Angel Season One: A Question

[2maggie2]

For some reason I can never remember the details of AtS.  I've watched it through twice, but am very vague about what happens.  Now Angel is back in the Buffyverse, and AtS is on Netflix, and so I'm rewatching.

Season one basically shows Angel in a good light.   The end of Sanctuary is my all-time favorite Angel moment.  He really is a wise and

Comments

[fenderlove]

As LadyPeyton and Quinara said above, Souled!Angel didn't start out to do good, in fact, he struggled against doing good. He still tried to kill people, be they rapists and murderers but killed them none-the-less. His first act of heroism is to save an infant against the comfortable life of evil he had once known. He chose to save a life over standing by and doing nothing (or, you know, eating it). He had to go against everything he wanted to do it, but he made the right choice from a human moral standpoint

[2maggie2]

Like I said to Quinara, the not eating the kid thing could be the big choice -- but Lindsey's chosen to not kill the kids and Angel tells him he hasn't chosen yet. The choice comes after -- about whether you hold your nose and go back to the evil accepting its other terms. And we never do see Angel consciously make the decison to go back to Darla and see if he can hang with her despite his problem with eating babies. Indeed, it's not clear he could have made that choice even if he wanted to -- since she'd probably kill him. So Angel had no decision to make.

The other big choice was to get out of the alley. But that's not a choice to stop actively participating in evil.

I'm guessing he did mean the first. But I'm not all that impressed... he's never stuck to that decision.

[fenderlove]

And we never do see Angel consciously make the decison to go back to Darla and see if he can hang with her despite his problem with eating babies. But hasn't he consciously made the choice by never going back? That part of his life is over, he knows it. He knew it the moment he grabbed the baby and jumped out the window. There was never a going back. She can't be a part of his life anymore. There's conscious choice there. He doesn't need to go back yet again when there's nothing to prove, nothing to learn, nothing to gain; he doesn't need to test himself any further. It's done. Personally, I think that the first time he went to her in China he knew it wasn't going to work; his life had changed and though he tried very hard to keep his brand of normalcy he couldn't. You either roll with it or you don't, and Angel not only didn't when presented with the opportunity; he never tried to be "Angelus: Scourge of Europe" ever again. If he had kept trying to do harm purposefully after that, then I could believe that not killing the baby was a

[2maggie2]

Sure, if you want to say that Angel's decision happened when he left Darla that's fine. But then where does Angel get off lecturing Lindsey about how having walked out of W&H because he was upset about baby killing doesn't constitute a decision? It's either a decision for both of them, or a decision for neither of them

[local_max]

I really heart Blind DateI’ll save the authorial intent question for a bit later. On the question of whether Angel has had his moment of truth moment where he decided to change: I’d say he has-it’s just not as stunning a moment as he’d like us to believe. And interestingly, it parallels Lindsey’s very closely. Angel gets his soul back, but he tries to stay with Darla. Darla throws him out. Then eventually Angel convinces her to take him back, in the Boxer Rebellion. And he goes along with the killing because he wants to be with Darla, but he tries to cheat his way out of actually doing bad things himself-he kills thieves and murderers and scoundrels. This is pretty dark, to kill anyone at all, and further to support and enable Darla’s killing. What makes him finally break for it is that Darla offers him a baby to kill, and he tries but he realizes he can’t do it. So he takes the baby and runs. He gives up evil; he gives up Darla; he gives up killing; and Darla could very will stake him right then and there, if he runs away

[local_max]

As far as authorial intent, the episodes are obviously paralleling Lindsey and Angel. Lindsey gets the big view from his office, and Angel gets one from a rooftop. Lindsey gets a place in Wolfram & Hart with evil, and Angel gets a place from the scroll for good. So the question becomes why the parallels. I think they were setting Lindsey up as a shadow. But is he a shadow to show what Angel is, or what he could be if he weren’t so great? I think it’s the former. I think the episode reads better if it’s the former. But I’m not sure. In a lot of ways it doesn't matter, because I think Joss comes down on the side that it's a subversive story--but it's interesting how much the show resides on that knife edge

[angearia]

He is very, very kind and compassionate to Faith, but he is curt with Lindsey. Is it because Angel’s instinct that Faith is redeemable and Lindsey isn’t is correct? Or does Angel’s lack of faith in Lindsey drive him further into W&H’s hands?

Consider Lindsey's last words: "Angel kills me." It's very much like Faith and Buffy in this regard:

And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.
Faith feels rejected by Buffy, cannot prove a lover/hero and so becomes determined to prove a villain. Same song, different singers when it comes to Angel and Lindsey

[2maggie2]

I heart your last paragraph.

[vamp_mogs]

Maybe Angel is referring to when he leaves Sunnydale and starts fighting demons in LA? For a good 3 months he does that completely on his own before Doyle ever approaches him. Sure, Doyle points out how that could potentially end badly (if he doesn’t connect to humans) but he was still protecting a lot of people without anybody forcing him to do so, or coming to him with a mission of any kind. In Consequences he talks to Faith about how the Scoobies inspired him and proved to him that there’s people in this world who genuinely do want to help (as opposed to hurt each other) and I think that’s what motivates him in that summer between BtVS S3-AtS S1

[lynnenne]

the moment Angel actually made the change wasn't so much when he chose to help Buffy as when he chose to leave Buffy.

This. Not coincidentally, this is also the moment when Angel becomes the protagonist of his own story, rather than merely the love interest of Buffy's story. It's this decision, more than any other, that sets him on the path to change.

[2maggie2]

Could be. Though as I've said to others above, that's more like a decision to actively do good, rather than to give up evil -- which is the decision Lindsey is confronting. I don't at all underestimte the force of that decision -- I just didn't think it fit this particular case. Angel is at his best here in season 1 and it's fun watching him before things go pear-shaped for him. I sort of see this particular episode as a tragedy because finding that scroll really messed him up

[pocochina]

When did Angel ever make a decision to change?

right?

I think it's somewhere between subversion and hypocrisy on Angel's part there. I think generally Angel would recognize that he didn't, and might even consider that while he's speaking to someone, but since W&H is The Enemy, and Lindsey embodies W&H, he's all about putting as much contempt and distance between them as possible, and that's all he's thinking, is that's Lindsey's weak spot and going for it has nothing to do with him.

I've recently watched Dead End and I think the comparison is even stronger there - Angel is all giddy off of being epiphanied and re-accepted and forgiven, and he wags his finger to Lindsey about getting along with people and evaluating your life and blah blah. And there, I do think he knows what he's doing, as do the writers, but he's really enjoying displacing it onto someone else, and it's part of the up-swing before Pylea rather than a commentary about Angel.

[2maggie2]

I like the thought that Angel is just blowing smoke as a way of getting at Lindsey. Will comment on Dead End when I get there. Like I said above, I'm always fuzzy about this show.

[menomegirl]

I haven't read any of the comments yet but before I do, I'd like to take a few minutes to point out what I think of as Angel's failure in Blind Date. All you have to do is watch how he tried to help Faith in BtVs and in Five by Five and Sanctuary. And then you watch Blind Date and compare his treatment of Lindsey to his treatment of Faith.

[2maggie2]

One could argue that Angel takes a different approach with a guy who's just dipping his toe into the redemption pool than he does with someone who is completely broken down and therefore desperately in need of redemption. But I think there's a lot to the thought that Angel is projecting some animosity onto Lindsey. We'll never know how Lindsey would have turned out if he'd had a bit more support on this than he got.