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Thanks for the memory
In which I get with the meta with respect to Angel 5x18 'Origin'.
‘I have a soft spot for people who try to redesign their souls.’ Terry Pratchett.
I had promised myself that this week I wasn’t going to whinge about the episode, no matter how unsatisfactory it might be; instead, I would overlook the details of execution and focus on the story I thought it was telling. So it felt like a reward from the Powers That Be when ‘Origin’ turned out to be an episode which, despite some minor flaws, contained so much meat that I hardly noticed the flaws in the first place. It brought into focus themes the series has been adressing throughout this season and gave us a fresh new perspective on them. Moreover, addressing those themes became part of the characters’ personal growth and offered for the first time a real note of hope in Angel’s increasingly dreary struggle. Two crucial themes are love and free will, but the central ones are memory and identity.
Illyria claims that our identity is nothing but an assembly of recollections (we are what we remember), and sees nothing wrong or strange in those recollections being retroactively changed. She sees the bigger picture – we are always changing, as a result of experiences that lay down new memories, so whether those new memories are acquired now or retroactively is unimportant. She has trouble understanding Wesley’s claim that removing a set of his memories has made him no longer himself, and when he gets his memories back she asks in genuine curiosity ‘Are you Wesley now?’ It seems that for Illyria identity is to some extent always in flux, always in the process of being constructed, and therefore that there can be no fixed ‘Wesley’ identity (‘Define change’ she asks him– she doesn’t understand why Wesley is trying to separate the notion of change off from the concept of identity, as if there were some platonic ‘real’ Wesley, from whom the current Wesley is a deviation). This episode constantly made me think of Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, which is precisely concerned with questions of how memory and identity interact. One of his case studies is of a young man, Jimmie, who as a result of retrograde amnesia had no memories after 1945 (Sacks met him in 1975). What is imortant for understanding Illyria’s argument, is that Jimmie was not only amnesiac, but also incapable of forming new long-term memories. He could hold a conversation, but every time Sacks came into the room, he greeted him as if he’d never met him before. Once, in an effort to explain his condition to him, Sacks made him look in a mirror – since Jimmie thought he was 19, he was utterly bewildered when he saw a middle-aged man looking back at him. As Sacks observes, it would have been a cruel thing to do, except that all memory of this terrifying revelation had faded within minutes. Jimmie is an example of what Wesley seems to think identity is, something fixed and immutable, that cannot be changed by memories of new experiences, and hence should not be changed by tampering with memories of the past. Illyria thinks Wesley is arguing that change per se is damaging to identity; Wesley thinks he is saying that some forms of change are natural, organic and permissible, whereas others are artificial and hence morally wrong. But Illyria is right that there is no fixed, unchanging ‘Wesley,’ created as a function of ‘legitimate’ memories. Memory, and identity, are more complex than this, and the series doesn’t shy away from examining these complexities.
