But you know I think I recognize your face But I've never seen you before

Oasis- actually that's a more optimistic version of 'Origin', in which the perspective is "But you know I don't recognise your face/ Though I've seen you many times before". Rather than the joy of someone you don't know seeming right, there's the strangeness of even the people nearest to you.

From... The Ballad of Reading Gaol

Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

Some kill their love when they are young,
And some when they are old;
Some strangle with the hands of Lust,
Some with the hands of Gold:
The kindest use a knife, because
The dead so soon grow cold.

Some love too little, some too long,
Some sell, and others buy;
Some do the deed with many tears,
And some without a sigh:
For each man kills the thing he loves,
Yet each man does not die.

Oscar Wilde- who claimed there is only good writing and bad writing. Were this true, his writing would be close to the best of all. Sadly for him then, he's wrong.

So there.

Hello everyone. I'm tempted to do a review of Wilde's poetry instead of this episode, but I'll trudge along. Heaven knows, if I don't do it soon, I might get inadvertently spoiled...;-)

5.18- 'Origin'

I was thrown a curveball by this episode, which I was expecting to be the point of the Season, and was handled as an interesting diversion on the road to the two things which will presumably now take centre stage- Angel's Wolfram and Hart position, and Illyria's identity and similarity to Fred. I expected this episode to be a little more weightier, a bookend with 'Home'. But perhaps I expected to much, and certainly my inner prejudice that what Angel did to Connor was wrong, (what I like to call my Inner Masq), would have expected more comeuppance in this arciest of shows. Instead, I got a sweet little potboiler episode.

While themes are bumbling through this episode quite amiably, they don't ever build to a point of climax that makes for an emotionally resonant conclusion. Instead we get something that is barely more than a puzzle for our final scene: I would have expected a little more legerdemain from Drew Goddard.

What he does do elegantly is continue the parallel constructed by Craft and Fain in the previous episode- between Wesley, Gunn and Angel. Each are working out how to survive after the death of something- in Wesley's case Fred, in Angel's Connor, and in Gunn's, his ability to believe he is a Good Man. And each in different ways, and throughout the episode, will come to terms with the fact that the loss is very real, but will negotiate the terms of that loss so that it seems just a little easier to bear.

We start on Wesley, smelling of frustration, (an apposite and beautiful non-metaphor for scotch), looking at Illyria examining the world. He is still trying to understand how Fred is dead when the body walking next to him looks identical. And while Illyria shares Fred's memories, she is an a certain sense still a part of Fred. 'We are more than a summation of our recollections', Illyria almost insists- and yet Fred, with memory changed in 'Home' was still accepted as the same person by an unknowing Wesley. So here we have a double-jointed fence, all wiggly and cumbersome. Three Freds: pre-'Home', post-Home-pre-'Shells', post-'Shells'. And then we start wondering about Pylea, and about how she set out from Texas, the open road in front of her, and life seeming like an endless ball of twine spread out before her feet. How did Pylea affect her memories of her small-town life? Since we don't remember everything we do, and much of what we do remember we remember in what could be argued as a false manner, how much qualitative difference is there between Fred and Wesley with their memories of Connor and without them. Was Fred's first change larger than her transformation into Illyria? Memory and past misdemeanours float away, ephemeral somehow, quicksilver reveries.

And so to Gunn. We see some unnecessarily hideous images of him in the basement this time. Or are they? What does the gore show? It connotes the heart of a warrior, being ripped out day after day. This is because, at least in part, Gunn doesn't believe that he is a Warrior anymore. He doesn't deserve the heart he used to own, now that he's made his selfish mistake, he thinks to himself. In the retold myth, Sisyphus wants to roll the boulder up the hill for all eternity; this, not just cruel fate, is the real tragedy. And so for Gunn, the position is like this new Sisyphus, precisely: he doesn't have to have his heart ripped out, but he believes he should. It makes his pain less, and he wants to atone, he wants to have pennance. That his atonement is impossible without the full knowledge of the facts is an issue probably to be dealt with in the next episode. Because by the end of this one, Wesley is coming to terms with the results of his returned memory, and Angel is biting into what it means to be an absent father all over again.

The tragedy of Angel. In this episode, we see the 'Real' Prophecy fulfilled. The one born of the vampire comes to age and kills Sahjhan. And yet, how many times has the three couplets 'The Father/ Will Kill/ The Son', come true, or been hinted at, in the previous two years? In 'Home', there's death of a kind. Then there are ironic reflections with Spike in 'Just Rewards' and Lawson in 'Why We Fight'. What matters about prophecy anyway? Is the point of Vail's introduction to show us the madness that comes of believing in prophecy and fate? We think about Angel, and if any part of him wanted to go to Wolfram and Hart because of the Shanshu prophecy. Did he then Kill the Son just to aid his own position. We are certainly given a subtext of this in the fight. Angel bows to Vail's blind belief in prophecy and puts his son in mortal danger. He is being blackmailed, but the object of the blackmail is that Vail reveal the past. The incontrovertible past, that, much more than prophecy, is inescapable. Angel opts for belief in certainty in the future, rather than the belief of reality in the past. And while he can't look back to his past mistakes, he will never cope with his future problems.

