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The last battle. Angel 5x22 Not Fade Away
They grow not old as we that are left grow old,
Age shall not wither them, nor the years condemn.
- Rupert Brooke
I have quite a lot more to say about Not Fade Away, in particular about the themes of hope/despair and loyalty/betrayal, but I’m really short of time at the moment and this has turned into a really long analysis as it is. I’ll try to tackle the rest some time next week, when my life should be less busy.
This was a wonderfully rich episode, full of connections and allusions and echoes. Fittingly, as the climax to a season that has been profoundly concerned with memory, it revisited not only moments from previous episodes in this season, but also past moments in the series as a whole and in its mother show, BtVS. These allusions to past events not only enriched the episode itself, they also enriched those past moments, altering our appreciation of their significance and enabling us to see them as steps on a journey, part of an ongoing process, not a frozen state. This reflects another key theme of this season, the nature of identity, and the way it changes under the influence of experience, whilst retaining a connection to its former states by means of memories. The careful interweaving of references to previous episodes contributed greatly to the emotional impact, although that would have been pretty powerful even without the triggering of memories of the past. Watching the gang going up against an enemy they knew would kill them (and knowing it was the last episode ever, so there was no financial reason to preserve any particular character) took away the security blanket the series structure usually provides. Any of them could have died taking out their particular target, and sure enough Wesley did. Wesley’s goodbye to Fred was a real tearjerker, and Lorne’s goodbye to Lindsey utterly shocking. And the cut away in the alley, at the very start of the last great fight, was very moving too, leaving you wanting to know more and yet grateful that you’d been spared what could only have been a terrible ending; leaving you, by virtue of ending the narrative before the story itself had finished, the tiny note of hope that maybe it didn’t end there after all, that maybe some of them lived to fight another day.
The themes of memory and identity, of how experience changes us and yet we remain essentially ourselves, come to fruition in this episode, which concentrates on the individual characters as individuals, not just as members of the MoG. Not once but. twice the team is fragmented, firstly when Angel sends them out to spend their last perfect day, and they all choose to go different ways, and then again when they are sent off to tackle their individual target villains. Each character, apart from Angel whose path follows a slightly different trajectory, chooses to spend his last day returning to his roots. Lorne goes back to sing in a bar, Gunn revisits Anne (and possibly, off-camera, his old gang buddies, who are hanging around somewhere), Wesley talks to Illyria about his early training by the Watchers’ Council whilst treating her wounds (strong shades of a Watcher’s function there) and Spike performs the poem he wrote for Cecily in Fool for Love at a poetry slam. It isn’t a question of going back to the beginning, returning to who they once were, because they’ve all changed so markedly since then, but by touching base with their former selves they illustrate both how much they’ve changed and how much they’re still the same. It’s worth looking at those scenes in a little more detail, because they are so packed with allusions and connections that they repay close observation.
Lorne sadly sings a song about the world and what it would be like if he were in charge. It’s a scene that acquires an entirely new significance after his murder of Lindsey – Lorne is about to commit a terrible act, and he hates himself and the world for it. Heroes may not accept the world as it is, but Lorne has to. He wants to help Angel make a difference, but the price is his own innocence, and though he pays that price, it’s too much for him, he has to leave afterwards and he doesn’t want anyone coming looking for him. All season, Lorne has been feeling displaced and useless, unable to make a real contribution, with even his talent for reading people becoming unreliable, and it’s profoundly ironic that come the last battle, the only contribution he can make is to murder someone who is, however temporarily, one of their own side. His shooting of Lindsey is shocking, coming as it does completely out of left field, and it’s Lorne’s own reaction to it that spells out clearly for us what a terrible deed this is. Lorne must bear full responsibility for what he does (‘I was only following orders’ hasn’t been a valid excuse since the Nuremberg trials), but Angel bears equal reponsiibilty, since he issued the orders. Lorne tells Lindsey ‘This was Angel’s plan,’, and Angel knows that Lindsey will not be coming back for Eve (and his cold way of informing her of this is quite breathtaking). So was the assassination justified? Watching Angel’s conversation with Lindsey when he asks him to join the team, it seems to me that Lindsey signed his own death warrant when he failed to listen to Angel, confident that the Cliff Notes would suffice. That, I think, was the point at which Angel decided that Lindsey wasn’t part of the solution, and as the saying goes, ‘If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem’. There, in a nutshell, is the basis for Angel’s decision. Lindsey wasn’t fighting for the good guys, he was fighting for himself, for the prospect of taking over W&H, not (unlike Angel) because he thought he could exploit them for good ends, but because he wanted the power. Just as (again, unlike Angel) he had tried to become a member of the Black Thorns not as part of a plan to take them out, but because he wanted the power. Given Lindsey’s motivations and history, Angel’s decision to have him eliminated is strategically sound, but it is also, as Lorne says, ‘unsavoury.’ Angel stabs Lindsey in the back when he’s fighting on his side, taking advantage of Lindsey’s misguided belief, as expressed to Eve, that Angel won’t touch him as long he’s on the team. The process of reintegrating Angelus into Angel’s identity, begun in Power Play, is taken much, much further in this episode. Lindsey’s situation parallels Harmony’s and echoes Lawson’s in Why We Fight – all three are evil, all three look as if they have hope of redemption (Harmony even states explicitly that she wouldn’t have betrayed Angel if he’d had confidence in her, and though this has to be taken with a very large pinch of salt, it does raise explicitly the question of how far Angel might have been able to redeem these people had he not been so sure they were unsaveable). Mercy, though, is not one of Angel’s great qualities. It took him a good half of the season to come gradually to trust Spike, in spite of knowing that he had a soul, and his initial solution to the problem posed by the presence of both Spike and Illyria was to have them killed. I think a major reason for this lack of mercy shown to the guilty (as opposed to the boundless help he offers to the innocent) is that he doesn’t believe he’s worthy of mercy himself. He’s still ‘the biggest mass murderer you’ll ever meet’ and he’ll never be able to change that, to alter the past and its consequences. That’s why he was so eager to help Nina before she had killed someone, because as far as Angel’s concerned once you step across that boundary, you’re lost. His one hope of redemption lay in the Shanshu prophecy (in my view it’s not so much the becoming human part that matters to him, as the washing away of the sins he committed in his soulless state), but he is required to sign this away in order to prove his ‘loyalty’to the Circle. Angel is initially afraid that they will ask him to kill Spike as a test of loyalty (just as Gunn and the rest of the MoG are afraid that Drogyn isn’t the only friend Angel will be willing to sacrifice), but it turns out that Evil thinks in more selfish terms. They don’t test him by asking him to kill a friend, they test him by asking him to give up something of value to himself, his hope of redemption. And of course Angel signs, because if he’s come this far, how could he do otherwise? How could he kill Drogyn in the name of his cause and then back out when his own future is threatened? It’s a little unclear exactly how signing a document can prevent the Shanshu prophecy from applying to Angel (the Circle are hardly likely to be the powers responsible for conferring it, after all) but my own personal reading is that what Angel does in this scene is sign away his soul to the Senior Partners. Redemption via Shanshu won’t help him if his soul belongs to the forces of evil. And so he gears up for the last battle without personal hope, knowing that no matter what he does he can’t escape hell, and the consequences of this lack of hope are extremely grim. With nothing left to lose, certain that he has no prospect of personal redemption, Angel no longer struggles to keep Angelus repressed, and adopts a strategy in which all that matters are the ends. The means by which those ends are achieved are not important, and thus he stains his soul with Lindsay’s blood. Angel is fighting on the side of good but he is not himself good. Unlike Buffy, he sacrifices his own moral integrity in order to achieve his goal. His vamping out in order to defeat Hamilton is, of course, symbolic of this embrace of the Angelus aspect of his own nature, and it enables him to win that particular fight, but the implications for his moral trajectory are deeply disturbing. Spike’s mention of the Shanshu at the end, and his insistence that he will be the one to get it, remind us that he, at least, hasn’t given up the hope of redemption, and perhaps he has always wanted it more than Angel – the only time he has ever defeated him in a fight was over the Cup of Perpetual Torment in Destiny, and Angel himself interpreted that to mean that the Shanshu was more important to Spike than it was to him. But before we rush to the conclusion that the prophecy applies to Spike after all, it’s worth revisiting Soul Purpose. In Angel’s dream, when Spike gets the Shanshu, he says in genuine surprise ‘But I didn’t do it for a reward,’ to which Wesley responds ‘That’s why you deserve it!’ Paradoxically, by giving up the Shanshu, Angel makes himself worthy of it (at least in his own subconscious). He is fighting, not because it will bring him any personal gain, but purely for the sake of others, for all the innocents the Black Circle will no longer prey on, and he’s willing to sacrifice his soul to achieve that end (‘Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his soul for anonymous victims’). Ultimately, it remains as unclear as ever whether Angel or Spike has a better claim to the Shanshu and whether either of them will ever achieve it.
