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I have to apologise for this review, which is more a collection of observations than an analysis as such, but I’ve got so little time this week that I haven’t had a chance to organise my thoughts properly. However, given that there’s only one episode to go, it seemed a shame not make the effort to write at least something, so here goes.
Power Play starts with a prisoner being beaten up in front of a wall of fire heavily reminiscent of the exit to Gunn’s dungeon dimension in Underneath. Suddenly Angel bursts through the flames and approaches the man, who gasps ‘Thank you! Thank you!’ Angel looks at him, then goes into vamp face and takes a good slurp of blood before breaking the man’s neck. Then come the credits. The next sequence opens with the subtitle “19 hours earlier”, and sure enough, most of the rest of the episode is devoted to flashbacks showing how Angel came to the point in his life shown in the teaser. Then, in the coda, we acquire new information that forces us to reassess what we have seen: Angel has not turned evil, it’s all part of a master plan to put a spoke in the wheels of the apocalypse. This process of providing new information that compels the viewers to reassess what they have already seen is a key feature of this episode. Not only do we have to reinterpret the teaser, we also revisit Cordy’s goodbye kiss from You’re Welcome – which turns out to have been not merely a moving farewell but the whole point of her visit, since it enabled her to pass a crucial vision on to Angel. The rather clunky joke from the same episode, in which she tells Angel he’s made a deal with the devil, only to catch sight of a demon who looks exactly like a traditional devil, acquires an entirely new significance when we discover that this particular demon is not merely Angel’s racquetball partner but the leader of the Black Thorns. When Marcus Hamilton first entered, breaking down the door in search of Eve, the terrifying first impression was undermined by the discovery that he only wanted to ‘kill’ Eve by making her sign a contract. Now we find that the first impression was correct, the man is terrifying. Another joke made in passing, Signora Bianci’s mistaken assumption last week that Angel is Angelus, turns out not to have been a throwaway line but the prelude to a significant theme of this week’s episode, the question of how far Angel and Angelus overlap. The possibility of Angel actually being Angelus is explicitly raised three times, once by Nina after they’ve had sex (though she treats it as a joke), once by the MoG and once by Archduke Sebassis. Each time, Angel denies it. The same notion is also raised by Illyria in her speech about corrupt rulers, although she doesn’t use the name Angelus (presumably because she doesn’t know about him). Spike denies that Angel has become a ‘megalomaniacal bastard’ on the grounds that he would ‘feel it’ if he had – presumably by this he means that he would know if Angel had turned back into Angelus, rather than that he’s a kind of moral barometer.
While the MoG are carefully misled by Angel into thinking that he’s gone bad, the audience is given a couple of clues that render his status more ambiguous. Both of his conversations with Nina suggest that the ‘bad guy’ persona may be an act: in both of them he refers to something that he’s set in motion and that he may not survive. Clearly he has A Plan (in retrospect I wondered if his fear of being the one who would hurt Nina if she stayed was a reference to the Black Thorns’ sacrificial lamb – he seems to have known what the initiation ceremony would involve (though not that it would be Drogyn) and he may have been afraid that they would pick Nina). The audience is thus kept in a state of uncertainty throughout the episode. Sex with Nina opens up the possibility of the return of Angelus, even if Angel’s response to her questioning makes it seem rather unlikely; and when we reach the teaser situation, we find out that not only does he kill the prisoner, but that the man he kills is Drogyn. Not until the glamour is cast do we find out for sure what we’ve been hoping for all along, that his apparent reversion to the dark side is all part of a plan to infiltrate the gang of apocalyptic movers and shakers. His explanation forces us to reassess much of what we’ve seen, but there’s one thing it doesn’t change: Angel really did kill Drogyn, and here a parallel with Buffy’s behaviour in The Gift rather forcibly prevents itself. Buffy refused to kill an innocent, Dawn, even if this was the only way to stop the world from ending. Angel does kill a good man - not an innocent (Drogyn is the Battle Brand, after all), but someone who is on his side, someone of exceptional goodness and purity (makes Drogyn sound like kind of a wuss), someone who regards him like a brother (I