Looking back from ‘Origin’, it’s clear that the theme of identity, and the role that memory plays in constructing and maintaining an identity, have been present right from the start. Most obviously, as ‘Origin’ reminds us, the replacement of the MoG’s memories of Connor coincides with the takeover of W&H, and in the first episode we also have Gunn agreeing to have vast quantities of legal knowledge uploaded into his brain (and what is knowledge but memories?). In Just Rewards, the necromancer Hainsley enables demons to occupy the dead bodies of human beings; unlike vampires, these dead humans don’t appear to retain their memories, they are mere shells, as Fred was supposed to be for Illyria. What Hainsley creates are not complex creatures like Harmony, Spike and Angel, but a full demon in a human overcoat. In Unleashed, we have a woman who suddenly becomes a werewolf, and as a werewolf has no memory of her human identity, none of the constraints built of love and reponsibility that could protect her family from her when she becomes wolf; equally, as we see in Smile Time, her human self has no memory of what she does as a werewolf. Since they share no memories the wolf and the woman are the ‘same person’ only in the sense that they share a body (although since one is a wolf and the other a human, it’s really only the same body in the sense that only one of them can occupy any given spot in space and time, and if one of them dies, so does the other). Spike, as a ghost, has no body at all, but his memories are intact and in ghost form he is able to form new memories, which in turn are integrated into his personality. He continues able to grow and change exactly as before; becoming a ghost doesn’t make him any less of the person, but the person he is is affacted by the experiences of being a ghost. In Lineage, the Rogerbot appears to have a very substantial set of Wesley’s father’s memories, so that he is able to react to unpredictable situations exactly as Roger would have done. This doesn’t make him Roger – they don’t share a consciousness, for a start – but it does raise the question whether the Rogerbot thinks of himself as Roger. Had the set of memories been perfect, there would have been no way for him to know that he wasn’t the real thing. In Damage, Dana suddenly acquires memories of former Slayers and, in her disturbed mental state, is unable to distinguish consistently between them and her own memories. The fragments of memory Dana accesses (‘Please, I need to get home to my son, my Robin,’) are very similar to the fragments of Fred’s memories that Illyria accesses. Nonetheless, because they are only fragments, and because there are so many other competing fragments, including her own memories, Dana does not become the Slayers she is channelling. And it is important to note that Dana’s own memories are not fixed and immutable. Like everyone else, she misremembers things, memories become overlaid with new experiences and altered accordingly. The man who tortured her becomes Spike, whom thanks to the Slayer memories she also remembers killing her. This is part of the process of constructing identity. Our memories are integrated into a narrative, some are deemed irrelevant, unimportant, and discarded (or at least put away in a file to which we no longer have the access), others are given such importance that we take them out regularly, polish them, admire (or cringe from) them, and in so doing gradually alter them. In Dana we see, literally, how even naturally acquired, organic memories are subject to change. In Why We Fight, we’re reminded how a vampire retains the memories and aspects of the personality of the human it once was. New experiences – violent bloodlust, the loss of the moral compass, super strength, a sense of connection to evil (if Holden Webster’s experience is universal) – have an immediate impact on the vampire’s personality, and change it, sometimes beyond recognition, but the memories are still there, and the memories still inhabit the same body, even if that is now a dead shell. In Smile Time, we have another transformation. Angel beceomes a muppet, but he retains his full set of memories, he’s still Angel. Even so, his new physical state begins to introduce changes to his identity, he’s more emotionally open, more impulsive, he has the proportional excitablity of a puppet his size. Thanks to the difference in puppet hormones, he manages to begin a relationship with Nina, something he couldn’t manage in his usual body, and since it seems likely that his relationship with Nina will have an impact on his sense of identity, his temporary puppet state has triggered long-term change. And then, of course, come AHITW and Shells, and we watch Fred lose her memories, watch her desperately try to cling on to who she is, to her sense of identity. At this point the issues of memory and identity that the series has been constantly touching upon come to the foreground and are explicitly addressed. Illyria isn’t Fred, though she inhabits her carcase, but she has access to fragments of Fred’s memories (how many, and how coherent they are, is unclear), and now, thanks to the memory restoration spell, she has a new set of Fred’s memories that are extensive and coherent, the entire stretch of the Connor arc. It is clear from her discussion with Wesley that these are bound to have an impact on her identity, to make her more like Fred, not least because she herself admits that she has trouble distinguishing between the ‘real’ and the ‘fake’ memories (perhaps I should say between the ‘fake’ and the ‘even faker’ memories, because of course, for Illyria they are all fake - she never was Fred, she never did say or do or think the things she recalls.). Then comes Underneath, and Lindsay, who is occupying an entirely fake reality, with a full set of fake memories, and who is tortured to death every day, only to have the memory of it wiped so it can be repeated.
