AtS season 4: the end
Sep. 12th, 2004 02:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenak"I gotta tell you, kid," says Sahjan to Connor in the season 5 episode Origin which I just had to rewatch after Home to soothe myself, "you make a great argument for free will."
He does, but not in the way Sahjan means it.
After Connor made his fatal choice in Inside Out and Jasmine has been born, Shiny Happy People comes as a complete surprise to the first time viewer. We go from the literal as well as figurative darkness of the previous episode (and most of the season) into LA in sunshine and the Hyperion in daylight, with only a few nighttime scenes in between. Instead of Angel & Co. fighting the opponent who now finally has revealed herself, they kneel down in front of her and praise her. As for the opponent in question, she sounds like a cross between a Californian New Age kid and a Baptist preacher. Instead of setting Connor and Angel up to fight another, as possessed Cordy has done, she now urges them, and Wesley and Gunn, to love and forgive each other.
This just has to be a trick.
One of the many elements of greatness season 4 has is the fact that it's not. Or not in the way a first time viewer might suppose.
Jasmine really isn't after more chaos and destruction. She does want everyone to love each other (and herself, especially herself). As opposed to, say, the Mayor of Sunnydale, my favourite BTVS villain, who was quite sincere in his homilies but whose ultimate plan for the students of Sunnydale at least was to end up as dinner, Jasmine sees the fact she occasionally consumes humans, and even all the havoc wrought before her birth, as incidental necessities to bring a greater purpose on the way. Consuming humans isn't the point; the point is to become Queen of a Heavenly Earth. Despite the occasional jabs, the Jossverse scribes all have read their Anne Rice; Angel and the rats in the Becoming flashbacks and William and his mother in Lies my parents told me are two of the more obvious homages to the early Vampire Chronicles. Jasmine could be much like Akasha, the very first vampire in the Anne Rice cosmos and the title character of the novel The Queen of the Damned, Akasha who thinks she can justify her existence and all the deaths she brings by creating a grand and war-less utopia.
As a Babylon 5 fan, Jasmine also immediately reminded me of the Vorlons, not just because of the way she looks in her tentacly form. The Vorlons see themselves as the forces of order, and have imprinted the younger races so that whenever they reveal themselves, they are seen as something divine out of the religion of the younger race in question. (Unless they're too busy fighting for their lives, which is when we see the real, tentacly energy form.) They're none too keen on the concept of free will and eventually ready to sacrifice millions to defeat the forces of chaos.
Shiny Happy People isn't all Jasmine bringing peace on Earth, either. Fred's obsession with serving her new goddess inadvertently brings the accident which enables her to see Jasmine's true face and to lose the love and adoration she felt until then. If you consider that in Spin the Bottle, it was Fred who went for the giant conspiracy theory, and that she actually did live in a world for a while where everyone was her enemy and seeing her as cattle, the fact that she ends up as the first heretic and isolated from the group, with everyone out to get her, is extremely fitting in a cruel Jossian way.
As mentioned in an earlier entry, I can't praise Gina Torres enough because Jasmine could easily have come across as ridiculous or unbelievable. Instead, she manages to convey both the charisma and the creepiness behind the loving smile. (Later, she'll also convey the anger and the loss, but we'll come to that.) This is Galadriel who has taken the Ring, and all shall love her and despair.
"You're a Power That Was?" Gunn asks, and the audio commentary of Inside Out has Steve DeKnight calling Jasmine "a fallen Power" as well. Presumably, this means that the story she tells Our Heroes, about having left the other Powers because she could no longer see the suffering of humans ("it was we who failed you") without intervening is true as far as it goes. Her argument, here more subtly than she'll put it later to Angel in Peace Out, is the one the Great Inquisitor puts to Jesus in The Brothers Karamanzov. People want bread. They don't want freedom, they want bread. The Augustinian justification for the existence of Evil is that it's necessary so there can be Free Will, but people don't want free will. They want to be free of free will. And if some have to die so that the masses can lead well-fed, happy, pleasurable lives, well, that is a necessary sacrifice.
The Powers That Be don't get exactly good press in this season of Angel; Fred calls them "The Power That Screw You" in the very first episode, and the only sign we get they might be interested in the welfare of mankind generally and Our Heroes specifically at all is when Darla appears to Connor in Inside Out. And Darla's appearance could theoretically be ascribed to other sources. All of which serves to make Jasmine's self-justification not as easily dismissable as it would have been if that season had done what DS9 did with the Prophets and the Pagh Wraiths instead of going for the Vorlon approach. We still don't agree with Jasmine, of course. As Angel says in Peace Out, the price is too high. But then, that's easy for us to say. If we lived in Rwanda or Sudan and had our family and friends butchered on a daily basis, we might take a different approach.