have no idea how this close relationship with Drogyn fits into Angel’s timeline, but I refuse to niggle about it) – and not even to stop the world ending, but just so he can go ahead with his plan to infiltrate the inner circle of darkness. Obviously the audience doesn’t feel the same emotional connection to Drogyn, a character who’s only appeared in one other episode, as they do to Fred, but from a story point of view, sacrificing Drogyn for the sake of the plan is a moral decision of the same level of ambivalence as sacrificing Fred would have been. Even if the action is in a good cause, the moral math behind it is that of Angelus, not Angel, and in order to go through with it, Angel has to draw on a side of himself that he’s long tried to keep buried. The obvious echoes here are with Angel’s turning of Lawson – there, too, he killed a good man in the service of a good cause, but with the crucial difference that Lawson not only accepted his fate but asked for it. Drogyn, though, is a genuine sacrificial lamb, one who, far from consenting to be sacrificed, believes Angel has come to save him, not kill him (it’s possible that ‘Thank you’ means ‘Thank you for putting me out of my misery’, but given the look on his face and the way he draws back when Angel vamps out, I think he was expecting rescue, not death). This fits in nicely with the theme that came to the fore last week, that of how identity changes and yet stays the same. We’ve been shown that identity is not fixed - people can change, dramatically, and yet still remain who they are. It's like the old paradox about the man with the axe - after five years he replaces the head and after ten years he replaces the handle, yet he thinks of it as the same axe. The thing that provides our sense of self with continuity is memory, and that persist however much we change. Thus Angelus is Liam with a demon and Angel is Angelus with a soul - they're all the same person, just at different points on their timeline. As Illyria argued in Origins, there is no Platonic ideal of Angel, just Angel at different stages of development, and his past selves exist within his present self because his memory of them shapes who he is today. It’s logical that as the culmination of the season approaches, Angel should start reintegrating suppressed aspects of his personality into his current self.
The episode also provides us with an update on the metaphysical status of the Senior Partners – they exist on another plane, and they exist, according to Angel, because of human weakness (which I guess is a nice way of saying because of human cruelty, selfishness and greed). This means that Angel can’t take on the Senior Partners, as he originally planned, because they’re in all of us. You can’t defeat Evil per se, only individuals who are engaged in doing evil, so instead he turns his attention to their instruments on earth, the Black Thorns (what is with all the Christian imagery in this episode? Sacrificial lambs and a crown of thorns, only this time its wearers don’t submit to suffering, they inflict it). Having given this some careful thought, I wholeheartedly approve of his intentions. Yes, he isn’t going to wipe out evil forever, but consider a couple of analogies. Suppose Angel were a policemen working for the drug squad, who’d spent years arresting small time dealers and junkies. Suppose one day he got the opportunity to take out a group of major drugs barons, the guys who make the serious money – would it be Good Thing, even if he died doing it, or should he be satisfied with the smaller stuff he’s doing at street level? Or suppose he was an ecowarrior, chaining himself to trees in the Brazilian rainforest, and was given the chance to close down every major logging company? Of course his victory wouldn’t last forever – taking down the companies doesn’t mean he can take down global capitalism – but it will buy the trees a breathing space while the forces of good work to get organised. If you take the argument seriously that there’s no point in Angel risking his life to defeat the Black Thorns, because inevitably someone will fill the power vacuum, you might as well argue that there’s no point in fighting individual demons either. Angel can’t win the war, but he can win a really significant battle and, as he says himself, he can show the bad guys that they haven’t got things wrapped up, that resistance isn’t useless.
When the big battle comes, I’m betting that Marcus Hamilton will be the Senior Partners’ strong right arm. The episode carefully establishes just how strong he is by having the Boritz (sp?) demon beat up Spike, only to be effortlessly beaten up by Illyria who in turn is effortlessly beaten up by Hamilton. He and Drogyn are clearly old enemies and we don’t yet know if he saw through Angel’s glamour or not. Either way, come the showdown, he’ll be in the front line.