Whew. I did say that everything was interconnected, and that this makes a linear analysis a bit difficult, but if you bear with me I’ll get onto the next characters and their ‘perfect day’.
Gunn I have least to say about because my knowledge of his backstory is so limited, but his question to Anne is clearly extremely significant. Like Angel, he’s confronting the issues of hope and purpose. He wants to know if the sacrifice he’s about to make has any point, and he’s developed an extremely dark world view, namely that this plane of existence is controlled by powers that will never let things change for the better, that ensure that man’s inhumanity to man rolls ever onward. Anne tells him that even if this is so, the fight is worth fighting. You may not be able to end the reign of evil for ever, but you can win tiny victories here and now. You can save one life here, rehabilitate one junkie there. Giving money to a homeless man won’t solve the problem of homelessness, but it will buy him a good meal for that one night. Building a rehab shelter for drug addicts won’t stop organised crime, but it will save a few individual lives, and, as the Jewish saying goes, he who saves one life saves the whole world. This is why I can’t see Angel’s decision to sacrifice himself and the MoG in an attempt to take out the Circle as pointless. Instead I see it as a very accurate reflection of the state of the real world. We are never going to be able to change those aspects of human nature that lead to war and oppression, and though we could end famine, I doubt if we ever will, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to stop individual wars, shouldn’t donate money to help refugees and famine victims, because here and now that makes a difference, even if it changes nothing in the long run. Angel’s sacrifice is not in vain, stopping the Circle in their tracks may not change the cosmic balance of power, but it does a hell of a lot of good here and now. Having found the answer to his question, Gunn the Vampire Slayer goes off to tackle precisely the kind of institutional corruption that led to his own fall from grace. Had it not been for the shock of Fred’s death, he might well have found himself on the Senator’s campaign team, so it’s fitting that he’s the one who takes them out, not with his supercharged legal knowledge courtesy of W&H but with a couple of ‘City of...’ style stakes and his street fighting skills.
Spike’s choice of activity for his last day comes as almost as much of a surprise as Lorne’s turning on Lindsey. Gleefully the writers set us up to expect that he’s going to spend the day brawling – there he is, in a rough tough biker bar, ordering a few glasses of dutch courage and talking about the rough crowd – only to pull the carpet from under our feet with the poetry slam. Spike returns to his William roots, to the personality he tried so hard to repress, and acknowledges not only his poetry but the love he felt for Cicely. The fact that the next poem is to be ‘The Wanton Folly of Me Mum,’ not only ties in nicely with the references he’s made in past episodes to how traumatic it was to have his mother ‘come on’ to him after she was turned (traumatised enough to write poetry about it, apparently), it also clarifies something implied by Angel’s remark that he liked Spike’s poetry. Apparently Spike didn’t stop writing after he was turned, and the fact that he seems determined to perform a series of poems, each dedicated to one of the women he has loved, suggests that he may also have got on to Dru and Buffy. This time around, of course, he’s not the desperately insecure would-be lover who nonethless knows that he’s ‘a good man’, and his efforts are met not with scorn but with cheering. Spike reclaiming the despised William aspects of his personality parallels Angel reclaiming the despised Angelus aspects of his, as well as tying in with Angel’s mournful conversation with Harmony about trying to remember what it’s like to be human. Angel claims to have forgotten what it was like (though I suspect it’s more a case of sour grapes) but Spike clearly still remembers all too well. Interestingly, Spike is the only character who is sent not only on a mission of death but also of rescue. He’s the one who gets to fetch the baby, the ultimate symbol of innocence and hope. As he cradles the child in his arms, Spike observes that it’s lucky he’s on a diet, a nicely ironic reminder that for all that he now saves innocents, he’s still a vampire, still feels the bloodlust (and a nice contrast with Harmony, sipping a glass of something that sure as hell isn’t otter blood as she snuggles up to Hamilton). The baby also reminded me that the very first time we ever saw Spike, he killed a child. Admittedly it was the Anointed One, but he still looked like a little boy. This time around, he’s saving one.