The Magic Bullet, the second episode of the final act, opens with a glimpse of blissful, happy, sunny LA under the sway of Jasmine… until we get to Fred, who is being hunted down by Wesley and Gunn, the men who loved her. But not as much as they love Jasmine now. Among many other things, these episodes also serve as religious satire; it's impossible not to be amused by radio announcements like the one about the dioceses of Los Angeles having decided to cast out the false idols and to put in depictions of Jasmine in their churches ("Go, Catholic Church" the radio announcer comments cheerfully), or by the "why I love Jasmine" declarations in the Hyperion (which cover the more modern Protestant factions in the US if you ask me). Speaking of the later, Angel and Connor singing "Jasmine" to the tune of "Mandy" together is a work of comic genius as well. Even if it makes me gulp in sadness after smiling, because they're so happy together here, and as we learn later that Connor did not in fact lose his free will, it's obvious that he craved that kind of father and son interaction.
(Also, one of these days I'll write the "Angel teaches Connor how to sing Mandy" drabble.)
The short scene in which Angel and Connor try to find Fred underground, and Connor explains how Holtz taught him to track is heartrending, precisely because of the matter-of-fact way Connor tells the story; to him, the fact he was tied up on a tree at age 5 and told to free himself and find Holtz on his own in a hell dimension is not something special or horrible or abusive, it is the way it was.
(And how is this for continuity and eeriness: when Cyvus Veil tells Angel about a fake memory he "built" for Connor in Origin, he says it was Connor, at age 5, getting lost in the supermarket, trying to find his parents again, only in Veil's fake story, the one that produced Happy!Functional!Connor, he was found by his mother and swept up in the arms of his father.)
"The Magic Bullet" of the episode title is several things. The name of the bookshop where Fred does not find help but does ultimately find the means to end her isolation, a reference to the Kennedy assassination (writer and director Jeff Bell did an audio commentary in which he said that Jasmine's revelation to the bookstore owner that "Oswald acted alone" wasn't "necessarily my opinion, because as we all know the truth is out there - sorry, wrong show - but it had to be the most devastating news this guy could hear"), and the way Fred is able to make Angel see the truth. The last, btw, is one rare instance in which a tv show manages to show instead of tell that someone is a genius. The problem with characters described as geniuses is that this is hard to confer without making them annoying or into the solution to every problem. Here, Fred figuring out that Jasmine's blood is the key, and how to infect Angel with it, is earned.
Of course, the trick with the bullet only works one time, so Fred and Angel hit upon the next idea - that Cordy's blood could have a similar effect, due to her being Jasmine's mother. (BTW, this rationale also makes it likely Connor's blood would immunize as well, and that thus he can't be really under Jasmine's sway, but we're not quite there yet.) And we're off to the next blasphemic religious imagery with Anne Rice echoes - the blood of comatose Cordy, "the transcendent Mother" as one of Jasmine's devotees calls her, healing the afflicted. (Check out The Vampire Lestat for "Those Who Must Be Kept".) (And the holy communion metaphors, naturally.) Which leaves everyone suitably depressed but free of the Jasmine thrall. Everyone but Connor, for whom, in the cliffhanger of the episode, this does not work. "And this is where the end starts for him," Jeffrey Bell comments, "where we realize he really is different, that he can't be saved." Well, not by the truth anyway.
Sacrifice brings back the dark imagery of the earlier season episodes. We're mostly underground now, save for the scenes back at the Hyperion with Connor and Jasmine. Jasmine calls Connor "father" for the first time here, after she has healed him from Angel's beating. Still, smiling, happy Connor from Shiny Happy People and Magic Bullet is gone, though. Now that the entire gang is on the other side again, led by his father, he's back to brooding despair and that completely messed up love and hate he feels. We see him sitting at Cordelia's bedside (before Jasmine removes her), but Cordelia is silent and unapproachable and can't help him anymore. Jasmine wants him to give her his pain, and he agrees to do it, but as we see later, this doesn't work. The pain, the one constant of his life as she states, doesn't leave until the windwipe.
Meanwhile, Angel tries to repress all his pain and despair, which horrifies Fred who states, in a conversation with Gunn about their shared guilt in the death of Professor Seidel, that she'd rather have the horror and the guilt she feels than not to feel at all. I think this is a bit of foreshadowing of Fred's season 5 function as the heart of the group as well as a meta comment. Of course, the meta is riddled with contradictions. The alternative to pain in these last episodes isn't feeling nothing at all, it's the artificial bliss and happiness Jasmine creates. And then, in the very last episode, it is the loss of memory. "I have her memories, her feelings. Doesn't that make a person?" asked Darla in Inside Out. Does it? "Are you Wesley now?" asks Illyria in Origin when Wesley, in addition to his season 5 pain caused by the loss of Fred, has gotten his memories of him and Angel failing each other in season 3 back.
"The world is harsh and cruel," Connor repeats Angel's "Deep Down" speech in Peace Out, states that Angel and friends need it to be that way to give their lives meaning and says he doesn't want the pain anymore. He just wants to rest. We can also throw in Spike's and Buffy's sung exchange on the subject of pain and living from Once More With Feeling into the bargain for good measure. In the Jossverse, you have to accept the pain if you want free will into the bargain, a most Augustinian concept for a self-confessed atheist. But then again, sometimes you might just go for a temporary reprieve.
