Angel Season Five - Episode Eleven - Damage (part 2)
Part 2 (of 4)
Somewhere between that alley and the Wolfram and Hart office Angel tells Spike exactly what the problem is; a psychotic slayer:
Angel: And you let her get away.
Spike: At least I was trying to stop her.
Angel: Oh, how'd that work out?
Spike: At least I know the game, now, don't I? I killed two slayers with my own hands. Think I can handle one that's gone daft in the melon.
Those Slayers are still his claim to fame, even with the soul. They are something that even the great Angelus can’t boast. Once it was about killing them, chasing the most challenging fights, fights with no certainty of victory, for the sheer thrill. Now he’s saying he can find Dana because he knows Slayers; knows them better than Angel. But Angel doesn’t want his help:
Angel: You're not handling anything, Spike. OK? Wes contacted Rupert Giles. He's sending his top guy to retrieve her
Notice that word ‘retrieve’ - “He's sending his top guy to retrieve her”, we’ll come back to that later too. They enter the conference room. Wesley, Gunn, Fred and Lorne are already assembled. Oh, and Rupert Giles’ “top guy” is none other than Andrew, one time third of the evil trio who was reluctantly adopted into Buffy’s gang after he expressed willingness to alter his wicked ways. Andrew spins around in his swivel chair and is stunned to see Spike. He’s happy to see Spike . . . okay, ecstatic might be more accurate:
Andrew: Spike? It's you. It's really you! My therapist thought I was holding onto false hope, but... I knew you'd come back. You're like... you're like Gandalf the White, resurrected from the pit of the Balrog, more beautiful than ever. Ohh... he's alive, Frodo. He's alive.
Andrew holds Spike in an emotional embrace, touches his face in awe and wonder then hugs him again and Spike … lets him. No words of rejection, no words designed to humiliate. Oh sure, Spike’s a little discomfited by this public display of affection but he doesn’t tell Andrew to stop. He endures it with good grace. Angel watches all this closely, with a guarded expression on his face. Here he is forced to see another perspective of Spike via someone who loves and values him, who is happy that he has managed to defy the ultimate death. And it has to be said, the comparison to Gandalf from the Lord of the Rings trilogy is priceless. Gandalf, a hobbit loving wizard, prone to bad habits that prevented his ascension to higher status until the sacrifice of his life to save his companions allows him to finally move from ‘grey’ to ‘white’. That someone, (including by implication Buffy) might view Spike as this glorious is strange and disturbing to Angel. It’s yet another contradiction to his staunchly held belief that Spike is incapable of change and that the whole ‘good’ Spike is nothing but a charade. It’s also a little bit more confirmation of all those sub-conscious fears, fears of irrelevancy, failure, fears he’s been battling since he made the deal with Wolfram and Hart, that were exacerbated by Spike’s big comeback. Andrew, of course wants to know how this is possible, but Angel, not wanting to be reminded of Spike’s other claim to fame, tells them to save the trip down memory lane for later.
Andrew, ever the storyteller, gives the group the low down on slayer mythology. Nothing they didn’t already know, except for a deeper explanation of the phenomenon of slayer dreams (as shown in the original film of Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and how potential slayers experience vivid dreams of the heroics of slayers past as preparation for the possibility of becoming the one and only chosen Slayer. Dana is therefore at the mercy of her dreams. She has no capacity to separate fantasy from reality, dream slayers from herself, past from present.
Andrew’s approach to Angel and his people does him no favours. He adopts his storytelling persona, imparts information that is known, cheekily denigrates Wesley and his ex-watcher status. It is quite clear that he is not Giles’ ‘top guy’ and Team Angel must suspect that they have been fobbed off with a substitute. Angel is openly sarcastic while the others snicker and roll their eyes at his antics. Lorne gets the discussion back on track by asking:
Lorne: Uh, wait. So if there's only one slayer, what is little miss whack-your-head-off doing scampering around?
But hang on, didn’t Lorne spend a good portion of the season four episode “Orpheus” (A4.15) nursing Faith, a second vampire slayer, as she fought the effects of a powerful demon drug? Is this forgetfulness a consequence of the memory wipe or an inelegantly phrased enquiry as to Faith’s possible demise? (Or, the short memory of the script writer?) To answer the question, “Little Sunnydale surprise” Spike supplies with a nod of his head towards Andrew, encouraging him to continue with his tale:
Andrew: Six months ago, Buffy, Vampyr Slayer extraordinaire, had her lesbian witch make with the beaucoup de magie. One light show later...
Angel: All the potentials become slayers.