Wesley, of course, doesn’t have a perfect day, but he, too, revisist his roots nonetheless. His gentleness and tolerance towards Illyria (‘You’re a very inspirational person’) is in marked contrast to his handling of Faith, but his situation nonetheless reminds him of his time with the Watcher’s Council. The fact that there is nothing Wesley wants to do points up his total lack of persnonal hope. It’s not that he doesn’t think Angel can achieve anything worthwhile, he just doesn’t believe anything will ever make him, personally, happy again. He wants, as Illyria observes, to be with Fred and he can’t be, ever. Fred’s soul was ‘consumed in the fires of resurrection’. There will be no reunion for them, now, or in any other dimension. He goes to tackle Vail certain that he will die, so certain that he has prepared a kind of suicide weapon, a form of magic that is triggered by his own mortal wound and which does, indeed, nearly manage to take out Vail (I absolutely loved the line ‘I crap better magic than that’, by the way). Dying, he allows Illyria to lie to him, to assume Fred’s form and promise him that soon he will be where she is and they will be together, and he dies knowing that it was all a lie, that has already seen Fred for the last time and there will be no reunion. And yet, with magnificent irony, the part of Fred that lives on in Illyria comes nearer to the surface than ever by virtue of this final encounter. Illyria continues to ‘be’ Fred even after Wesley has gone, continues to weep for him, and her superpowered punch at Vail is driven more by personal vengeance than desire to complete the mission. Illyria’s dislike of grief was flagged up in TGiQ – she tells Wesley that his grief hangs from him like rotting flesh and she didn’t want to have to observe the Burkles’ grief – but now she not only observes it from outside, she feels it inside her, and she can’t control it. Her reaction is very Spike-like – it makes her wants to hit something. Hard. Thus, just as the others characters revisit who they once were, so does Illyria. She becomes more Fred than she has ever been before, and the experience changes her in ways she cannot control.
Illyria’s task is to take out Izzy and friends, but the sequence sets us up to expect a car bomb. The camera carefully shows us Izzy belting up and the driver turning the ignition key, before Illyria’s face appears through the windscreen. The next time we see her, she is walking away from the car, which looks very much as if a bomb has gone off in it. I don’t think this is a coincidence. We get to see a little bit of everyone else’s fight, and ME have certainly never been reluctant to show us Illyria in action in the past. It ties in, I think, with Timebomb, in which Illyria was quite literally a bomb, one that took out all of LA on a different timeline, and it’s part of the process of having the characters revisit aspects of their past selves. But Timebomb links in with Not Fade Away on another level as well. In that episode, we were shown that Illria can travel back and forth in time at will (what made her angry and suspicious was that this was happening against her will, not that it was happening at all) and I thought at the time that it was no wonder Illyria understands that identity isn’t fixed, if she can drop in on people at any stage in their lives whenever she wants. Illyria is (or at least was, before she lost her powers) like a person in possession of the full set of DVDs, who can go back to any point in the story she chooses and then zip forward to the end, in the same way, we as can flip back and revisit William confessing his love to Cecily, or Spike running over the Welcome to Sunnydale Sign, or being beaten up by Buffy in an alley, or closing the Hellmouth. And in doing this the episode makes its own medium its subject. Not Fade Away is about fictional characters, how they change and develop over the years, how the audience remembers what they used to be like and how they track those changes, revisiting past episodes and reinterpreting them afresh in the light of new ones. And the ending captures that perfectly, in that abrupt cut away right in the middle of the action, ending the narrative when the story itself is manifestly not yet over. It isn’t a freeze frame ending, like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or thelma and Louise, that stops the story at a point when death is inevitable. It occurs in the middle of the action, as Angel’s sword arm comes down, so that we have every reason to expect another shot, and it thereby draws attention to the fact that this is a narrative. By violating the conventions of closure, it encourages the continuation of the story in another medium. Joss famously observed that once AtS ended, people would have to write fanfic to fill the hole left by its loss, but he designed this ending in such a way that every single viewer is forced to decide how the story (as opposed to the narrative that is the TV series) ends. Let a thousand fanfics bloom, indeed.