Peace Out is probably my favourite of David Fury's not-comedic episodes and the finest series finale he ever wrote. (As Home, much like Restless in season 4 of BTVS, is not really a finale but both a coda and a set-up for the new season.) It kills me every time. In the midst of the darkness, you have the occasional humour, like Gunn quoting Galaxy Quest ("Never give up, never surrender!" - these Jossverse scribes are such wonderful geeks), or Jasmine's "A temple would be nice" when being asked what the world can do for her (and Gina Torres' dead pan delivery is perfect), but by and large, we're in Greek Tragedy country here, with Connor, Jasmine and Angel as the principal characters.
As long as Jasmine possessed Cordy, Cordy had done everything to ensure Connor would put her and their baby first of everything, and loved them most of all. Presumably, it never occurred to Jasmine that there might be a situation where love for Cordelia and love for Jasmine would no longer lead Connor to the same conclusions. Wesley and Fred both realise this weakness and pointedly ask Connor about Cordelia, which leads him on his quest to find her again. Jasmine's assurance that she's fine and unharmed aren't enough anymore, which should have been a big sign to her that one of the two people on Earth she can't harm is having severe doubts about her, but Jasmine is swept up in her hubris and certainty of victory, as surely as any figure of a Greek tragedy ever was.
So Connor ends up finding Cordelia in a church, wrapped in a shroud as Romeo finds Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, on the altar like the image of a dead saint. The Transcendant Mother indeed. And as befits a tragic hero, here he reveals his inner thoughts in a soliloquy. The new world of peace and wonder she promised the last time she spoke to him, the world that would justify everything, is nearly there.
"That is what you wanted, isn't it?" he asks. "That is why you came to me." And with that last sentence shows that he doesn't think anymore, if he ever did, that she came to him because of love, or sympathy, or even pity. And he can't believe in the ultimate purpose anymore, either. He knows Jasmine is a lie, just as everything else in his life was. "But she was a better lie than the others."
And the irony is this: the one truth in all this, the fact that his father loves him, is something Connor will not be able to accept and really understand until the biggest lie of all, the mindwipe, has taken place.
It's fitting that the key to break the thrall of Jasmine (but not to defeat her entirely) is her true name. The power of names and truths is a popular topos in myths (and fantasy literature). It's very relevant to what can be called Angel's blood family. Angel himself has several names - Liam, Angel, Angelus (though the later only became a separate designation in the third season of BTVS - in the first and second season, the characters use "Angel" and "Angelus" for both the souled and unsouled version without distinction). Darla cannot remember her original human name, only that it wasn't her present one. William chooses the name of Spike to escape his old identity. (What are the chances that Drusilla was actually called Drusilla when alive?) Connor is Stephen as well, and will aquire a new last name soon. And Jasmine only became Jasmine because of her love for these nightblooms. (Which in itself is a lovely tie-back to both season 2 of BTVS, where Drusilla called them that and added "like us", meaning her, Spike and Angel, and to season 2 of AtS, where Darla, waiting in the very same place where Angel will talk to both Cordy and Jasmine later, commented on how she loved their scent as well.) She's the Devourer, as Connor is the Destroyer, and Angel is the Scourge of Europe. And she is that whose name cannot be spoken by anyone save a severed head.
With the destruction of Jasmine's thrall, Los Angeles sinks back into its every day violent chaos. "I wanted paradise," Jasmine challenges Angel. "You chose this!" Which is true, and yet it's Jasmine who fails the ultimate test, as Angel offers her to try and make the world a better place without enslaving it. If the sake of the world outweighed her love of self, she would have been able to accept. But she doesn't. She chooses revenge on Angel instead.
It is very fitting that it's still not Angel who finally ends her life. Of all the people Jasmine hurt, the two she used most and twisted inside out were Cordelia and Connor. It had to be one of the two who would destroy her. In a final tragic irony, Connor is presumably the one being in the universe who loved Jasmine out of his own free will. (Cordy certainly didn't.) Seconds before killing her, he affirms he loves her still, and you know, I don't think he's lying. And it's this one being whose birth she engineered, who is more her creation than anyone else on earth thanks to the way she manipulated and corrupted him, whom she called for in her first experience of loneliness and despair, it's this one person who still loves her after her spell has been broken and who loved her before, seeing her quite clearly, who kills her.
The series never tells us just why he does it. As an act of self-destructive nihilism? Because she was about to kill Angel? Because he had overheard her earlier threats and knew she could and probably would kill thousands more in her disappointment? Maybe for all of these reasons, and maybe even because he still loves her, and because Jasmine, as opposed to Connor, never lived with pain and cannot handle it at all. Angel will make a Faustian bargain to end the pain of his son, and the gesture in which, as he says, he proves he loves his sun will be to cut his throat as a start for the mindwipe spell, to "kill" old Connor. It might very well be that Connor does something similar for his daughter her.
To repeat something I wrote in my original review last year: Joss and Marti have said more than once that Buffy's "love interest" in season 5 was her sister, Dawn. The tie between Buffy and Dawn was the emotional core of season 5. Similarly, Angel's "love interest" in season 4 isn't Cordelia. It is Connor, and the father/son relationship is its emotional core. Both Buffy's inability to kill Dawn in The Gift and Angel's decision not just to accept the W&H deal but to demand a new, mindwiped life for Connor, mindwiping everyone else but himself (and the W&H liaisons) in the process, have been hotly debated. Both choices were probably not the right choices, but in these particular situations, they were the only choices for both Buffy and Angel.
