Love is
sacrifice.
In "S4x01 - Deep Down" Angel says this to Connor: "Nothing in
the world is the way it ought to be. It's harsh and cruel, and that's why
there's us. Champions. It doesn't matter where we come from, what we've done or
suffered, or even if we make a difference. We live as though the world were as
iut should be. To show it what it can be. You're not a part of that yet. I hope
you will be. I love you, Connor. Now get out of my house."
And the stage is set for a mad season of crazy fun.
In this mad dash to the end of the season, in which a rogue pregnancy had to be
accounted for as well as every laundry list item from the Shanshu prophecy, a
Slayer sprung from prison, a hot live wire of a thief achieves character arc
completion, the sun restored to the heavens, as not only a giganimous rock
Beast needs to be overcome but also a messianic love goddess that eats people,
Connor is trying to figure out how he fits into all of this.
Angel tells him up front. He doesn't.
As of "S4x20 - Sacrifice," Connor has made up his own mind on that
score. As he says to Angel in the opening sequence, "I'm finally part of
something. I belong. And I won't let anyone ruin that."
Jasmine emphasized the theme of belonging: "To belong, to truly be a part
of something, you have to surrender to it. Cordelia has done that."
Aside: AHA! So Cordy was struggling at first. It seems to bear out my
argument in past JASMINE WATCH segments of trying to gauge Cordy's struggle with
the thrall growing inside of her.
In his efforts, Connor is the guy with his ear to the tracks who can't hear the
train until three cars have crushed his skull. He's part of Something, yes, but
he refuses to acknowledge the pain that Something is causing.
And who can blame him? Team Angel itself, knowing only part of the truth, are
suffering the worst drudgery in fighting it. One wonders if they were aware,
beyond the mind control, beyond what Gunn characterized as the druglike nature
of Jasmania -- heck, they don't even acknowledge, horrified, what they were
prepared to do to to each other when they were under her thrall -- that she ate
people to maintain that giddy joy they all felt.
Would it have strengthened their resolve? Looking around, Fred could only see
the happiness that they were separated from. If they knew that people -- people
with as perfect and legitimate a claim to existence as their own -- were dying
for that happiness -- would that have made a difference?
Maybe. It's a pity that none of them knew. I'm not entirely certain they find
out. We'll find out soon enough.
But the show has started building Wolfram&Hart's case. As they flee the
hotel, Jasmine comes walking toward them, and from the perspective inside the
car, she's still tall and willowy and beautiful. But from the perspective
inside the car, she should've appeared in her true form. By the time Lilah
accuses them of destroying world peace, her argument can almost make sense.
The running and fleeing plan was absolutely doomed to failure. There is no
"warning" against Jasmine. Even Fred's initial idea about creating a
synthetic analog to Jasmine or Cordelia's blood so as to break the spell was
gonna be a tough sell.
Finding a hiding place in the sewers left them in the best place,
storylinewise, to stage a counteroffensive. Waiting for Jasmine to eat enough
of the First Citadel of Jasmine to cast a thrall out to, say, Belize is simply
unsatisfying.
Incidentally, why is everyone out of breath just by climbing down a ladder?
They've been sitting in a car for a while, and the manhole entrance was,
y'know, just there.
Jasmine had to eat half a dozen people to heal Connor. How much for a cancer
ward? Hell, she could just eat the ward. But instead of the old, sickly and
infirm, she's gaining her strength from the young and the vibrant.
GETTING META: Jasmine said, through a pod person, that they were hurting her
just by existing. That's another attack on organized religion -- rout out the
infidel, destroy him.
Angel said "Hearts get in the way. If we don't gut ourselves, burn out
everything that gave her power over us we'll never make it."
"Dieu le vuelt," yes? "It is G-d's will!" It was the
battle cry for the first millenial Crusade. The Crusaders had to destroy their
humanity to rain down the kind of destruction they felt was demanded of them by
G-d. There's no way you can kill a person, destroy a city, without the
concommitant regrets if you are facing people and cities. They must become, in
one's own mind, evil. Infidel. Team Angel needed to destroy its own humanity in
sacking The First Citadel of Jasmine.
Fred's reaction to that was a heartbreaking foreshadowing to the loss we'd
experience in Season 5. "Is that the world we're fighting for? The right
to be heartless, to be an uncaring shell, to be dead inside?" When Gunn
accuses her of ignoring her humanity in their murder of Professor Seidel, she
says: "What we did, I felt it. Every bit of it. And sometimes when I allow
myself to think about it, it eats me up inside.
"And I don't know about you, but I'd take that over being a shell any
day."
What Jasmine is about is about power. It makes her giddy. When she gets off the
phone with the governor (and why she needed a phone is beyond me) "The
state now answers to me. It's happening. Don't you feel it? This world is about
to kneel before me aand shed all its avarice, all its woe. I will free them
from the loneliness. From the empty horror of their lives. They won't know what
hit them. We will live in a palace built by the love of millions. It will make
the pyramids of Giza look like the headstones in a pauper's graveyard. It's
going to be beautiful."