Age shall not wither them, nor the years condemn.
- Rupert Brooke
I have quite a lot more to say about Not Fade Away, in particular about the themes of hope/despair and loyalty/betrayal, but I’m really short of time at the moment and this has turned into a really long analysis as it is. I’ll try to tackle the rest some time next week, when my life should be less busy.
This was a wonderfully rich episode, full of connections and allusions and echoes. Fittingly, as the climax to a season that has been profoundly concerned with memory, it revisited not only moments from previous episodes in this season, but also past moments in the series as a whole and in its mother show, BtVS. These allusions to past events not only enriched the episode itself, they also enriched those past moments, altering our appreciation of their significance and enabling us to see them as steps on a journey, part of an ongoing process, not a frozen state. This reflects another key theme of this season, the nature of identity, and the way it changes under the influence of experience, whilst retaining a connection to its former states by means of memories. The careful interweaving of references to previous episodes contributed greatly to the emotional impact, although that would have been pretty powerful even without the triggering of memories of the past. Watching the gang going up against an enemy they knew would kill them (and knowing it was the last episode ever, so there was no financial reason to preserve any particular character) took away the security blanket the series structure usually provides. Any of them could have died taking out their particular target, and sure enough Wesley did. Wesley’s goodbye to Fred was a real tearjerker, and Lorne’s goodbye to Lindsey utterly shocking. And the cut away in the alley, at the very start of the last great fight, was very moving too, leaving you wanting to know more and yet grateful that you’d been spared what could only have been a terrible ending; leaving you, by virtue of ending the narrative before the story itself had finished, the tiny note of hope that maybe it didn’t end there after all, that maybe some of them lived to fight another day.
The themes of memory and identity, of how experience changes us and yet we remain essentially ourselves, come to fruition in this episode, which concentrates on the individual characters as individuals, not just as members of the MoG. Not once but. twice the team is fragmented, firstly when Angel sends them out to spend their last perfect day, and they all choose to go different ways, and then again when they are sent off to tackle their individual target villains. Each character, apart from Angel whose path follows a slightly different trajectory, chooses to spend his last day returning to his roots. Lorne goes back to sing in a bar, Gunn revisits Anne (and possibly, off-camera, his old gang buddies, who are hanging around somewhere), Wesley talks to Illyria about his early training by the Watchers’ Council whilst treating her wounds (strong shades of a Watcher’s function there) and Spike performs the poem he wrote for Cecily in Fool for Love at a poetry slam. It isn’t a question of going back to the beginning, returning to who they once were, because they’ve all changed so markedly since then, but by touching base with their former selves they illustrate both how much they’ve changed and how much they’re still the same. It’s worth looking at those scenes in a little more detail, because they are so packed with allusions and connections that they repay close observation.
Lorne sadly sings a song about the world and what it would be like if he were in charge. It’s a scene that acquires an entirely new significance after his murder of Lindsey – Lorne is about to commit a terrible act, and he hates himself and the world for it. Heroes may not accept the world as it is, but Lorne has to. He wants to help Angel make a difference, but the price is his own innocence, and though he pays that price, it’s too much for him, he has to leave afterwards and he doesn’t want anyone coming looking for him. All season, Lorne has been feeling displaced and useless, unable to make a real contribution, with even his talent for reading people becoming unreliable, and it’s profoundly ironic that come the last battle, the only contribution he can make is to murder someone who is, however temporarily, one of their own side. His shooting of Lindsey is shocking, coming as it does completely out of left field, and it’s Lorne’s own reaction to it that spells out clearly for us what a terrible deed this is. Lorne must bear full responsibility for what he does (‘I was only following orders’ hasn’t been a valid excuse since the Nuremberg trials), but Angel bears equal reponsiibilty, since he issued the orders. Lorne tells Lindsey ‘This was Angel’s plan,’, and Angel knows that Lindsey will not be coming back for Eve (and his cold way of informing her of this is quite breathtaking). So was the assassination justified? Watching Angel’s conversation with Lindsey when he asks him to join the team, it seems to me that Lindsey signed his own death warrant when he failed to listen to Angel, confident that the Cliff Notes would suffice. That, I think, was the point at which Angel decided that Lindsey wasn’t part of the solution, and as the saying goes, ‘If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem’. There, in a nutshell, is the basis for Angel’s decision. Lindsey wasn’t fighting for the good guys, he was fighting for himself, for the prospect of taking over W&H, not (unlike Angel) because he thought he could exploit them for good ends, but because he wanted the power. Just as (again, unlike Angel) he had tried to become a member of the Black Thorns not as part of a plan to take them out, but because he wanted the power. Given Lindsey’s motivations and history, Angel’s decision to have him eliminated is strategically sound, but it is also, as Lorne says, ‘unsavoury.’ Angel stabs Lindsey in the back when he’s fighting on his side, taking advantage of Lindsey’s misguided belief, as expressed to Eve, that Angel won’t touch him as long he’s on the team. The process of reintegrating Angelus into Angel’s identity, begun in Power Play, is taken much, much further in this episode. Lindsey’s situation parallels Harmony’s and echoes Lawson’s in Why We Fight – all three are evil, all three look as if they have hope of redemption (Harmony even states explicitly that she wouldn’t have betrayed Angel if he’d had confidence in her, and though this has to be taken with a very large pinch of salt, it does raise explicitly the question of how far Angel might have been able to redeem these people had he not been so sure they were unsaveable). Mercy, though, is not one of Angel’s great qualities. It took him a good half of the season to come gradually to trust Spike, in spite of knowing that he had a soul, and his initial solution to the problem posed by the presence of both Spike and Illyria was to have them killed. I think a major reason for this lack of mercy shown to the guilty (as opposed to the boundless help he offers to the innocent) is that he doesn’t believe he’s worthy of mercy himself. He’s still ‘the biggest mass murderer you’ll ever meet’ and he’ll never be able to change that, to alter the past and its consequences. That’s why he was so eager to help Nina before she had killed someone, because as far as Angel’s concerned once you step across that boundary, you’re lost. His one hope of redemption lay in the Shanshu prophecy (in my view it’s not so much the becoming human part that matters to him, as the washing away of the sins he committed in his soulless state), but he is required to sign this away in order to prove his ‘loyalty’to the Circle. Angel is initially afraid that they will ask him to kill Spike as a test of loyalty (just as Gunn and the rest of the MoG are afraid that Drogyn isn’t the only friend Angel will be willing to sacrifice), but it turns out that Evil thinks in more selfish terms. They don’t test him by asking him to kill a friend, they test him by asking him to give up something of value to himself, his hope of redemption. And of course Angel signs, because if he’s come this far, how could he do otherwise? How could he kill Drogyn in the name of his cause and then back out when his own future is threatened? It’s a little unclear exactly how signing a document can prevent the Shanshu prophecy from applying to Angel (the Circle are hardly likely to be the powers responsible for conferring it, after all) but my own personal reading is that what Angel does in this scene is sign away his soul to the Senior Partners. Redemption via Shanshu won’t help him if his soul belongs to the forces of evil. And so he gears up for the last battle without personal hope, knowing that no matter what he does he can’t escape hell, and the consequences of this lack of hope are extremely grim. With nothing left to lose, certain that he has no prospect of personal redemption, Angel no longer struggles to keep Angelus repressed, and adopts a strategy in which all that matters are the ends. The means by which those ends are achieved are not important, and thus he stains his soul with Lindsay’s blood. Angel is fighting on the side of good but he is not himself good. Unlike Buffy, he sacrifices his own moral integrity in order to achieve his goal. His vamping out in order to defeat Hamilton is, of course, symbolic of this embrace of the Angelus aspect of his own nature, and it enables him to win that particular fight, but the implications for his moral trajectory are deeply disturbing. Spike’s mention of the Shanshu at the end, and his insistence that he will be the one to get it, remind us that he, at least, hasn’t given up the hope of redemption, and perhaps he has always wanted it more than Angel – the only time he has ever defeated him in a fight was over the Cup of Perpetual Torment in Destiny, and Angel himself interpreted that to mean that the Shanshu was more important to Spike than it was to him. But before we rush to the conclusion that the prophecy applies to Spike after all, it’s worth revisiting Soul Purpose. In Angel’s dream, when Spike gets the Shanshu, he says in genuine surprise ‘But I didn’t do it for a reward,’ to which Wesley responds ‘That’s why you deserve it!’ Paradoxically, by giving up the Shanshu, Angel makes himself worthy of it (at least in his own subconscious). He is fighting, not because it will bring him any personal gain, but purely for the sake of others, for all the innocents the Black Circle will no longer prey on, and he’s willing to sacrifice his soul to achieve that end (‘Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his soul for anonymous victims’). Ultimately, it remains as unclear as ever whether Angel or Spike has a better claim to the Shanshu and whether either of them will ever achieve it.