Home, Tim Minear states in his commentary, was explicitly intended as a pilot for season 5, to convince the WB to pick up the show again. It has a lot of set-up, most of all the basic idea of W&H offering their LA branch to Angel as a reward for ending world peace, as Lilah puts it (and to corrupt him, naturally). Also the first Gunn storyline I was really interested in and fascinated by. But it's also a coda for everything that went on before. The Ballad of Wesley and Lilah gets its last refrain, and Wesley trying to free Lilah by burning her contract, and Lilah telling him "it means a lot that you tried" ends it on a surprising note of melancholic grace. (Incidentally, Lilah mentions early on in the episode that she'll go straight back to hell once the deal is made, so leaving the unavailability of Stephanie Romanov in season 5 for whatever reasons aside, her absence there makes show sense.) And Angel ends up fulfilling a prophecy that was originally faked.
"We always knew that the character would only last a season," Tim Minear states, "and at first we wanted to end his arc in a much more brutal Mordred fashion. But then we grew too fond of both the character and the actor. And we figured that hey, someone ought to get a happy ending."
A complete Mordred ending would presumably have meant Angel killing Connor for good. (Also I guess at that stage Cordy was still supposed to be the one to kill Jasmine, and Connor would have died while being firmly in the villain camp.) What we get instead is more complicated. Regarding the early scene between Connor and the cop, Minear says that it was intended to show that Connor was conflicted still, that there was good in him, that he was acting out of a sense of responsibility and guilt (because he knew the cop was in this state due to losing Jasmine), wishing to save the man. Until the cop reveals himself as a family man, and Connor, to whom parents committing suicide have become the red button, snaps. When we see him again, much later, he has reached complete breakdown.
The scene with Angel and Connor is, imo, David Boreanaz' best acting on either show. Including the legendary first take on Angelus and everything else he did. It's impossible not to feel with Angel here, and not to understand emotionally why he does what he does. Tim Minear comments that David Boreanaz and Vincent Kartheiser both gave each time during the eight to twelve takes it took to film this (because of the different angles necessary) their all, each time with the full intensity, and that it was an incredible experience for everyone involved. No kidding. It tears me up each time I watch it. "You tried to love me. I think you did." And "You cannot be saved by a lie. You cannot be saved at all."
"Prove it." And he brings down the knife.
After Fred's "Who is Connor?" has informed us something far more than accepting the deal has happened with the A.I. crew, we get the tag scene, which brings us back to where the season started: Angel watching a cheerful, happy family dinner. It is Connor with new parents, aunt and kid sister (that's how they're named in the credits, though Origin will identify the parents as Lawrence and Colleen Riley), a Connor has everything Angel wanted him to have, and has lost the pain that had destroyed him - at the price of his memory. Connor makes the toast Wesley made in the dream sequence of Angel's which started the season: "To family."
For Angel, watching from the eternal outside, that is enough.
He does, but not in the way Sahjan means it.
After Connor made his fatal choice in Inside Out and Jasmine has been born, Shiny Happy People comes as a complete surprise to the first time viewer. We go from the literal as well as figurative darkness of the previous episode (and most of the season) into LA in sunshine and the Hyperion in daylight, with only a few nighttime scenes in between. Instead of Angel & Co. fighting the opponent who now finally has revealed herself, they kneel down in front of her and praise her. As for the opponent in question, she sounds like a cross between a Californian New Age kid and a Baptist preacher. Instead of setting Connor and Angel up to fight another, as possessed Cordy has done, she now urges them, and Wesley and Gunn, to love and forgive each other.
This just has to be a trick.
One of the many elements of greatness season 4 has is the fact that it's not. Or not in the way a first time viewer might suppose.
Jasmine really isn't after more chaos and destruction. She does want everyone to love each other (and herself, especially herself). As opposed to, say, the Mayor of Sunnydale, my favourite BTVS villain, who was quite sincere in his homilies but whose ultimate plan for the students of Sunnydale at least was to end up as dinner, Jasmine sees the fact she occasionally consumes humans, and even all the havoc wrought before her birth, as incidental necessities to bring a greater purpose on the way. Consuming humans isn't the point; the point is to become Queen of a Heavenly Earth. Despite the occasional jabs, the Jossverse scribes all have read their Anne Rice; Angel and the rats in the Becoming flashbacks and William and his mother in Lies my parents told me are two of the more obvious homages to the early Vampire Chronicles. Jasmine could be much like Akasha, the very first vampire in the Anne Rice cosmos and the title character of the novel The Queen of the Damned, Akasha who thinks she can justify her existence and all the deaths she brings by creating a grand and war-less utopia.
As a Babylon 5 fan, Jasmine also immediately reminded me of the Vorlons, not just because of the way she looks in her tentacly form. The Vorlons see themselves as the forces of order, and have imprinted the younger races so that whenever they reveal themselves, they are seen as something divine out of the religion of the younger race in question. (Unless they're too busy fighting for their lives, which is when we see the real, tentacly energy form.) They're none too keen on the concept of free will and eventually ready to sacrifice millions to defeat the forces of chaos.
