theft of Angel’s soul. There are striking similarities to Manny’s murder. Both were inside jobs and neither matched the Beast’s modus operandi. Above all it is clear that the Beast has an agenda that has not yet been made clear and it is a fair assumption from what I have already said and from the theft of Angel’s soul that this agenda does involve Angelus but has nothing to do with the Svear. And once Cordelia’s identity was revealed all of these clues made sense. And we could also understand that the so-called connection between Connor and Angel on the one hand and the Beast on the other were red herrings deliberately laid by Cordelia to distract attention away from herself. I thought that all of this was very well conceived and executed.

And there were also clues about the ultimate intentions of the Beastmaster too. Why did the Beast attack Wolfram and Hart with such deadly ferocity? Removing the competition doesn’t carry a ring of truth about it. What does the Beast have to fear from competition it destroyed so easily and completely? Then there is the fact that the Conduit itself saved Angel and the others from an attack by the Beast, presumably to prevent the Beast from destroying the one potential source of effective opposition to it. This suggested that the Beast and Wolfram and Hart were not playing on the same side.

And so the way was open to the great twist of the season, namely that Jasmine was a “Power that Was” trying to bring World Peace. As an idea in and of itself, I loved it. Having seemingly prepared the way for some great world-shattering evil to emerge at the end of “Inside Out”, the writers threw us something of a curve ball when the “Big Bad” of the season now turns out to be radically different in nature to what we had expected. In making this Big Bad someone who seemingly wanted to do good but in their choice of methods revealed a far more questionable set of values rather than someone who wanted to do evil, the writers are thinking outside the normal box. And that is all to the good. When the audience is confronted by something unusual they have to think about it more. They have to work out for themselves how to react to the strange combination that Jasmine represents. Of course ultimately we can and do recognize that what she is trying to do is wrong and dangerous. Her birth mean the slaughter of an innocent girl and plunged Cordelia into a coma. The Beast, who had served her, slaughtered dozens of innocent people to create the rain of fire. When it blotted out the sun LA was overrun by vampires who went of a killing spree. How could the author of this chaos and destruction be an instrument of harmony? But above all we see evidence of her duplicity. She claims to love Fred and Angel. But then she says she wants both of them dead. And the only reason for this change was that Jasmine now recognizes them as a genuine threat to her because they knew how to free people from her. But she can’t or won’t own up to that. As a “Power that Was” she felt that the bad guys were being allowed to get away with things and she itched to intervene. But with godlike powers comes arrogance. She would have regarded herself as superior to humans, she would have been entirely unconscious of the value of a human life or human beings’ need to take responsibility for their own paths. So, she would have used her powers believing she was doing good and being quite unable to see or understand the evil effects of her actions. This was a different type of villain, almost a tragic figure because of the way her capacity to do good was twisted into something evil by weakness rather than malice. This was what caught my interest because showing Jasmine as someone who feels she is doing good but is really only expressing her inner deceitful megalomaniac is not only creating a scenario that is interesting and different but is entirely consistent with the storyline to date. Sadly the writers then turned her in “Peace Out” into a cartoon character. There Jasmine that stands revealed here is simply evil. She never had any good intentions for others. It was all about enslavement and feeding her own arrogance. This is a character whose motivation is really no different from countless other megalomaniacs. And that is a pity.