And so we come, at last, to Connor. If the mindwipe Angel performed on the MoG was A Bad Thing, morally repugnant, a denial of their free will, how much worse is his crime against Connor? Connor didn’t merely lose a subset of memories, he was rebuilt from scratch (‘Gentlemen, we have the technology...’) Except that Connor isn’t rebuilt entirely from scratch – he inabits the same body, for a start. We know that his hormonal reactions are the same from his reaction to older women. From the description of how he was lost in the store, it sounds as if at least some of his memories from growing up with Holtz were used as a basis for the new memories, modified to make them less traumatic, to keep him mentally healthy, but not discarded altogether. And here’s the thing: it works. Connor becomes not a ‘raging psychopath’ but an well-adjusted, happy, confident young man, with an exceptionally well-developed sense of self (‘You’ve got to let me do it my way’). Is all this a lie? Would the honest thing, the morally right thing, be to rip all this away from him? Maybe, maybe not, Angel is terrified that once the real memories return, Connor will revert to his psychopathic state, but he leaves one thing out of account. The healthy, well adjusted young man he sees before him is who Connor is now. He was made that way by the memories, but that is who he is, that is his identity. Of course BtVS viewers are reminded unavoidably of Dawn Summers, whose whole life prior to a certain point exists only as memories, in her own mind and in the mind of others, but who then proceeds to live a real life as the person those memories have created. And that life is no less real than the lives of all the other Scoobies, her personality is no less complex or human or real than that of her sister and friends. As Spike tells her, it really doesn’t matter where you started out. Identity changes. What you are is who you are now, however you may have got there. That’s Illyria’s view, too. ‘The world is as it is.’ Doesn’t matter much how it got to be that way. Change is unceasing anyway, so why worry too much about the individual causes of change? And so, when Connor’s memories return, he doesn’t become a raging psychopath, because that is no longer who he is (it would have been different, of course, had the memory restoration spell simultaneously wiped the alternative memories – that would have been like pressing a reset button. And yet, and yet... the longer Connor lived past the point where the false memories ended and his real life began, the harder it would have been to reset him. If he had had, say, five years of real memories of his well-adjusted self alongside the memories of the experiences that made him a psychopathic killer, he would have had a chance of integrating his two selves). Everyone in the vicinity of the restoration spell now has two sets of memories and has to make a choice about how important those memories are in their life story, in the narrative of self that they construct. For Connor, it’s relatively easy. He chooses to use the knowledge that comes with the memories to defeat Sarjain, but thereafter he decides that this isn’t who he wants to be (‘Fighting isn’t my thing’). It seems likely that he’s going to privilege the false memories over the real one and carry on being the person he now is, living the life he’s lived for the past eight months or so. And Wesley has come to same decision, and for similar reasons. The person he became as a result of the false memories has been living and working with Angel for a significant period of time, during which Angel had demonstrated that he is a leader worth following, that the trust Wesley felt for him was deserved. The return of the real memories doesn’t invalidate those experiences. Wesley acknowledges that he’d rather be who he is now than revert to the Wesley he would have been without the mindwipe, that the narrative of self he constructs with the help of the false memories is a more endurable self-image than the other Wes. He now remembers what happened, what he did, but he chooses to accept the change, just as Illyria urged. And now that they’ve all got their memories back, their identities will develop yet again, in a way that integrates both the real and the false memories. The only question is, will that integration produce good or bad reuslts? So far, things are looking very hopeful that the results will be good.