Shiny Happy People isn't all Jasmine bringing peace on Earth, either. Fred's obsession with serving her new goddess inadvertently brings the accident which enables her to see Jasmine's true face and to lose the love and adoration she felt until then. If you consider that in Spin the Bottle, it was Fred who went for the giant conspiracy theory, and that she actually did live in a world for a while where everyone was her enemy and seeing her as cattle, the fact that she ends up as the first heretic and isolated from the group, with everyone out to get her, is extremely fitting in a cruel Jossian way.
As mentioned in an earlier entry, I can't praise Gina Torres enough because Jasmine could easily have come across as ridiculous or unbelievable. Instead, she manages to convey both the charisma and the creepiness behind the loving smile. (Later, she'll also convey the anger and the loss, but we'll come to that.) This is Galadriel who has taken the Ring, and all shall love her and despair.
"You're a Power That Was?" Gunn asks, and the audio commentary of Inside Out has Steve DeKnight calling Jasmine "a fallen Power" as well. Presumably, this means that the story she tells Our Heroes, about having left the other Powers because she could no longer see the suffering of humans ("it was we who failed you") without intervening is true as far as it goes. Her argument, here more subtly than she'll put it later to Angel in Peace Out, is the one the Great Inquisitor puts to Jesus in The Brothers Karamanzov. People want bread. They don't want freedom, they want bread. The Augustinian justification for the existence of Evil is that it's necessary so there can be Free Will, but people don't want free will. They want to be free of free will. And if some have to die so that the masses can lead well-fed, happy, pleasurable lives, well, that is a necessary sacrifice.
The Powers That Be don't get exactly good press in this season of Angel; Fred calls them "The Power That Screw You" in the very first episode, and the only sign we get they might be interested in the welfare of mankind generally and Our Heroes specifically at all is when Darla appears to Connor in Inside Out. And Darla's appearance could theoretically be ascribed to other sources. All of which serves to make Jasmine's self-justification not as easily dismissable as it would have been if that season had done what DS9 did with the Prophets and the Pagh Wraiths instead of going for the Vorlon approach. We still don't agree with Jasmine, of course. As Angel says in Peace Out, the price is too high. But then, that's easy for us to say. If we lived in Rwanda or Sudan and had our family and friends butchered on a daily basis, we might take a different approach.
The Magic Bullet, the second episode of the final act, opens with a glimpse of blissful, happy, sunny LA under the sway of Jasmine… until we get to Fred, who is being hunted down by Wesley and Gunn, the men who loved her. But not as much as they love Jasmine now. Among many other things, these episodes also serve as religious satire; it's impossible not to be amused by radio announcements like the one about the dioceses of Los Angeles having decided to cast out the false idols and to put in depictions of Jasmine in their churches ("Go, Catholic Church" the radio announcer comments cheerfully), or by the "why I love Jasmine" declarations in the Hyperion (which cover the more modern Protestant factions in the US if you ask me). Speaking of the later, Angel and Connor singing "Jasmine" to the tune of "Mandy" together is a work of comic genius as well. Even if it makes me gulp in sadness after smiling, because they're so happy together here, and as we learn later that Connor did not in fact lose his free will, it's obvious that he craved that kind of father and son interaction.
(Also, one of these days I'll write the "Angel teaches Connor how to sing Mandy" drabble.)
The short scene in which Angel and Connor try to find Fred underground, and Connor explains how Holtz taught him to track is heartrending, precisely because of the matter-of-fact way Connor tells the story; to him, the fact he was tied up on a tree at age 5 and told to free himself and find Holtz on his own in a hell dimension is not something special or horrible or abusive, it is the way it was.
(And how is this for continuity and eeriness: when Cyvus Veil tells Angel about a fake memory he "built" for Connor in Origin, he says it was Connor, at age 5, getting lost in the supermarket, trying to find his parents again, only in Veil's fake story, the one that produced Happy!Functional!Connor, he was found by his mother and swept up in the arms of his father.)
"The Magic Bullet" of the episode title is several things. The name of the bookshop where Fred does not find help but does ultimately find the means to end her isolation, a reference to the Kennedy assassination (writer and director Jeff Bell did an audio commentary in which he said that Jasmine's revelation to the bookstore owner that "Oswald acted alone" wasn't "necessarily my opinion, because as we all know the truth is out there - sorry, wrong show - but it had to be the most devastating news this guy could hear"), and the way Fred is able to make Angel see the truth. The last, btw, is one rare instance in which a tv show manages to show instead of tell that someone is a genius. The problem with characters described as geniuses is that this is hard to confer without making them annoying or into the solution to every problem. Here, Fred figuring out that Jasmine's blood is the key, and how to infect Angel with it, is earned.