Power Play starts with a prisoner being beaten up in front of a wall of fire heavily reminiscent of the exit to Gunn’s dungeon dimension in Underneath. Suddenly Angel bursts through the flames and approaches the man, who gasps ‘Thank you! Thank you!’ Angel looks at him, then goes into vamp face and takes a good slurp of blood before breaking the man’s neck. Then come the credits. The next sequence opens with the subtitle “19 hours earlier”, and sure enough, most of the rest of the episode is devoted to flashbacks showing how Angel came to the point in his life shown in the teaser. Then, in the coda, we acquire new information that forces us to reassess what we have seen: Angel has not turned evil, it’s all part of a master plan to put a spoke in the wheels of the apocalypse. This process of providing new information that compels the viewers to reassess what they have already seen is a key feature of this episode. Not only do we have to reinterpret the teaser, we also revisit Cordy’s goodbye kiss from You’re Welcome – which turns out to have been not merely a moving farewell but the whole point of her visit, since it enabled her to pass a crucial vision on to Angel. The rather clunky joke from the same episode, in which she tells Angel he’s made a deal with the devil, only to catch sight of a demon who looks exactly like a traditional devil, acquires an entirely new significance when we discover that this particular demon is not merely Angel’s racquetball partner but the leader of the Black Thorns. When Marcus Hamilton first entered, breaking down the door in search of Eve, the terrifying first impression was undermined by the discovery that he only wanted to ‘kill’ Eve by making her sign a contract. Now we find that the first impression was correct, the man is terrifying. Another joke made in passing, Signora Bianci’s mistaken assumption last week that Angel is Angelus, turns out not to have been a throwaway line but the prelude to a significant theme of this week’s episode, the question of how far Angel and Angelus overlap. The possibility of Angel actually being Angelus is explicitly raised three times, once by Nina after they’ve had sex (though she treats it as a joke), once by the MoG and once by Archduke Sebassis. Each time, Angel denies it. The same notion is also raised by Illyria in her speech about corrupt rulers, although she doesn’t use the name Angelus (presumably because she doesn’t know about him). Spike denies that Angel has become a ‘megalomaniacal bastard’ on the grounds that he would ‘feel it’ if he had – presumably by this he means that he would know if Angel had turned back into Angelus, rather than that he’s a kind of moral barometer.
While the MoG are carefully misled by Angel into thinking that he’s gone bad, the audience is given a couple of clues that render his status more ambiguous. Both of his conversations with Nina suggest that the ‘bad guy’ persona may be an act: in both of them he refers to something that he’s set in motion and that he may not survive. Clearly he has A Plan (in retrospect I wondered if his fear of being the one who would hurt Nina if she stayed was a reference to the Black Thorns’ sacrificial lamb – he seems to have known what the initiation ceremony would involve (though not that it would be Drogyn) and he may have been afraid that they would pick Nina). The audience is thus kept in a state of uncertainty throughout the episode. Sex with Nina opens up the possibility of the return of Angelus, even if Angel’s response to her questioning makes it seem rather unlikely; and when we reach the teaser situation, we find out that not only does he kill the prisoner, but that the man he kills is Drogyn. Not until the glamour is cast do we find out for sure what we’ve been hoping for all along, that his apparent reversion to the dark side is all part of a plan to infiltrate the gang of apocalyptic movers and shakers. His explanation forces us to reassess much of what we’ve seen, but there’s one thing it doesn’t change: Angel really did kill Drogyn, and here a parallel with Buffy’s behaviour in The Gift rather forcibly prevents itself. Buffy refused to kill an innocent, Dawn, even if this was the only way to stop the world from ending. Angel does kill a good man - not an innocent (Drogyn is the Battle Brand, after all), but someone who is on his side, someone of exceptional goodness and purity (makes Drogyn sound like kind of a wuss), someone who regards him like a brother (I have no idea how this close relationship with Drogyn fits into Angel’s timeline, but I refuse to niggle about it) – and not even to stop the world ending, but just so he can go ahead with his plan