Whew. I did say that everything was interconnected, and that this makes a linear analysis a bit difficult, but if you bear with me I’ll get onto the next characters and their ‘perfect day’.
Gunn I have least to say about because my knowledge of his backstory is so limited, but his question to Anne is clearly extremely significant. Like Angel, he’s confronting the issues of hope and purpose. He wants to know if the sacrifice he’s about to make has any point, and he’s developed an extremely dark world view, namely that this plane of existence is controlled by powers that will never let things change for the better, that ensure that man’s inhumanity to man rolls ever onward. Anne tells him that even if this is so, the fight is worth fighting. You may not be able to end the reign of evil for ever, but you can win tiny victories here and now. You can save one life here, rehabilitate one junkie there. Giving money to a homeless man won’t solve the problem of homelessness, but it will buy him a good meal for that one night. Building a rehab shelter for drug addicts won’t stop organised crime, but it will save a few individual lives, and, as the Jewish saying goes, he who saves one life saves the whole world. This is why I can’t see Angel’s decision to sacrifice himself and the MoG in an attempt to take out the Circle as pointless. Instead I see it as a very accurate reflection of the state of the real world. We are never going to be able to change those aspects of human nature that lead to war and oppression, and though we could end famine, I doubt if we ever will, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to stop individual wars, shouldn’t donate money to help refugees and famine victims, because here and now that makes a difference, even if it changes nothing in the long run. Angel’s sacrifice is not in vain, stopping the Circle in their tracks may not change the cosmic balance of power, but it does a hell of a lot of good here and now. Having found the answer to his question, Gunn the Vampire Slayer goes off to tackle precisely the kind of institutional corruption that led to his own fall from grace. Had it not been for the shock of Fred’s death, he might well have found himself on the Senator’s campaign team, so it’s fitting that he’s the one who takes them out, not with his supercharged legal knowledge courtesy of W&H but with a couple of ‘City of...’ style stakes and his street fighting skills.
Spike’s choice of activity for his last day comes as almost as much of a surprise as Lorne’s turning on Lindsey. Gleefully the writers set us up to expect that he’s going to spend the day brawling – there he is, in a rough tough biker bar, ordering a few glasses of dutch courage and talking about the rough crowd – only to pull the carpet from under our feet with the poetry slam. Spike returns to his William roots, to the personality he tried so hard to repress, and acknowledges not only his poetry but the love he felt for Cicely. The fact that the next poem is to be ‘The Wanton Folly of Me Mum,’ not only ties in nicely with the references he’s made in past episodes to how traumatic it was to have his mother ‘come on’ to him after she was turned (traumatised enough to write poetry about it, apparently), it also clarifies something implied by Angel’s remark that he liked Spike’s poetry. Apparently Spike didn’t stop writing after he was turned, and the fact that he seems determined to perform a series of poems, each dedicated to one of the women he has loved, suggests that he may also have got on to Dru and Buffy. This time around, of course, he’s not the desperately insecure would-be lover who nonethless knows that he’s ‘a good man’, and his efforts are met not with scorn but with cheering. Spike reclaiming the despised William aspects of his personality parallels Angel reclaiming the despised Angelus aspects of his, as well as tying in with Angel’s mournful conversation with Harmony about trying to remember what it’s like to be human. Angel claims to have forgotten what it was like (though I suspect it’s more a case of sour grapes) but Spike clearly still remembers all too well. Interestingly, Spike is the only character who is sent not only on a mission of death but also of rescue. He’s the one who gets to fetch the baby, the ultimate symbol of innocence and hope. As he cradles the child in his arms, Spike observes that it’s lucky he’s on a diet, a nicely ironic reminder that for all that he now saves innocents, he’s still a vampire, still feels the bloodlust (and a nice contrast with Harmony, sipping a glass of something that sure as hell isn’t otter blood as she snuggles up to Hamilton). The baby also reminded me that the very first time we ever saw Spike, he killed a child. Admittedly it was the Anointed One, but he still looked like a little boy. This time around, he’s saving one.