The best thing about this extended meditation on memory and identity is that it functions on the meta level as well. The episode assumes that the viewer will bring to their reading a set of their own memories that contradict certain events they see on screen. Drew Goddard is sometimes accused of continuity porn, but here the references to past episodes are not merely self-serving, they aren’t even there solely to further plot and characterisation, they are part of the very subject of the episode. When Connor’s voice is first heard calling ‘Dad’ it is not only Angel who freezes in recognition, not only Angel who knows that this word when spoken by this boy has (at least!) two possible referents, depending on which set of memories applies. Of course, if you’re a Johnny-come-lately viewer who came aboard in S5 and haven’t bothered to acquaint yourself with the backstory, then Angel’s reaction is an exciting mystery, and Connor’s identity not a given and angst-invoking fact, but an unexpected new development. For Connor, as for those viewers who first came on board for this season, Sarjain is just some demon, the prophecy is just some prophecy, what matters is that he has to kill him to protect his family. For the faithful long-term viewer it is something quite different, the culmination of a story, imbued with a significance that Connor can only begin to grasp after his memories have been restored. For them, Wesley’s flood of returning memories restores a reality that they have remembered all along; for the new viewer, it transforms the story they have been watching. Yet even new viewers are required to read the episode in the context of their memories. When Connor asks ‘Is that what I am?’ memories of Lawson are invoked (same floppy hair, same calm voice, quietly asking Angel the same existential question). Suddenly Why We Fight has to be reinterpreted. ‘Origin’ has layers upon layers, which are accessibly only thanks to our memories of past episodes. A story about the role of memory in identity which requires the viewer to acknowledge that their understanding of the story is conditioned by their own memories, that’s satisfactorily meta.
I’d like to finish on a note of minor moralising: the fact that identity is not fixed, as this episode so strongly argues, opens the way for conscious change, and for the exercise of free will (as Sarjain observes to Connor). Gunn has no trouble whatsoever rejecting the Senior Partners’ offer of a deal, even when Marcus Hamilton suggests that Angel isn’t interested in rescuing him. He can turn him down so easily because he believes he deserves this punishment. But part of the discussion of change in this episode was about the importance of getting on with life. Angel’s advice (order?) to Wesley can be paraphrased as ‘You can’t forget what happened, but you can’t stay stuck there either.’ Gunn can’t stay punishing himself forever, at some point he’s going to have to be rescued from that private hell and start living with the memory of his guilt. His rejection of Hamilton’s offer shows that he has already changed into the kind of man who wouldn’t make a deal with the SPs (which reminds me of Spike, who went to get a soul to become ‘the kind of man who would never....’). Identity is not fixed, it is constantly open to change, for good or bad. Even Harmony can make the effort to change and can succeed. It is always possible to redesign your soul, even if you don’t have one, though sometimes you might need some outside help.
‘I have a soft spot for people who try to redesign their souls.’ Terry Pratchett.
I had promised myself that this week I wasn’t going to whinge about the episode, no matter how unsatisfactory it might be; instead, I would overlook the details of execution and focus on the story I thought it was telling. So it felt like a reward from the Powers That Be when ‘Origin’ turned out to be an episode which, despite some minor flaws, contained so much meat that I hardly noticed the flaws in the first place. It brought into focus themes the series has been adressing throughout this season and gave us a fresh new perspective on them. Moreover, addressing those themes became part of the characters’ personal growth and offered for the first time a real note of hope in Angel’s increasingly dreary struggle. Two crucial themes are love and free will, but the central ones are memory and identity.
Illyria claims that our identity is nothing but an assembly of recollections (we are what we remember), and sees nothing wrong or strange in those recollections being retroactively changed. She sees the bigger picture – we are always changing, as a result of experiences that lay down new memories, so whether those new memories are acquired now or retroactively is unimportant. She has trouble understanding Wesley’s claim that removing a set of his memories has made him no longer himself, and when he gets his memories back she asks in genuine curiosity ‘Are you Wesley now?’ It seems that for Illyria identity is to some extent always in flux, always in the process of being constructed, and therefore that there can be no fixed ‘Wesley’ identity (‘Define change’ she asks him– she doesn’t understand why Wesley is trying to separate the notion of change off from the concept of identity, as if there were some platonic ‘real’ Wesley, from whom the current Wesley is a deviation). This episode constantly made me think of Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, which is precisely concerned with questions of how memory and identity interact. One of his case studies is of a young man, Jimmie, who as a result of retrograde amnesia had no memories after 1945 (Sacks met him in 1975). What is imortant for understanding Illyria’s argument, is that Jimmie was not only amnesiac, but also incapable of forming new long-term memories. He could hold a conversation, but every time Sacks came into the room, he greeted him as if he’d never met him before. Once, in an effort to explain his condition to him, Sacks made him look in a mirror – since Jimmie thought he was 19, he was utterly bewildered when he saw a middle-aged man looking back at him. As Sacks observes, it would have been a cruel thing to do, except that all memory of this terrifying revelation had faded within minutes. Jimmie is an example of what Wesley seems to think identity is, something fixed and immutable, that cannot be changed by memories of new experiences, and hence should not be changed by tampering with memories of the past. Illyria thinks Wesley is arguing that change per se is damaging to identity; Wesley thinks he is saying that some forms of change are natural, organic and permissible, whereas others are artificial and hence morally wrong. But Illyria is right that there is no fixed, unchanging ‘Wesley,’ created as a function of ‘legitimate’ memories. Memory, and identity, are more complex than this, and the series doesn’t shy away from examining these complexities.