Of course, the trick with the bullet only works one time, so Fred and Angel hit upon the next idea - that Cordy's blood could have a similar effect, due to her being Jasmine's mother. (BTW, this rationale also makes it likely Connor's blood would immunize as well, and that thus he can't be really under Jasmine's sway, but we're not quite there yet.) And we're off to the next blasphemic religious imagery with Anne Rice echoes - the blood of comatose Cordy, "the transcendent Mother" as one of Jasmine's devotees calls her, healing the afflicted. (Check out The Vampire Lestat for "Those Who Must Be Kept".) (And the holy communion metaphors, naturally.) Which leaves everyone suitably depressed but free of the Jasmine thrall. Everyone but Connor, for whom, in the cliffhanger of the episode, this does not work. "And this is where the end starts for him," Jeffrey Bell comments, "where we realize he really is different, that he can't be saved." Well, not by the truth anyway.
Sacrifice brings back the dark imagery of the earlier season episodes. We're mostly underground now, save for the scenes back at the Hyperion with Connor and Jasmine. Jasmine calls Connor "father" for the first time here, after she has healed him from Angel's beating. Still, smiling, happy Connor from Shiny Happy People and Magic Bullet is gone, though. Now that the entire gang is on the other side again, led by his father, he's back to brooding despair and that completely messed up love and hate he feels. We see him sitting at Cordelia's bedside (before Jasmine removes her), but Cordelia is silent and unapproachable and can't help him anymore. Jasmine wants him to give her his pain, and he agrees to do it, but as we see later, this doesn't work. The pain, the one constant of his life as she states, doesn't leave until the windwipe.
Meanwhile, Angel tries to repress all his pain and despair, which horrifies Fred who states, in a conversation with Gunn about their shared guilt in the death of Professor Seidel, that she'd rather have the horror and the guilt she feels than not to feel at all. I think this is a bit of foreshadowing of Fred's season 5 function as the heart of the group as well as a meta comment. Of course, the meta is riddled with contradictions. The alternative to pain in these last episodes isn't feeling nothing at all, it's the artificial bliss and happiness Jasmine creates. And then, in the very last episode, it is the loss of memory. "I have her memories, her feelings. Doesn't that make a person?" asked Darla in Inside Out. Does it? "Are you Wesley now?" asks Illyria in Origin when Wesley, in addition to his season 5 pain caused by the loss of Fred, has gotten his memories of him and Angel failing each other in season 3 back.
"The world is harsh and cruel," Connor repeats Angel's "Deep Down" speech in Peace Out, states that Angel and friends need it to be that way to give their lives meaning and says he doesn't want the pain anymore. He just wants to rest. We can also throw in Spike's and Buffy's sung exchange on the subject of pain and living from Once More With Feeling into the bargain for good measure. In the Jossverse, you have to accept the pain if you want free will into the bargain, a most Augustinian concept for a self-confessed atheist. But then again, sometimes you might just go for a temporary reprieve.
Peace Out is probably my favourite of David Fury's not-comedic episodes and the finest series finale he ever wrote. (As Home, much like Restless in season 4 of BTVS, is not really a finale but both a coda and a set-up for the new season.) It kills me every time. In the midst of the darkness, you have the occasional humour, like Gunn quoting Galaxy Quest ("Never give up, never surrender!" - these Jossverse scribes are such wonderful geeks), or Jasmine's "A temple would be nice" when being asked what the world can do for her (and Gina Torres' dead pan delivery is perfect), but by and large, we're in Greek Tragedy country here, with Connor, Jasmine and Angel as the principal characters.
As long as Jasmine possessed Cordy, Cordy had done everything to ensure Connor would put her and their baby first of everything, and loved them most of all. Presumably, it never occurred to Jasmine that there might be a situation where love for Cordelia and love for Jasmine would no longer lead Connor to the same conclusions. Wesley and Fred both realise this weakness and pointedly ask Connor about Cordelia, which leads him on his quest to find her again. Jasmine's assurance that she's fine and unharmed aren't enough anymore, which should have been a big sign to her that one of the two people on Earth she can't harm is having severe doubts about her, but Jasmine is swept up in her hubris and certainty of victory, as surely as any figure of a Greek tragedy ever was.
So Connor ends up finding Cordelia in a church, wrapped in a shroud as Romeo finds Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, on the altar like the image of a dead saint. The Transcendant Mother indeed. And as befits a tragic hero, here he reveals his inner thoughts in a soliloquy. The new world of peace and wonder she promised the last time she spoke to him, the world that would justify everything, is nearly there.
"That is what you wanted, isn't it?" he asks. "That is why you came to me." And with that last sentence shows that he doesn't think anymore, if he ever did, that she came to him because of love, or sympathy, or even pity. And he can't believe in the ultimate purpose anymore, either. He knows Jasmine is a lie, just as everything else in his life was. "But she was a better lie than the others."
And the irony is this: the one truth in all this, the fact that his father loves him, is something Connor will not be able to accept and really understand until the biggest lie of all, the mindwipe, has taken place.