It is open to interpretation as to whether Angel knew about the ‘Sunnydale surprise’ beforehand. If his words are read as completing Andrew’s explanation then, he does indeed already know about it but has failed to share this information with anybody in his team, not even Wesley, who as a former Watcher would naturally be interested in such a huge development. If his words are translated as anticipating the rest of Andrew’s sentence then this means that he didn’t know and that he’s only learning about it now along with everybody else. This would also mean that Buffy hadn’t told him - Told him about Spike’s demise, but not about the expansion of the sisterhood. Either way, kinda big details are being left out by somebody. Wesley is full of admiration for the strategy describing it as ‘brilliant’. But then by wondering how hundreds of slayers could possibly receive their proper training without the aid of the Watcher’s Council betrays his stance on how the Watcher-Slayer dynamic should work. Once a Watcher…
But Wes need not worry; Mr. Giles and a few key Sunnydale alumni have been busy rounding up the recently chosen. Andrew claims Dana is an anomaly that no one could have foreseen but that’s not strictly true. Surely the possibility that not every potential was equipped for a life of slayerdom should have occurred to them. During season seven of Buffy the potentials that arrived at Revello Drive came from very different spheres of life, different circumstances. Transfer this to a world scale, post-empowerment and it is not only possible, but indeed likely that some chosen ones would have problems or issues that make them unsuitable for the duty. And, hey, anyone remember an ‘anomaly’ called Faith? Surely her history alone made the possibility of a ‘Dana’ or others like her a realistic consideration. What we are really seeing here is the consequences of the Sunnydale spell. In season seven, Buffy came up with the idea of empowering the potentials as a last resort. She had a mission and that’s all that mattered. Her need was immediate. Magically activating the potentials allowed her to wage her war on behalf of the world. She gave a stirring speech, offered them a choice, gave them power. That was fine for the girls who were there, in the living room with Buffy but the spell was far more far reaching, effecting girls all over the world and therefore so are the consequences. Dana is one exploration of this, ‘The Chain” written by Joss Whedon (Dark Horse Comics, Season 8, #5) is another in which the unnamed slayer specifically says she didn’t get a choice, she got chosen. The empowerment spell was not all cake and ice-cream because, as Spike once warned Xander, there are always consequences with magic. Unfortunately for Dana, the result of the empowerment is that she’s no longer an innocent victim, kept quiet and safe in her hospital ward, now, she is a murderer, a super strong killer with no moral boundaries. Her power has allowed her to choose not to be weak but in doing so she chooses to use that strength to kill.
So, when they put all the information together, Dana’s sudden awakening, the super strength, the dreams, the languages, the instinctual ability, it all makes perfect sense:
Spike: Explains why that skirt was yapping' at me in Chinese. Must've thought she was the slayer I took out back in the Boxer Rebellion.
Causing Angel to take a pot shot from his vantage point way, way up on the high moral ground:
Angel: You mean the slayer you murdered.
Like he’s innocent of heinous crimes just because he hasn’t killed a slayer! It’s like the proverbial pot calling the kettle black. And one might argue that in the case of slayers, at least Spike went for targets that knew the score, could fight back, defend themselves, had a better than average chance of actually winning. And for Spike, with the risk came the thrill. Not like Angelus who chose his victims for entirely different purposes. Different routes, same objective, even when they were evil. Spike excuses his past actions by virtue of the fact that he didn’t have a soul then to which Angel replies:
Angel: Right, 'cause having one now is making such a difference
It’s the ultimate insult. The denigration of his hard won soul is too much for Spike to take and once again, Angel’s slur drives him from the room. He leaves the corporates to it, determined to get the job done himself. To his credit, Angel seems to realise that he’s gone too far. He follows Spike into the foyer to stop his rash departure, arguing that they are the last two people who should be confronting Dana because she is a slayer who doesn’t understand the existence of good Vampyrs…sorry, vampires , and that she exists solely to kill their kind:
Spike: Dance of death. Eternal struggle. Right. Got it.
He’s danced this dance before; it’s all he’s ever done.
Angel: You will...when she's staking you in the heart.
And if we suspected it before, thought we sensed the echo, now we’re certain. A conversation had in a mineshaft over a hundred years before still resonates with meaning and significance all the way here in the twenty-first century:
Spike: Yeah, you know what I prefer to being hunted? Getting caught.
Angelus: That's a brilliant strategy really... pure cunning.
Spike: Sod off! Come on. When was the last time you unleashed it? All out fight in a mob, back against the wall, nothing but fists and fangs? Don't you ever get tired of fights you know you're going to win?
Angelus: No. A real kill. A good kill. It takes pure artistry. Without that, we're just animals.
The threat of a stake doesn’t deter the impetuous Spike. He quickly corrects Angel’s misconception that he doesn’t know what he’s dealing with:
Spike: What do you want me to do? Go all boo-hoo 'cause she got tortured and driven out of her gourd? Not like we haven't done worse back in the day.
Angel: Yeah, and it's something I'm still paying for.
Spike: And you should let it go, mate. It's starting to make you look old
One can’t get his eyes off the victims, only with the soul they afford no pleasure; it translates into infinite remorse, it drives his quest for redemption. The other can’t spare a backward glance. The thrill was in the chase, the fight, and besides, that guy, the one who did that simply doesn’t exist anymore, won’t return, no need to look back is there, can’t change it anyway. Again we have a situation in which Spike and Angel could learn a lesson from the other. Angel is too fixated with what he was, what he still could be. While for Spike the occasional look behind him would subdue that well practiced arrogance and increase his compassion for the helpless he’s trying to help.
Continued here...