Wesley, of course, doesn’t have a perfect day, but he, too, revisist his roots nonetheless. His gentleness and tolerance towards Illyria (‘You’re a very inspirational person’) is in marked contrast to his handling of Faith, but his situation nonetheless reminds him of his time with the Watcher’s Council. The fact that there is nothing Wesley wants to do points up his total lack of persnonal hope. It’s not that he doesn’t think Angel can achieve anything worthwhile, he just doesn’t believe anything will ever make him, personally, happy again. He wants, as Illyria observes, to be with Fred and he can’t be, ever. Fred’s soul was ‘consumed in the fires of resurrection’. There will be no reunion for them, now, or in any other dimension. He goes to tackle Vail certain that he will die, so certain that he has prepared a kind of suicide weapon, a form of magic that is triggered by his own mortal wound and which does, indeed, nearly manage to take out Vail (I absolutely loved the line ‘I crap better magic than that’, by the way). Dying, he allows Illyria to lie to him, to assume Fred’s form and promise him that soon he will be where she is and they will be together, and he dies knowing that it was all a lie, that has already seen Fred for the last time and there will be no reunion. And yet, with magnificent irony, the part of Fred that lives on in Illyria comes nearer to the surface than ever by virtue of this final encounter. Illyria continues to ‘be’ Fred even after Wesley has gone, continues to weep for him, and her superpowered punch at Vail is driven more by personal vengeance than desire to complete the mission. Illyria’s dislike of grief was flagged up in TGiQ – she tells Wesley that his grief hangs from him like rotting flesh and she didn’t want to have to observe the Burkles’ grief – but now she not only observes it from outside, she feels it inside her, and she can’t control it. Her reaction is very Spike-like – it makes her wants to hit something. Hard. Thus, just as the others characters revisit who they once were, so does Illyria. She becomes more Fred than she has ever been before, and the experience changes her in ways she cannot control.
Illyria’s task is to take out Izzy and friends, but the sequence sets us up to expect a car bomb. The camera carefully shows us Izzy belting up and the driver turning the ignition key, before Illyria’s face appears through the windscreen. The next time we see her, she is walking away from the car, which looks very much as if a bomb has gone off in it. I don’t think this is a coincidence. We get to see a little bit of everyone else’s fight, and ME have certainly never been reluctant to show us Illyria in action in the past. It ties in, I think, with Timebomb, in which Illyria was quite literally a bomb, one that took out all of LA on a different timeline, and it’s part of the process of having the characters revisit aspects of their past selves. But Timebomb links in with Not Fade Away on another level as well. In that episode, we were shown that Illria can travel back and forth in time at will (what made her angry and suspicious was that this was happening against her will, not that it was happening at all) and I thought at the time that it was no wonder Illyria understands that identity isn’t fixed, if she can drop in on people at any stage in their lives whenever she wants. Illyria is (or at least was, before she lost her powers) like a person in possession of the full set of DVDs, who can go back to any point in the story she chooses and then zip forward to the end, in the same way, we as can flip back and revisit William confessing his love to Cecily, or Spike running over the Welcome to Sunnydale Sign, or being beaten up by Buffy in an alley, or closing the Hellmouth. And in doing this the episode makes its own medium its subject. Not Fade Away is about fictional characters, how they change and develop over the years, how the audience remembers what they used to be like and how they track those changes, revisiting past episodes and reinterpreting them afresh in the light of new ones. And the ending captures that perfectly, in that abrupt cut away right in the middle of the action, ending the narrative when the story itself is manifestly not yet over. It isn’t a freeze frame ending, like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or thelma and Louise, that stops the story at a point when death is inevitable. It occurs in the middle of the action, as Angel’s sword arm comes down, so that we have every reason to expect another shot, and it thereby draws attention to the fact that this is a narrative. By violating the conventions of closure, it encourages the continuation of the story in another medium. Joss famously observed that once AtS ended, people would have to write fanfic to fill the hole left by its loss, but he designed this ending in such a way that every single viewer is forced to decide how the story (as opposed to the narrative that is the TV series) ends. Let a thousand fanfics bloom, indeed.