Looking back from ‘Origin’, it’s clear that the theme of identity, and the role that memory plays in constructing and maintaining an identity, have been present right from the start. Most obviously, as ‘Origin’ reminds us, the replacement of the MoG’s memories of Connor coincides with the takeover of W&H, and in the first episode we also have Gunn agreeing to have vast quantities of legal knowledge uploaded into his brain (and what is knowledge but memories?). In Just Rewards, the necromancer Hainsley enables demons to occupy the dead bodies of human beings; unlike vampires, these dead humans don’t appear to retain their memories, they are mere shells, as Fred was supposed to be for Illyria. What Hainsley creates are not complex creatures like Harmony, Spike and Angel, but a full demon in a human overcoat. In Unleashed, we have a woman who suddenly becomes a werewolf, and as a werewolf has no memory of her human identity, none of the constraints built of love and reponsibility that could protect her family from her when she becomes wolf; equally, as we see in Smile Time, her human self has no memory of what she does as a werewolf. Since they share no memories the wolf and the woman are the ‘same person’ only in the sense that they share a body (although since one is a wolf and the other a human, it’s really only the same body in the sense that only one of them can occupy any given spot in space and time, and if one of them dies, so does the other). Spike, as a ghost, has no body at all, but his memories are intact and in ghost form he is able to form new memories, which in turn are integrated into his personality. He continues able to grow and change exactly as before; becoming a ghost doesn’t make him any less of the person, but the person he is is affacted by the experiences of being a ghost. In Lineage, the Rogerbot appears to have a very substantial set of Wesley’s father’s memories, so that he is able to react to unpredictable situations exactly as Roger would have done. This doesn’t make him Roger – they don’t share a consciousness, for a start – but it does raise the question whether the Rogerbot thinks of himself as Roger. Had the set of memories been perfect, there would have been no way for him to know that he wasn’t the real thing. In Damage, Dana suddenly acquires memories of former Slayers and, in her disturbed mental state, is unable to distinguish consistently between them and her own memories. The fragments of memory Dana accesses (‘Please, I need to get home to my son, my Robin,’) are very similar to the fragments of Fred’s memories that Illyria accesses. Nonetheless, because they are only fragments, and because there are so many other competing fragments, including her own memories, Dana does not become the Slayers she is channelling. And it is important to note that Dana’s own memories are not fixed and immutable. Like everyone else, she misremembers things, memories become overlaid with new experiences and altered accordingly. The man who tortured her becomes Spike, whom thanks to the Slayer memories she also remembers killing her. This is part of the process of constructing identity. Our memories are integrated into a narrative, some are deemed irrelevant, unimportant, and discarded (or at least put away in a file to which we no longer have the access), others are given such importance that we take them out regularly, polish them, admire (or cringe from) them, and in so doing gradually alter them. In Dana we see, literally, how even naturally acquired, organic memories are subject to change. In Why We Fight, we’re reminded how a vampire retains the memories and aspects of the personality of the human it once was. New experiences – violent bloodlust, the loss of the moral compass, super strength, a sense of connection to evil (if Holden Webster’s experience is universal) – have an immediate impact on the vampire’s personality, and change it, sometimes beyond recognition, but the memories are still there, and the memories still inhabit the same body, even if that is now a dead shell. In Smile Time, we have another transformation. Angel beceomes a muppet, but he retains his full set of memories, he’s still Angel. Even so, his new physical state begins to introduce changes to his identity, he’s more emotionally open, more impulsive, he has the proportional excitablity of a puppet his size. Thanks to the difference in puppet hormones, he manages to begin a relationship with Nina, something he couldn’t manage in his usual body, and since it seems likely that his relationship with Nina will have an impact on his sense of identity, his temporary puppet state has triggered long-term change. And then, of course, come AHITW and Shells, and we watch Fred lose her memories, watch her desperately try to cling on to who she is, to her sense of identity. At this point the issues of memory and identity that the series has been constantly touching upon come to the foreground and are explicitly addressed. Illyria isn’t Fred, though she inhabits her carcase, but she has access to fragments of Fred’s memories (how many, and how coherent they are, is unclear), and now, thanks to the memory restoration spell, she has a new set of Fred’s memories that are extensive and coherent, the entire stretch of the Connor arc. It is clear from her discussion with Wesley that these are bound to have an impact on her identity, to make her more like Fred, not least because she herself admits that she has trouble distinguishing between the ‘real’ and the ‘fake’ memories (perhaps I should say between the ‘fake’ and the ‘even faker’ memories, because of course, for Illyria they are all fake - she never was Fred, she never did say or do or think the things she recalls.). Then comes Underneath, and Lindsay, who is occupying an entirely fake reality, with a full set of fake memories, and who is tortured to death every day, only to have the memory of it wiped so it can be repeated.
