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Angel 5x19 'Time Bomb'. Once again, it's all about power.
All through this season Angel has been struggling to reconcile his (increasingly waning) faith in his mission to help the hopeless and his role as CEO of W&H, a position which necessarily requires some compromise with the forces of darkness but also appears to offer the chance to do good on a greater scale than rescuing one victim at a time. All along he has had severe doubts about the honesty of that justification, but saw himself as having no choice, since he had no other way of saving Connor. Now things have changed considerably. Lindsay has told him that the Apocalypse is already underway, made possible by ignorance, apathy and human greed (a version of evil being possible because good men do nothing), and Connor has regained his memories, thus releasing Angel from the only effective hold the SPs had over him (apart, of course, from that contract signed in blood, that Wes found in the cellar). Increasingly convinced that the SPs are stringing him along, Angel has decided to take the battle to them, but is hampered by his ignorance of who/what they are. Nonetheless, his new attitude seems to have unsettled them, judging by their decision to send in Marcus Hamilton, after a liaison-less period. Last week, when Hamilton was telling Angel how pleased the SP’s were with his work, methought he did protest too much, so it was interesting to see that this week he’s switched from the carrot of praise to the stick of financial penalties. The SPs are definitely getting worried about Angel. They also don’t seem too happy about Illyria, which makes me wonder exactly what their involvement in her resurrection was. They clearly timed the decay in Gunn’s upgrade so that he would be willing to cut the deal with Sparrow, but Sparrow claims his own involvement was limited to persuading Gunn to accept the deal, which makes it sound as if the prime movers were the SPs. But now she’s here, they’re none too pleased. I guess whatever plan they had for her didn’t include ‘Join Angel’s team’ on its agenda.
I’m not at all sure that Illyria herself had any intention of joining Team Angel. She rescues Gunn in order to use him as a bargaining chip, and while Angel thinks what she wants in return is to sign up, her subsequent conversations with him suggest that it’s rulership she has on her mind, not followership. As for Gunn, the interesting thing about him is not so much that he was rescued (though I’m very glad he was) but that his punishment really does seem to have served as a sort of Purgatory, burning away his corruption (and the guilt that paralysed him) and leaving him as a kind of innocent, who looks at W&H through fresh eyes and says ‘I can’t do this.’ (I note that I was wrong about him remembering what he was being punished for when he was in the cellar, but it seems the purging effect works anyway). His innocent’s perspective extends beyond the dealings with demonic clients to the interactions between his friends – although he’s only been gone for two weeks, he’s surprised when Lorne tells him how little contact there is between the various members of Angel’s team, that Wesley is barely functional and Angel doesn’t talk to anyone much. Gunn, newly restored, sees clearly what is going on around him, sees the black and white within the grey, and refuses to make compromises. His moral compass has been so fully restored that he feels physical revulsion at the thought of serving evil scaly clients – it simply isn’t an option for him anymore. It’s also made clear that it’s his recent experiences that enable him to see so clearly. What the Brethren are offering the unborn baby is uncannily close to what the Senior Partners offered Gunn – respect, admiration, the chance to ‘be someone’ – but he is able to draw on his memory of the shiny happy fake life with the lurking evil under the surface, and use it to peer behind the facade of care and concern to find the Brethren’s real agenda. Notice that he’s still frantically looking through the paperwork as Amanda is preparing to sign – it’s not that he finds a dodgy clause and gets suspicious, he’s convinced a priori that there has to be a catch, and is desperate to find it. This is a far cry from the Gunn who signed the customs release form with his eyes carefully closed to the knowledge that someone, somewhere would get hurt as a consequence.
At the same time as Gunn is telling Angel that the moral compromises W&H demand of them are unacceptable, Spike is giving Illyria a lesson on adaptability. He has no trouble whacking her in the face, even though she looks like Fred, because he has adapted to the fact that she isn’t Fred (a lesson Wesley is apparently still having a bit of trouble with). In the meantime, Angel has Illyria bending his ear about power and non-compromise. Illyria sees morality as a weakness, something that prevents you from using all the power you have at your disposal, and she chews his ear about not exploiting the resources offered by W&H. But by the end she has learned that the apparently simple truth ‘more power = better’ doesn’t always hold. In order to simply survive, Illyria is forced to give up a great deal of her own power (including, alas, all those funky time tricks – looks like now she’s just an ordinary superhero with ordinary superstrength). The episode doesn’t set up compromise and adaptability as categories in opposition to each other; it isn’t that Angel has to choose between them. Instead, we’re shown that sometimes (as with Spike, and Illyria herself) the ability to adapt is a virtue, while at other times, as with Gunn, it’s important not to compromise. The two strategies are of value only insofar as they are employed in the service of a particular goal.