It's a lucky old twist then, that Wesley has so much lost faith with the world that he smashes the Orlon Window, and having peered through the glass, starts to adapt to how the past really was. What he could never have accepted from Angel would have been Angel sacrificing Fred for Connor. In the situation where that was not true, he was still unable to trust Angel any more. He tries, unsuccessfully, to argue with Illyria earlier that he is not being insolent towards Angel. But while Angel goes on blindly believing in prophecies and Eternal Rewards, Wesley has lost trust in his elder and better. Wesley, as a parallel is running along a little ahead of Angel in this Season: the more battered, the more cynical, and, ultimately, the more enlightened.

Away from this triptych, here are some other meanderings:

-Vail. Sounds like: Veil. Spelt backwards. Liav. Spelt backwards and written in my illegible handwriting- Liar. Vail built Connor, into a real boy, A Pinnochio whose nose would never lengthen regardless of how much he lied (unknowingly) about the past. Angel makes a liar of his own son, after Vail enacts the transfer. Here we have a man so ritualistically tied to prophecy. His name is in 'Accounts Paid' for having re-made Connor. His world is Action, and Reward. Prophecy and Enactment. An entirely deterministic world where free will takes a back seat. Sahjhan, the trickster of Season Three, the bloke who took Connor to Quortoth thereby thwarting all four likely results, (Wolfram and Hart, Angel, Wesley, Holtz), would like to return to upset the applecart. As the trickster, he appears as the Genie of the Lamp. The demon who can make the unreal possible. In reality, though, anyone this flighty gets the Hammer of Prophecy staked against them. The question is: in a world where everyone believes in Prophecy, how impossible is it to live without believing in it, even if you are right? This is a Question crucial in understanding Middle Ages religion, in understanding the Universe of Angel, and in understanding Sahjhan's fate. He causes all sorts of mayhem by faking a prophecy. But in the end, due to others unremitting belief in the truth of the future, he dies anyway, thwarted by Society's inability to accept that the future is to be decided. This is what makes Connor being a good argument for Free Will so wonderfully noir.

-Hamilton. More threat in a little finger than Eve had in her entire body. Looking liek some kind of magnificent undertaker, he struts around. Now the apocalypse has been claimed to have begun, Wolfram and Hart's form lingers larger round Angel, and Hamilton shows this- one of the very few people ever on Angel to be significantly taller than David Boreanaz.

-Connor Riley. Clearly, we're supposed to think, living the 'Life of'. I think that's the hint, rather than any relation back to the big solider man. Though Connor has moments of dangerous sadism, he is really a well-adjusted boy. Hence the irony of all Angel and Connor's scenes together. He reacts calmly, even with a humour that he never had in the previous Season, (Connor may be the only regular character never to have cracked a joke, even a dry one). At the end we haev the odd moment of ambiguity. Did Connor just mention his Father as Angel, or not so. Given so many significant looks, we are supposed to think so. After all, Connor validates his father's decision. It may be a little too generous to Angel, whose decision was morally reprehensible, but this time, he goes back to his family, and to Stanford, having made his own choice. Now, as Sahjhan foreshadows, Connor really does have his own free will. Neither God nor Angel are now playing dice with his universe- he goes into his next throw with all the facts intact.

And so, more or less, do our Gang. Angel knows the past, and he knows other people know, and that Connor has not only the alternate past, but the initial past. Vail's option stands as the Past of Determinism and forgotten events. Wesley's past, ever the anarchist, stands for the Past of Free Will and redemption. That Wesley should smash the Orlon Window gives him a strong and healthy parallel to Alterno!Giles right back in 'The Wish'. He had to believe that there was a better world. But since we're in 'Angel', the world isn't simply better- just different, and the struggle continues.

-Nice shot-work de semain: The first shot on Connor's parents, swinging round onto Wesley rather than Angel, emphasises the parallel neatly, without wasting too much unnecessary time.

-Wesley finds the contract in a similar filing cabinet to the one where he found Lilah's contract. 'Flames wouldn't be eternal if they actually consumed anything', is possibly my favourite line of the entire series, (the last four of 254 permitting), but here Wesley refuses to let his living flame: that little hope he told Illyria about at the end of 'Shells' die out. He does, eventually, void the contract.

-We're Spike'n'Lorne-lite this week. Spike is carrying on with his unenviable task, regardless of Fortune's buffets and rewards. That's the way to do it Angel. Lorne pops in just to be the Green Monster. Which is a shame, but still highlights Angel's complete lack of self-reflection. He's doing, not considering. This episode is plot heavy, thought light, which is exactly Angel's problem.

This one didn't hit me in the visceral way it perhaps should have, but it had moments of Goddard's almost lazy genius, like 'Your thirty pieces of silver'. Now Angel is Judas, and Wesley takes back the memories that make him Brutus, as he remembers how he stole Connor. An interesting slant.

The Giftish montage reminds us of the sheer length of time since Season three, and how much these characters have developed. And makes me, at least, more than a little melancholy.

So four to go, and 'Time Bomb' coming shortly.

Thanks for reading.

TCH