And so we come, at last, to Connor. If the mindwipe Angel performed on the MoG was A Bad Thing, morally repugnant, a denial of their free will, how much worse is his crime against Connor? Connor didn’t merely lose a subset of memories, he was rebuilt from scratch (‘Gentlemen, we have the technology...’) Except that Connor isn’t rebuilt entirely from scratch – he inabits the same body, for a start. We know that his hormonal reactions are the same from his reaction to older women. From the description of how he was lost in the store, it sounds as if at least some of his memories from growing up with Holtz were used as a basis for the new memories, modified to make them less traumatic, to keep him mentally healthy, but not discarded altogether. And here’s the thing: it works. Connor becomes not a ‘raging psychopath’ but an well-adjusted, happy, confident young man, with an exceptionally well-developed sense of self (‘You’ve got to let me do it my way’). Is all this a lie? Would the honest thing, the morally right thing, be to rip all this away from him? Maybe, maybe not, Angel is terrified that once the real memories return, Connor will revert to his psychopathic state, but he leaves one thing out of account. The healthy, well adjusted young man he sees before him is who Connor is now. He was made that way by the memories, but that is who he is, that is his identity. Of course BtVS viewers are reminded unavoidably of Dawn Summers, whose whole life prior to a certain point exists only as memories, in her own mind and in the mind of others, but who then proceeds to live a real life as the person those memories have created. And that life is no less real than the lives of all the other Scoobies, her personality is no less complex or human or real than that of her sister and friends. As Spike tells her, it really doesn’t matter where you started out. Identity changes. What you are is who you are now, however you may have got there. That’s Illyria’s view, too. ‘The world is as it is.’ Doesn’t matter much how it got to be that way. Change is unceasing anyway, so why worry too much about the individual causes of change? And so, when Connor’s memories return, he doesn’t become a raging psychopath, because that is no longer who he is (it would have been different, of course, had the memory restoration spell simultaneously wiped the alternative memories – that would have been like pressing a reset button. And yet, and yet... the longer Connor lived past the point where the false memories ended and his real life began, the harder it would have been to reset him. If he had had, say, five years of real memories of his well-adjusted self alongside the memories of the experiences that made him a psychopathic killer, he would have had a chance of integrating his two selves). Everyone in the vicinity of the restoration spell now has two sets of memories and has to make a choice about how important those memories are in their life story, in the narrative of self that they construct. For Connor, it’s relatively easy. He chooses to use the knowledge that comes with the memories to defeat Sarjain, but thereafter he decides that this isn’t who he wants to be (‘Fighting isn’t my thing’). It seems likely that he’s going to privilege the false memories over the real one and carry on being the person he now is, living the life he’s lived for the past eight months or so. And Wesley has come to same decision, and for similar reasons. The person he became as a result of the false memories has been living and working with Angel for a significant period of time, during which Angel had demonstrated that he is a leader worth following, that the trust Wesley felt for him was deserved. The return of the real memories doesn’t invalidate those experiences. Wesley acknowledges that he’d rather be who he is now than revert to the Wesley he would have been without the mindwipe, that the narrative of self he constructs with the help of the false memories is a more endurable self-image than the other Wes. He now remembers what happened, what he did, but he chooses to accept the change, just as Illyria urged. And now that they’ve all got their memories back, their identities will develop yet again, in a way that integrates both the real and the false memories. The only question is, will that integration produce good or bad reuslts? So far, things are looking very hopeful that the results will be good.
