Joss Whedon Showed Us How Horrible He Was The Whole Time, Part 3: How The Final Season of Angel Showed Us Just How Much Whedon Viewed Mankind With Contempt

 

Angel was always thematically darker than Buffy and the series true demonstration of that began in the middle of its second season. The first part of the second season dealt with the resurrection of Darla (Julie Benz) the vampire who sired Angel in the middle of the eighteenth century, by Wolfram and Hart. After spending much of that part tormenting him, it was revealed that Darla, still a human was dying of syphilis. After a failed attempt by Angel to save her, she was turned back to a vampire by Drusilla (Juliet Landau) who Angel and Darla themselves had changed to a vampire in 1860. The winter finale ended with Darla and Drusilla turning on the higher-ups of Wolfram and Hart and – in one of the great moments in television history – Angel leaving them to be massacred.

Angel’s dissent into darkness carried on for much of the second half of the season and seemed to be destined to end in what amounted to a suicide mission by Angel to the ‘Home Office’ of Wolfram and Hart to deal with the senior partners. In true Whedon fashion, his transportation was an elevator (complete with Musak all the way down) and Holland Masters (Sam Anderson), one of the lawyers who had died at Darla’s fangs in the elevator. (As he put it: “I’m quite dead. Unfortunately, my contract with Wolfram & Hart extends well beyond that.) After admonishing Angel about what he hopes to accomplish all the way down, the elevator doors open – and Angel is right back where he started on the streets of LA. The message is that Earth is essentially hell and that exists if every person: “if they didn’t have evil in them somewhere, they wouldn’t be people. They’d be angels.”

This was a very dark message to be certain, and perhaps to make sure we didn’t linger on it very long, Angel and the series he was a part of went into much lighter territory for the remainder of the second season.  The viewer was inclined to either forget it or dismiss it as the talk of a representative of evil incarnate, and its not like either of Whedon’s series ever gives you much time to think. But eventually Whedon would come back to this message very clearly two seasons later – and essentially spend the rest of Angel more or less doubling down on it.

I went into some detail about the fourth season of Angel  above and because it’s so utterly convoluted, I’m not going to try and summarize here. Instead, I’ll settle for what amounts to the key arc. By the final third of the season, the ultimate ‘Big Bad’ behind the apocalyptic forces that have been laying waste to Los Angeles and by extension the world have been revealed to be part of a way to lead the birth of Jasmine (Gina Torres) an elder being who takes on the appearance of the divine, and to whom anyone who hears her voice immediately falls under her spell. We very quickly learn that there is more to it than that – she regularly devours people for sustenance and as the final episodes of the seasons progress, it becomes clear she is essentially an elder demon bent on world control. Angel manages to end up thwarting her by the penultimate episode, and as chaos unfolds around LA, Jasmine is slaughtered by Connor who is technically her father (you really don’t want to know.) Angel returns to the hotel where the squad has set up headquarters and while they are still fumbling to recover, Lilah shows up to congratulate them for ‘ending world peace.” (Lilah was murdered halfway through the season but she works from Wolfram and Hart, see above.)

In the final episode of the season, Lilah tells them Wolfram and Hart is offering them a reward for the actions. But its not because they saved the world. No, its because by defeating Jasmine they thwarted Wolfram and Hart in the only way they could – they made sure that world peace would never be achieved.  Angel points out that Jasmine subverted everyone’s free will, and Lilah dismisses this as a bad thing basically telling them this is the only way peace was possible. As to sacrifice of all the people she eats, they are told relatively speaking that’s a small price to pay.

At this point it is very clear that Wolfram & Hart essentially believes in the Hobbesian view of man; that they are inherently untrustworthy and evil and that they can only be controlled through absolute sovereignty. In itself, this is not an uncommon belief throughout much of many protagonists throughout television in the decades to come: Gregory House and Rust Cohle of True Detective  had a similar dark view of human nature, and near the end of Lost, the Man In Black would reveal very clear that he thought the exist same thing.  But by putting this message where it falls in Angel – and in context with the final season of Buffy ­ - as well as if with everything about both show’s general attitudes as well as everything that unfolded to the characters to this time, it becomes clear just how bleak Whedon view is of not only nature, but everything his characters have been doing to this point. It’s one thing to engage in a never ending struggle to stop the forces of darkness from destroying the world (and considering how oblivious anyone who is a series regular seems to be to all the evil around them, they are not getting much out of the fight), it’s quite another to fundamentally argue that at the end of the day, it might just be better for the people you’re protecting if the bad guys just won. Amazingly not only do none of the characters who are considering Lilah’s offer even fight her much on the logic, they never even argue with the idea for the rest of the series, constantly trying to justify everything they do as a result.

Which in the final season of Angel amounts to taking the offer. All of them fundamentally justify what they are doing as trying to change the system from the inside, but it becomes clear over the course of the final season that each of them are fundamentally being corrupted by the presence of Wolfram and Hart. The newly constituted team of Slayers reject helping them because they no longer trust them; every week it becomes clearer they are becoming more comfortable with their position, and not even Fred being transformed into Illyria or the arrival of Lindsay (Christian Kane, a former attorney for the firm not seen since Season 2) initially convinces them to change their ways. It is only in the penultimate episode of the series that Angel convinces them that his behavior has been cover for an action to take on the Circle of The Black Thorn (a last minute new Big Bad that seems pulled out of thin air)  and destroy them. No one even pretends this will do anything halt or even slow evil for long, and Angel essentially admits going in it’s a suicide mission: even if their attack ends successfully, they will be slaughtered by the counterattack.