And here we come to the crunch of this episode. What is Angel’s goal? Illyria has a very narrow-minded view of the purpose of existence – to rule over everything – and her arguments with Angel are predicated on the assumption that he shares that goal. She certainly manages to press a few of his buttons (chiefly the territorial one – she almost has him using the word ‘kingdom’ at one point) and he’s so taken by her line about ‘serving no master but your own ambition’ that he repeats it. But Illyria fundamentally misreads Angel. He may be a leader, but he has no desire to rule over everything. His vaulting ambition is to do good, to compensate for all the evil he’s inflicted on the world. At the end of the episode Angel is faced with a direct choice between his two masters, W&H on the one hand, and his real clients, the helpless victims (Amanda and baby) on the other. The choice is literally embodied in the persons of Gunn and Hamilton, both of whom are present and watching Angel closely. So the question is, when he calls the Brethren into the office and locks the door, what is he planning to do? Who is he going to serve? W&H’s profits or his own ambition? At this stage of the game, I can’t honestly believe it’s the former.
The basic moral ethos of the Jossverse is that you can’t fight evil by doing evil. Doing evil corrupts, and if you go down this route, eventually you’ll have no good guys left. Using the resources of evil may win you the battle, but it will lose you the war. The question Angel is facing now is, if you can’t fight evil by doing evil, how do you fight it? Going back to helping one victim at time is small beer after his time at W&H. He wants to go after the big guns, but he still has no idea how to get at the Senior Partners. My guess is that by going postal on some incredibly powerful clients (we get a careful bit of exposition about the consequences of not helping the Brethren to get their hands on their sacrificial victim), he’s hoping to provoke the SPs into a direct confrontation. Let’s get this apocalypse on the road!
All through this season Angel has been struggling to reconcile his (increasingly waning) faith in his mission to help the hopeless and his role as CEO of W&H, a position which necessarily requires some compromise with the forces of darkness but also appears to offer the chance to do good on a greater scale than rescuing one victim at a time. All along he has had severe doubts about the honesty of that justification, but saw himself as having no choice, since he had no other way of saving Connor. Now things have changed considerably. Lindsay has told him that the Apocalypse is already underway, made possible by ignorance, apathy and human greed (a version of evil being possible because good men do nothing), and Connor has regained his memories, thus releasing Angel from the only effective hold the SPs had over him (apart, of course, from that contract signed in blood, that Wes found in the cellar). Increasingly convinced that the SPs are stringing him along, Angel has decided to take the battle to them, but is hampered by his ignorance of who/what they are. Nonetheless, his new attitude seems to have unsettled them, judging by their decision to send in Marcus Hamilton, after a liaison-less period. Last week, when Hamilton was telling Angel how pleased the SP’s were with his work, methought he did protest too much, so it was interesting to see that this week he’s switched from the carrot of praise to the stick of financial penalties. The SPs are definitely getting worried about Angel. They also don’t seem too happy about Illyria, which makes me wonder exactly what their involvement in her resurrection was. They clearly timed the decay in Gunn’s upgrade so that he would be willing to cut the deal with Sparrow, but Sparrow claims his own involvement was limited to persuading Gunn to accept the deal, which makes it sound as if the prime movers were the SPs. But now she’s here, they’re none too pleased. I guess whatever plan they had for her didn’t include ‘Join Angel’s team’ on its agenda.