And this brings me on to my other great problem. As I have said there is nothing inherently unbelievable about Jasmine incorporating some “collateral damage” to humans in her plan. We can also see that the arrival of the Beast was a necessary part of creating the circumstances in which Connor would sleep with Cordelia. And the reason for the destruction of Wolfram and Hart now becomes clear. They were an organization who could have put things together quickly enough to pose a real threat to Jasmine while she was still in Cordelia. But in some important respects the resolution of the story does not account for some of the events that preceded it. Why, for example, did the Beast blot out the sun? To persuade Angel Investigations to bring back Angelus of course – but why did Jasmine want him? The only explanation I can come up with is: as a distraction to prevent anyone taking too close an interest in her and what she was doing with Connor and finding out about her pregnancy. But wasn’t the Beast enough of one already? And, if Jasmine had the psychological understanding that her claims of manipulation would suggest, wouldn’t she know how unreliable Angelus would be? He was the one who killed the Beast and he was also the one who revealed that the Beast had a Master. That was what started the gang looking for the Beastmaster in the first place. And the final piece of the puzzle there was provided by Angel when he returned with Angelus’ memories. Bringing Angelus back was simply an unnecessary and therefore irrational risk. And as such it made it very difficult to accept events from the arrival of the Beast to the manifestation of Jasmine as part of a single coherent plan. And that is a significant flaw in the otherwise admirable plotting of the season.

I have, however, saved my greatest complaint until the end. A story arc is two things. It is the plot, and it is the characters' evolution over the course of that plot. And ultimately it is the evolution of the character that justifies the time spent on an arc. For example, in a typical three act structure in a stand alone episode, the hero is introduced to the problem in Act I, the hero tries to solve the problem in Act II but is defeated by the opposing forces and in Act III the hero finally defeats the opposition. But that is, if you like, the outer journey: the actions the hero takes to complete his mission. The more complex, the less certain and therefore the more interesting part is the hero’s inner journey. This is about how he finds the courage, strength and understanding within himself to succeed. And it is really only the in time allowed by an arc that the writers can do justice to such an inner journey.

Season 2 is a great example of such an arc in that it shows both the inner and outer journey of the protagonist – Angel - through each act of the story. He starts of with a misplaced sense that he was the centre of everything and because of this fell into the trap Wolfram and Hart laid for him. It was only when he finally understood that redemption wasn’t about him but about those he could help that he rescued himself from that trap. And in doing so he defeated Wolfram and Hart by deciding to follow the real path of redemption. Here is the inner journey; here is the real heart of the season. The exterior events simply illustrate or reflect this inner journey.

This season does not give us the same sense of a journey in which our hero is led from one place to the next. Certainly it follows the fine example of season 2 by spending a great deal of time exploring the psychological and emotional baggage which led Angel and the other members of the team to make some pretty disastrous decisions. From “Ground State” to “Awakening” the writers showed us with stunning clarity a group of people who were less of a team than a collection of self-centered, emotionally immature and morally bankrupt individuals who became overwhelmed by doubt and fear. I have to say in passing that for me the writers went way too far in their portrayal of the characters' weaknesses. As I have already said, an arc will simply not work unless the writers make us care about the characters enough to keep tuning in to see what happens next and the extent to which we were left with such weak and selfish individuals left me dangerously short of sympathy for them. But I digress. The inner journey here has to be their discovery that however much they want or need or feel something, they cannot allow these emotions to dictate their actions. Rather they have to act on the basis of what is right. And no-where but no-where do we see this journey. When disaster overtakes them (Angelus escapes) there is no recognition by any of them of the mistakes they made in the past or how those mistakes led to the disaster. There is no attempt to learn from their mistakes. Indeed they rely on an outside intervention by Faith to rescue the situation and bring back Angel. And in the final part of the arc – the struggle with Jasmine – the issues that dominated the start of the season (allowing yourself to be enslaved by your own emotional frailties) simply don’t arise. The nearest we get is Angel’s declaration in “Sacrifice”

“If we don't gut ourselves and burn out everything inside that gave her power over us, then we're lost.”

But that is a strategy that is in the end repudiated even by him and indeed there is no necessary connection between having normal human emotions and allowing your own selfish desires to dictate everything you do. So nowhere in the struggle against Jasmine is there any opportunity for the team to demonstrate that they have actually learned anything. nd, as we have already seen, when that opportunity comes at the end of the season in “Home”, the team with Angel leading the way show they have in fact learned nothing. Angel, Gunn and Wesley all agree to join Wolfram and Hart not because they think it is the right thing to do but because it serves some emotional need of theirs. This indeed is the negation of the whole purpose of the arc.

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