The only attempt to try and argue that any of this is essentially worth their time comes in one of the final scenes when Gunn pays a visit to Anne Steele, a semi-recurring character throughout both series. Anne has had perhaps the most successful character growth of any character on the show. She started out back in Season 2 as Chantarelle, essentially a vampire groupie who Buffy ended up saving when she learned the harsh truth. In Season 3’s ‘Anne’ Buffy who had run off to LA after sacrificing Angel, meets ‘Lily’ in a diner where she is working, and through their interaction, gives Buffy a new sense of purpose and Lily now takes Anne’s name. We see her twice in Season 2 where she is now running a homeless shelter and is well aware of the supernatural (she identifies Angel right off) but is now living her life for the people she tries to take care of.

Gunn visits her and helps her unload groceries and supplies for the shelter. Gunn asks her flat out what she would do if she knew all of this was pointless and the world was going to end. Anne does not hesitate she’d do exactly what she was doing right now and keep on helping the people she cared about.

I won’t lie, this is inspirational and moving. But its force is negated incredibly by two scenes that take place not long after. Lindsay, now recruited to the light side, has completed his mission and is hopeful about finally having chosen the side of good. But Lorne (the late Andy Hallett) the demon from Pylea who has been fighting alongside Angel for the last three season, dismisses this entirely, telling him that they can never trust him before pulling out a gun and shooting him in the chest. (I should add Lorne is the only regular by this point who shows anything resembling integrity; before they all go to the final battle, Angel tells them if they survive to meet them back at the hotel. Lorne tells him he’ll do what he’s been told but then he’s done with them. He is the only regular we know for certain who walks away from the fight alive and who basically rejects everything the remainder of the gang is doing.)

The final scene, where the bleeding and bruising survivors intend to head into fighting against forces that will certainly slaughter them without thinking, is supposed to serve as some kind of motivation. The fact that Angel wants to slay a dragon is supposed to signify that he is taking on the role of a knight is supposed to be him seizing his quest, and the fact that the series ends before the slaughter with Angel saying: “Let’s go to work”, was considered at the time profoundly inspirational. Maybe it is if you choose to see it that way. In a larger context I found myself wondering: who’s going to take over the fight once they’re gone? How much destruction will the forces of evil wreak before they are sure Angel and the gang are dead? And maybe most importantly, will Anne’s shelter still be standing when it’s over?

And if there was any doubt left in your mind that Whedon had little use for either of the characters created actions or the fights they engaged in, the authorized comic that followed a few years after both series would fundamentally those thought to bed. How much Whedon was directly involved with either will never be clear; the fact that they started out as Season 8, 9, etc. before splitting into multiple branches does not leave much room for doubt they were following in his ‘vision’. I read Season 8 of Buffy before throwing up my hands with the series. Occasionally when visiting a book store I would look at the occasional compilation and become further disgusted.

A brief summary will suffice: three years after the final season of Buffy, the new slayers are being targeted. The military is going after them, led by a masked figure named ‘Twilight’ (yes, this is Joss being cute) Harmony, a vampire who kept switching the sides becomes a media sensation and vampires become considered heroes and the people who haunt them villains. ‘Twilight’ is eventually revealed to be Angel (how this fits into his own comic series I never found out) who has been ordered by the Powers to destroy Buffy for the ‘greater good’. When he does, they are pissed. The ‘Season’ ends with Giles dying (don’t worry, he gets better) Buffy destroying the seed of all magic and every slayer who was created, except for Buffy and Faith losing their powers.

All of this is bad enough before I tell you all the truly ridiculous things the comics end up doing to the characters besides that this season alone: Dawn spends much of the season experimenting with magic and spends it either as a giant or a centaur, Buffy travels to the future and experiments with lesbianism, Xander and Dawn end up dating and every other relationship goes to hell. I don’t think I was shocked when it later season Giles came back as a child or that Spike was back as a ghost. At a certain point, I fundamentally began to question how many of the writers were on drugs or just decided to do whatever the hell they wanted that they didn’t have the budget for on the WB.

To be fair, I have never like any authorized comic book continuation of a series, whether they were Buffy, X-Files, Smallville or what-not. At the end of the day, I find them little more than authorized fan-fiction and as someone who spent years writing the stuff I’m irked that people can make money from this.  And I have no idea even now, how much involvement Whedon and anyone connected with the series has with the comics. But the reason I think that many of them were made with his say so is that every part of Whedon’s nature is present.  It is the point of view that he held when the series was on the air that the fight is endless, that it is pointless, and eventually all the relationships you build will end up fracturing. (The last time I read any of Buffy comics, none of the main characters were so much as speaking to each other.) And its on brand for what we know about Whedon as a showrunner, a bully, and a control freak, now able to do whatever he wants with the characters created without any restrictions, having to pay the actors who created his character, or having to take their feelings into account at all. He might have his characters argue that they aren’t puppets, but in these comics he can treat them like they are.