I’m not at all sure that Illyria herself had any intention of joining Team Angel. She rescues Gunn in order to use him as a bargaining chip, and while Angel thinks what she wants in return is to sign up, her subsequent conversations with him suggest that it’s rulership she has on her mind, not followership. As for Gunn, the interesting thing about him is not so much that he was rescued (though I’m very glad he was) but that his punishment really does seem to have served as a sort of Purgatory, burning away his corruption (and the guilt that paralysed him) and leaving him as a kind of innocent, who looks at W&H through fresh eyes and says ‘I can’t do this.’ (I note that I was wrong about him remembering what he was being punished for when he was in the cellar, but it seems the purging effect works anyway). His innocent’s perspective extends beyond the dealings with demonic clients to the interactions between his friends – although he’s only been gone for two weeks, he’s surprised when Lorne tells him how little contact there is between the various members of Angel’s team, that Wesley is barely functional and Angel doesn’t talk to anyone much. Gunn, newly restored, sees clearly what is going on around him, sees the black and white within the grey, and refuses to make compromises. His moral compass has been so fully restored that he feels physical revulsion at the thought of serving evil scaly clients – it simply isn’t an option for him anymore. It’s also made clear that it’s his recent experiences that enable him to see so clearly. What the Brethren are offering the unborn baby is uncannily close to what the Senior Partners offered Gunn – respect, admiration, the chance to ‘be someone’ – but he is able to draw on his memory of the shiny happy fake life with the lurking evil under the surface, and use it to peer behind the facade of care and concern to find the Brethren’s real agenda. Notice that he’s still frantically looking through the paperwork as Amanda is preparing to sign – it’s not that he finds a dodgy clause and gets suspicious, he’s convinced a priori that there has to be a catch, and is desperate to find it. This is a far cry from the Gunn who signed the customs release form with his eyes carefully closed to the knowledge that someone, somewhere would get hurt as a consequence.
At the same time as Gunn is telling Angel that the moral compromises W&H demand of them are unacceptable, Spike is giving Illyria a lesson on adaptability. He has no trouble whacking her in the face, even though she looks like Fred, because he has adapted to the fact that she isn’t Fred (a lesson Wesley is apparently still having a bit of trouble with). In the meantime, Angel has Illyria bending his ear about power and non-compromise. Illyria sees morality as a weakness, something that prevents you from using all the power you have at your disposal, and she chews his ear about not exploiting the resources offered by W&H. But by the end she has learned that the apparently simple truth ‘more power = better’ doesn’t always hold. In order to simply survive, Illyria is forced to give up a great deal of her own power (including, alas, all those funky time tricks – looks like now she’s just an ordinary superhero with ordinary superstrength). The episode doesn’t set up compromise and adaptability as categories in opposition to each other; it isn’t that Angel has to choose between them. Instead, we’re shown that sometimes (as with Spike, and Illyria herself) the ability to adapt is a virtue, while at other times, as with Gunn, it’s important not to compromise. The two strategies are of value only insofar as they are employed in the service of a particular goal.
And here we come to the crunch of this episode. What is Angel’s goal? Illyria has a very narrow-minded view of the purpose of existence – to rule over everything – and her arguments with Angel are predicated on the assumption that he shares that goal. She certainly manages to press a few of his buttons (chiefly the territorial one – she almost has him using the word ‘kingdom’ at one point) and he’s so taken by her line about ‘serving no master but your own ambition’ that he repeats it. But Illyria fundamentally misreads Angel. He may be a leader, but he has no desire to rule over everything. His vaulting ambition is to do good, to compensate for all the evil he’s inflicted on the world. At the end of the episode Angel is faced with a direct choice between his two masters, W&H on the one hand, and his real clients, the helpless victims (Amanda and baby) on the other. The choice is literally embodied in the persons of Gunn and Hamilton, both of whom are present and watching Angel closely. So the question is, when he calls the Brethren into the office and locks the door, what is he planning to do? Who is he going to serve? W&H’s profits or his own ambition? At this stage of the game, I can’t honestly believe it’s the former.
The basic moral ethos of the Jossverse is that you can’t fight evil by doing evil. Doing evil corrupts, and if you go down this route, eventually you’ll have no good guys left. Using the resources of evil may win you the battle, but it will lose you the war. The question Angel is facing now is, if you can’t fight evil by doing evil, how do you fight it? Going back to helping one victim at time is small beer after his time at W&H. He wants to go after the big guns, but he still has no idea how to get at the Senior Partners. My guess is that by going postal on some incredibly powerful clients (we get a careful bit of exposition about the consequences of not helping the Brethren to get their hands on their sacrificial victim), he’s hoping to provoke the SPs into a direct confrontation. Let’s get this apocalypse on the road!