to infiltrate the inner circle of darkness. Obviously the audience doesn’t feel the same emotional connection to Drogyn, a character who’s only appeared in one other episode, as they do to Fred, but from a story point of view, sacrificing Drogyn for the sake of the plan is a moral decision of the same level of ambivalence as sacrificing Fred would have been. Even if the action is in a good cause, the moral math behind it is that of Angelus, not Angel, and in order to go through with it, Angel has to draw on a side of himself that he’s long tried to keep buried. The obvious echoes here are with Angel’s turning of Lawson – there, too, he killed a good man in the service of a good cause, but with the crucial difference that Lawson not only accepted his fate but asked for it. Drogyn, though, is a genuine sacrificial lamb, one who, far from consenting to be sacrificed, believes Angel has come to save him, not kill him (it’s possible that ‘Thank you’ means ‘Thank you for putting me out of my misery’, but given the look on his face and the way he draws back when Angel vamps out, I think he was expecting rescue, not death). This fits in nicely with the theme that came to the fore last week, that of how identity changes and yet stays the same. We’ve been shown that identity is not fixed - people can change, dramatically, and yet still remain who they are. It's like the old paradox about the man with the axe - after five years he replaces the head and after ten years he replaces the handle, yet he thinks of it as the same axe. The thing that provides our sense of self with continuity is memory, and that persist however much we change. Thus Angelus is Liam with a demon and Angel is Angelus with a soul - they're all the same person, just at different points on their timeline. As Illyria argued in Origins, there is no Platonic ideal of Angel, just Angel at different stages of development, and his past selves exist within his present self because his memory of them shapes who he is today. It’s logical that as the culmination of the season approaches, Angel should start reintegrating suppressed aspects of his personality into his current self.
The episode also provides us with an update on the metaphysical status of the Senior Partners – they exist on another plane, and they exist, according to Angel, because of human weakness (which I guess is a nice way of saying because of human cruelty, selfishness and greed). This means that Angel can’t take on the Senior Partners, as he originally planned, because they’re in all of us. You can’t defeat Evil per se, only individuals who are engaged in doing evil, so instead he turns his attention to their instruments on earth, the Black Thorns (what is with all the Christian imagery in this episode? Sacrificial lambs and a crown of thorns, only this time its wearers don’t submit to suffering, they inflict it). Having given this some careful thought, I wholeheartedly approve of his intentions. Yes, he isn’t going to wipe out evil forever, but consider a couple of analogies. Suppose Angel were a policemen working for the drug squad, who’d spent years arresting small time dealers and junkies. Suppose one day he got the opportunity to take out a group of major drugs barons, the guys who make the serious money – would it be Good Thing, even if he died doing it, or should he be satisfied with the smaller stuff he’s doing at street level? Or suppose he was an ecowarrior, chaining himself to trees in the Brazilian rainforest, and was given the chance to close down every major logging company? Of course his victory wouldn’t last forever – taking down the companies doesn’t mean he can take down global capitalism – but it will buy the trees a breathing space while the forces of good work to get organised. If you take the argument seriously that there’s no point in Angel risking his life to defeat the Black Thorns, because inevitably someone will fill the power vacuum, you might as well argue that there’s no point in fighting individual demons either. Angel can’t win the war, but he can win a really significant battle and, as he says himself, he can show the bad guys that they haven’t got things wrapped up, that resistance isn’t useless.
When the big battle comes, I’m betting that Marcus Hamilton will be the Senior Partners’ strong right arm. The episode carefully establishes just how strong he is by having the Boritz (sp?) demon beat up Spike, only to be effortlessly beaten up by Illyria who in turn is effortlessly beaten up by Hamilton. He and Drogyn are clearly old enemies and we don’t yet know if he saw through Angel’s glamour or not. Either way, come the showdown, he’ll be in the front line.