It's fitting that the key to break the thrall of Jasmine (but not to defeat her entirely) is her true name. The power of names and truths is a popular topos in myths (and fantasy literature). It's very relevant to what can be called Angel's blood family. Angel himself has several names - Liam, Angel, Angelus (though the later only became a separate designation in the third season of BTVS - in the first and second season, the characters use "Angel" and "Angelus" for both the souled and unsouled version without distinction). Darla cannot remember her original human name, only that it wasn't her present one. William chooses the name of Spike to escape his old identity. (What are the chances that Drusilla was actually called Drusilla when alive?) Connor is Stephen as well, and will aquire a new last name soon. And Jasmine only became Jasmine because of her love for these nightblooms. (Which in itself is a lovely tie-back to both season 2 of BTVS, where Drusilla called them that and added "like us", meaning her, Spike and Angel, and to season 2 of AtS, where Darla, waiting in the very same place where Angel will talk to both Cordy and Jasmine later, commented on how she loved their scent as well.) She's the Devourer, as Connor is the Destroyer, and Angel is the Scourge of Europe. And she is that whose name cannot be spoken by anyone save a severed head.
With the destruction of Jasmine's thrall, Los Angeles sinks back into its every day violent chaos. "I wanted paradise," Jasmine challenges Angel. "You chose this!" Which is true, and yet it's Jasmine who fails the ultimate test, as Angel offers her to try and make the world a better place without enslaving it. If the sake of the world outweighed her love of self, she would have been able to accept. But she doesn't. She chooses revenge on Angel instead.
It is very fitting that it's still not Angel who finally ends her life. Of all the people Jasmine hurt, the two she used most and twisted inside out were Cordelia and Connor. It had to be one of the two who would destroy her. In a final tragic irony, Connor is presumably the one being in the universe who loved Jasmine out of his own free will. (Cordy certainly didn't.) Seconds before killing her, he affirms he loves her still, and you know, I don't think he's lying. And it's this one being whose birth she engineered, who is more her creation than anyone else on earth thanks to the way she manipulated and corrupted him, whom she called for in her first experience of loneliness and despair, it's this one person who still loves her after her spell has been broken and who loved her before, seeing her quite clearly, who kills her.
The series never tells us just why he does it. As an act of self-destructive nihilism? Because she was about to kill Angel? Because he had overheard her earlier threats and knew she could and probably would kill thousands more in her disappointment? Maybe for all of these reasons, and maybe even because he still loves her, and because Jasmine, as opposed to Connor, never lived with pain and cannot handle it at all. Angel will make a Faustian bargain to end the pain of his son, and the gesture in which, as he says, he proves he loves his sun will be to cut his throat as a start for the mindwipe spell, to "kill" old Connor. It might very well be that Connor does something similar for his daughter her.
To repeat something I wrote in my original review last year: Joss and Marti have said more than once that Buffy's "love interest" in season 5 was her sister, Dawn. The tie between Buffy and Dawn was the emotional core of season 5. Similarly, Angel's "love interest" in season 4 isn't Cordelia. It is Connor, and the father/son relationship is its emotional core. Both Buffy's inability to kill Dawn in The Gift and Angel's decision not just to accept the W&H deal but to demand a new, mindwiped life for Connor, mindwiping everyone else but himself (and the W&H liaisons) in the process, have been hotly debated. Both choices were probably not the right choices, but in these particular situations, they were the only choices for both Buffy and Angel.
Home, Tim Minear states in his commentary, was explicitly intended as a pilot for season 5, to convince the WB to pick up the show again. It has a lot of set-up, most of all the basic idea of W&H offering their LA branch to Angel as a reward for ending world peace, as Lilah puts it (and to corrupt him, naturally). Also the first Gunn storyline I was really interested in and fascinated by. But it's also a coda for everything that went on before. The Ballad of Wesley and Lilah gets its last refrain, and Wesley trying to free Lilah by burning her contract, and Lilah telling him "it means a lot that you tried" ends it on a surprising note of melancholic grace. (Incidentally, Lilah mentions early on in the episode that she'll go straight back to hell once the deal is made, so leaving the unavailability of Stephanie Romanov in season 5 for whatever reasons aside, her absence there makes show sense.) And Angel ends up fulfilling a prophecy that was originally faked.
"We always knew that the character would only last a season," Tim Minear states, "and at first we wanted to end his arc in a much more brutal Mordred fashion. But then we grew too fond of both the character and the actor. And we figured that hey, someone ought to get a happy ending."
A complete Mordred ending would presumably have meant Angel killing Connor for good. (Also I guess at that stage Cordy was still supposed to be the one to kill Jasmine, and Connor would have died while being firmly in the villain camp.) What we get instead is more complicated. Regarding the early scene between Connor and the cop, Minear says that it was intended to show that Connor was conflicted still, that there was good in him, that he was acting out of a sense of responsibility and guilt (because he knew the cop was in this state due to losing Jasmine), wishing to save the man. Until the cop reveals himself as a family man, and Connor, to whom parents committing suicide have become the red button, snaps. When we see him again, much later, he has reached complete breakdown.
The scene with Angel and Connor is, imo, David Boreanaz' best acting on either show. Including the legendary first take on Angelus and everything else he did. It's impossible not to feel with Angel here, and not to understand emotionally why he does what he does. Tim Minear comments that David Boreanaz and Vincent Kartheiser both gave each time during the eight to twelve takes it took to film this (because of the different angles necessary) their all, each time with the full intensity, and that it was an incredible experience for everyone involved. No kidding. It tears me up each time I watch it. "You tried to love me. I think you did." And "You cannot be saved by a lie. You cannot be saved at all."