The best thing about this extended meditation on memory and identity is that it functions on the meta level as well. The episode assumes that the viewer will bring to their reading a set of their own memories that contradict certain events they see on screen. Drew Goddard is sometimes accused of continuity porn, but here the references to past episodes are not merely self-serving, they aren’t even there solely to further plot and characterisation, they are part of the very subject of the episode. When Connor’s voice is first heard calling ‘Dad’ it is not only Angel who freezes in recognition, not only Angel who knows that this word when spoken by this boy has (at least!) two possible referents, depending on which set of memories applies. Of course, if you’re a Johnny-come-lately viewer who came aboard in S5 and haven’t bothered to acquaint yourself with the backstory, then Angel’s reaction is an exciting mystery, and Connor’s identity not a given and angst-invoking fact, but an unexpected new development. For Connor, as for those viewers who first came on board for this season, Sarjain is just some demon, the prophecy is just some prophecy, what matters is that he has to kill him to protect his family. For the faithful long-term viewer it is something quite different, the culmination of a story, imbued with a significance that Connor can only begin to grasp after his memories have been restored. For them, Wesley’s flood of returning memories restores a reality that they have remembered all along; for the new viewer, it transforms the story they have been watching. Yet even new viewers are required to read the episode in the context of their memories. When Connor asks ‘Is that what I am?’ memories of Lawson are invoked (same floppy hair, same calm voice, quietly asking Angel the same existential question). Suddenly Why We Fight has to be reinterpreted. ‘Origin’ has layers upon layers, which are accessibly only thanks to our memories of past episodes. A story about the role of memory in identity which requires the viewer to acknowledge that their understanding of the story is conditioned by their own memories, that’s satisfactorily meta.
I’d like to finish on a note of minor moralising: the fact that identity is not fixed, as this episode so strongly argues, opens the way for conscious change, and for the exercise of free will (as Sarjain observes to Connor). Gunn has no trouble whatsoever rejecting the Senior Partners’ offer of a deal, even when Marcus Hamilton suggests that Angel isn’t interested in rescuing him. He can turn him down so easily because he believes he deserves this punishment. But part of the discussion of change in this episode was about the importance of getting on with life. Angel’s advice (order?) to Wesley can be paraphrased as ‘You can’t forget what happened, but you can’t stay stuck there either.’ Gunn can’t stay punishing himself forever, at some point he’s going to have to be rescued from that private hell and start living with the memory of his guilt. His rejection of Hamilton’s offer shows that he has already changed into the kind of man who wouldn’t make a deal with the SPs (which reminds me of Spike, who went to get a soul to become ‘the kind of man who would never....’). Identity is not fixed, it is constantly open to change, for good or bad. Even Harmony can make the effort to change and can succeed. It is always possible to redesign your soul, even if you don’t have one, though sometimes you might need some outside help.