I think she is getting worse. Maybe Mr. Nasty and Kev were right. Maybe she
started out with good intentions and when she started melding with humanity and
eating some of us, maybe she started absorbing the sinful self-interested
nature of her followers and it's manifesting in her actions. In the same breath
she talks about taking away our greed, our avarice, she's talking about the
glorious temple she's going to build to herself, with no irony whatsoever.
But again, Jasmine hasn't fought a single demon, and she hasn't stopped a
single murderous thought. Quite the contrary. When Matthew is brought back into
the fold, she tells the Goldman gang that Gunn hit him "again and
again." Which is just untrue. And she incites mob violence against Gunn,
Fred and Lorne. And in that moment, that violence just seems right and good and
fun to them.
Jasmine is all about feeling good. There's no sacrifice in Jasmania. There's
only a singleminded will to win. The prevailing attitude following
disenchantment is regret and loss. Meaning that what she gave was some kind of
supplement, or a painkiller.
Wes said, on their way to ... well, the next scene: "I miss the warmth,
and the knowing what's right, and that you're doing it just by loving
her."
Well, no, not exactly. You're doing it just by bending unquestioningly to her
will. Thereby she rewards you with the soma. The sweet, sweet elixir of doing a
bunch of potentially even awful things but not ... caring overmuch about
them.
Joss seems to be defining his own morality. You don't get to kill people and
steal and commit unspeakable horrors and then look to the sky and say
"Oops" and everything's OK again.
But in the Jossverse, even if you do what you do because an evil demon is
walking around in your corpse, there's no forgiveness. There's always a Holtz
who shows up at the worst possible time to remind you that no matter how often
you save the world and how many puppies you save, you still haven't atoned for
the crimes of murdering his family. Y'know what? There is no recompense
for Holtz. And there's no excuse for what he did to Angel's son, either.
Two wrongs did not make a right in that case, and as has been said from time
immemorial, "An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind."
I .... prefer what Joss calls in a speech by Kate in "S1x06 - Sense and
Sensitivity" a beautiful lie. I choose to worship a G-d who can
forgive because we as human beings are simply too fallible and earthly justice
is too limited. If we knew we were making account to a loving, merciful and
above all forgiving G-d, even if it is intellectually unsatisfying, that's the
world I choose to live in.
OF ALL THE GIN JOINTS IN ALL THE WORLD: In their hours of wandering around
beneath the city, Team Angel encounters a trap set by the Goldman gang, who
lost a member, Tommy, fighting ... well, let's call him Scorpio, since he's so
bashful with names. The Goldman gang leads them back to where they lost Tommy
and Wesley is taken by Scorpio.
Scorpio's presence in L.A. is odd, but I guess he's tracked Jasmine to this
dimension, in this space, nearby. Why he's torturing a vamp making blood magic
rather than presenting his worship to Jasmine is .. a little strange, but I
guess he's preparing a sacrifice.
Sacrifice. What he says love means -- "same as all bodies. Same as
everywheres." Well, it'd be a better word if people had any say in it. I
get that the people might actually be happy to sacrifice themselves, but
something about the effect Jasmine's thrall has on the higher reasoning centers
makes me very suspicious about that.
So is Jasmine's thrall acceptable -- a religious leader who makes you believe
everything's OK because she says it is? Well, even in the theology of
Christianity there's sacrifice. In a more exact parallel, Jasmine would
be the one dying.
SIDE NOTES: Wes (after Fred talks about naming them): "It seems strange
now." -- Which suggests that when she was explaining herself, they were
under a thrall that made them unwilling or unable to question her.
CORDELIA: Fred can't believe they forgot about her, and Angel says: "Do
it. Forget about her. We all have to now. We don't have a choice." That
was as much to the fans, I think.
Connor's reaction is interesting to me. He spends the rest of the episode
suspicious that Jasmine has eaten Cordy. But he still does her bidding. Even
out of a contact buzz, even on his own, Cordy still matters to him. But when he
gives up his pain, when he goes after them, down in the sewer, when Jasmine is
able to speak through him in the same way she does through all of her
followers, Connor fights with a fervor he didn't have after he thought Cordy get
eaten.
THE OTHER WORLD: Angel steps through a portal into the Other World. The Older
World. The world Jasmine ... left.
Our future, ladies and gentlemen. The devastation of a singleminded purpose.
There was this eerie lack of industry when Gunn and Fred found Matthew -- empty
streets in the middle of the day, two trash collectors and a skateboarder. In Los
Angeles.
This Other World seemed to be one potential result of everyone worshipping
Jasmine without any care for anything else. Just build Jasmine a temple. A big
temple. No, an even bigger one. Consume all resources. Nothing else matters.
The demonstrated result? A populace of crazed junkies desperate for a fix, of
those who loved her first, jonesing like mad and unable to even address
the hellscape she's left in her wake.
Sacrifice, yes. But of what?