"Prove it." And he brings down the knife.
After Fred's "Who is Connor?" has informed us something far more than accepting the deal has happened with the A.I. crew, we get the tag scene, which brings us back to where the season started: Angel watching a cheerful, happy family dinner. It is Connor with new parents, aunt and kid sister (that's how they're named in the credits, though Origin will identify the parents as Lawrence and Colleen Riley), a Connor has everything Angel wanted him to have, and has lost the pain that had destroyed him - at the price of his memory. Connor makes the toast Wesley made in the dream sequence of Angel's which started the season: "To family."
For Angel, watching from the eternal outside, that is enough.
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Date: 2004-09-12 07:26 am (UTC)But I shall soon.
And then I'll come back and read your reviews. ; )
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Date: 2004-09-12 08:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-12 07:27 am (UTC)This is Galadriel who has taken the Ring, and all shall love her and despair.
Indeed!
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Date: 2004-09-12 08:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-12 11:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-12 11:31 am (UTC)Yes, by all means, have Origin handy. It's a balm after your heart gets torn to shreds again by the tragedy of it all.
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Date: 2004-09-13 12:09 am (UTC)I loved the fourth season as it was airing, but in rewatching back-to-back, I am blown away by how well-structured it is, and also most of all how coherent Jasmine!Cordy's plans are (take that, The First!). When you go into the post-Spin the Bottle eps knowing Cordy is evil at this point makes it so easy to spot the manipulations and games she is playing. The first time through, as it was airing, I thought that it was more a mix of the real Cordy and the Jasminifed one, but seeing it all play out in a short amount of time, it's pretty clear to me that Cordy is pretty much completely suppressed from the moment Lorne restores her memory. When you read all of her actions through the mindset that she is trying to further her own ends, it's clear that even in the scenes where she seems to be behaving nicely or selflessly by consoling another character, for example, it is a manipulation. I do feel for Charisma, though: she must have been very confused as to how to play the part. Not only is she evil but pretending to not be, she isn't even acting like real Cordelia, but S3 St. Cordy. Add to that the fact that in one of the episodes, Awakening, she really is being genuine Cordelia, or at least Angel's perception of Cordelia, and I can see why she had such a tough time. It is a testament to the great writing, directing, etc. that her not-so-great performance for most of the season does not really lessen the impact of the story arc at all.
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Date: 2004-09-13 12:20 am (UTC)Err, very much the later as opposed to the former. I mean, if for whatever reason real Cordy had slept with Connor out of her own free will, can you really see her apologizing for this to Angel by equating it with his deeds as Angelus? Please. At that point at the very latest, if I hadn't known in advance we were in Angel's fantasy, I'd have been yelling at the screen.
RE: Charisma: I think this is one of the reasons why there is such a palpable difference between this and her glowing performance in You're Welcome - she really know whom she was playing in season 5 and felt comfortable with it.
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Date: 2004-09-13 07:58 am (UTC)Yes....I was trying to figure out the best way at the moment to say "not evil". I maybe should have just gone with "not evil"! ;-)
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Date: 2004-09-12 12:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-12 12:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-12 05:27 pm (UTC)That is why you came to me." And with that last sentence shows that he doesn't think anymore, if he ever did, that she came to him because of love, or sympathy, or even pity.
This just broke my heart for Connor, again. *sniffles*
Great reviews!
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Date: 2004-09-12 09:39 pm (UTC)This just broke my heart for Connor, again. *sniffles*
One of the many reasons why I'm glad for Connor's appearances in Origin and Not Fade Away is that we saw he knows now (and emotionally understands) he's being loved.
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Date: 2004-09-12 05:49 pm (UTC)It was interesting to note that the final easing over of Wes and Gunn almost seemed to have been Jasmine, the experience of being in her thrall and it even lasted, as much as can be told, afterwards until the mindwipe. A kind of forced bonding back into a team that finally smoothed over everything. I wonder how they would have done sans mindwipe at Wolfram & Hart, but we'll never know.
And I have very very much enjoyed your reviews, I'm even more looking forward to diving into the season again with all you've written in mind.
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Date: 2004-09-12 09:45 pm (UTC)Someone should do a vid mix with all the scenes on this show when someone (other than Lorne, who is a pro) sings. This would so be the comic highlight.*g*
Wes and Gunn: good point, yes. Post-Jasmine and pre-mindwipe, you can see it when Gunn talks to Wes about Lilah. Which reminds me that there are other factors encouraging the renewed ease - Gunn and Fred were over as a couple and after their kiss, they knew they wouldn't get back together again. Gunn sleeping with Gwen probably confirmed to himself it was over, too. Meanwhile, hearing about Wesley's involvment with Lilah would have pointed out to him that Wesley had other entanglements as well. So no more competing-about-Fred-issues.
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Date: 2004-09-13 05:39 am (UTC)Excellent point about Wes and Gunn. I suppose the "you stole Angel's baby" anger slipped into the competing about Fred anger, and with Connor so present and Angel more forgiving, it was less of an issue anyway.