To understand
the scope of the apocalpyse that was averted, so to speak, by Team Angel,
return with me for a moment to the silent apocalypse envisioned by Holland Manners.
The end of the world is all around us, the hopelessness and despair of the
human condition of scarcity, fear and loathing.
Indeed, while involuntary -- and perhaps baseless -- the hope, peace and love
Jasmine represented marked an endrun around the apocalypse Wolfram & Hart
was planning.
While a Jasmanian thrall might be a terrifying force to people who take their
sense of volition and self-direction
for granted as a sacred birthright of their own humanity -- and could be
reasonably suspicious about the sorts of things that might be demanded of them,
running, as we witnessed, from
turning against their friends to seeking their death to happily undressing for
dinner -- from the perspective of
Wolfram & Hart, it indeed represented the undoing of all of their grand
plans -- keeping people lonely and alone, mired in self-doubt, fear and rage
against the unknown.
No wonder they were so grateful.
I'd argue that this episode -- the introduction of Angel Investigations to the
inner workings of Wolfram&Hart -- is actually the first episode of the
fifth season.
Set at the end of one of the grandest yet most manageable apocalyi the show has
envisioned -- the tangible effects being a little bit of looting and some chaos
where the cameras were, less tangibly the mass loss of hope and sense of
"rightness" worldwide -- the tour Team Angel began with an evil limo
ride and ended as proprietors of a turnkey multitasking multidimensional
operation set the stage for all the joys and morally ambivalent chaos Joss
could throw at them.
Casting Lorne as agent to the stars, Fred as Q, Gunn as mystic conduit to the
Senior Partners and giving Wesley more access to ancient texts than he ever had
as a Watcher, Angel is the one character who was left without any specific
definition. He's placed at the head of the most complicated and diabolical
machinery without so much as a handbook for the phone system.
Yet it can be argued that he did the most with his first day in the office than
anyone on his staff.
In the course of their tour, he tracked down Connor, saved Cordelia and several
others from him, negotiated a set of false memories for at least five people
and signed on to the craziest time of fun we could envision for this series.
So why didn't he negotiate a sixth order of Jenga for himself?
Forgetting Connor -- letting him create his happy life with his new family and
walking away -- would've reduced his pain by orders of magnitude. He'd felt
harrowing loss when his infant son was kidnapped, and completely at sea when he
reappeared and hurtled back into his life as a broken, twisted piece of
emotional wreckage, and then literally at sea when his own son booked him into
Davy Jones' locker. The joy he felt at recovering Cordelia was dashed at her
rejection of him and soul-shredding when she coupled with his prodigal, along
with all of the emotional turmoil he experienced through the rest of this
season.
So with an extra few words, it could all have evaporated.
Why not let it?
Well, trust is certainly an issue. Angel can comfortably take responsibility
for his friends' emotional well-being, but setting Wolfram&Hart loose on
his own brain might have seemed like too much.
There was perhaps a sense that someone who knew the truth needed to survive the
ordeal, and he maybe felt he was the one most emotionally equipped to do so.
It's not like pain, regret and remorse are new to him, after all.
Perhaps he felt that this was part of the journey the Powers set him on, that
he needed to carry all the pain of losing Connor and recovering him as part of
his self-imposed penance.
Angel is always more comfortable retaining painful information than letting
others share the burden. From his return from hell, and the images The First
tormented him with, from "Earshot" where he tells Buffy his inner
thoughts and feelings are unavailable to her without he decides to share them,
from "I Will Remember You" when he retains the memory of his humanity
and decides to keep it back from her, to all of Season 5 through the eighteenth
episode, Angel trusts his guardianship of pain.
Is it heroic? Maybe. Is it well-intentioned? Certainly. But we move into the
character flaw that ultimately got Cordelia Chase killed. When he hides things
from his friends, they cannot grieve with him. They cannot share his burdens,
they can't help him and they certainly can't approach life from the united
perspective of consensus reality.
They cannot help each other, and the division proves destructive.
This is never addressed except by a few lines from Wesley in "Origin"
and they glance harmlessly off the mark. Angel's deal with Wolfram&Hart did
not get Fred killed. Wesley had rightly placed the blame for that squarely in
its proper receptacle -- Fred's own curious nature got her killed.
Rather, Angel's deal kept them from their own pain.
It's ironic that Angel, at the end, will have the most direct communion with
the Visions, and The Powers That Be. Cordelia Chase would never have allowed
Angel to take over Wolfram&Hart, and yet at the heart of the silent apocalypse
pursued by the Senior Partners, a direct blow is struck by his very proximity
as head of their Los Angeles branch.
When the time comes to strike, Angel finds that he is in the best position
to strike. And he got there without visions, without any significant
alterations to his agenda, and without tipping the Senior Partners to his
objective.
And they should've known this.
It's possible to make a good argument that their first approach having failed
-- antagonizing Angel in S2, trying to drag him over to the dark side -- the
next step was to put him at the top of the meat grinder and apply pressure
until they'd simply crushed him.
It's a good plan but it lacks finesse. Gift horses so often ship in cash on
delivery from Troy, and with no less a person than Lilah asking him to sign
Angel's only going to be all the more on his guard. Making him head of
Wolfram&Hart gave him direct access to the Circle of the Black Thorn, the
Senior Partners' agency on this plane of existence, and that made them vulnerable
in a way that Angel sitting around in the Hyperion waiting for calls to come in
never could.
The silent apocalypse was humming right along without Angel having a clue and
with no means of stopping it. Why'd they push it?
There was still that nagging fear of the Shoop.
The Shanshu Prophecy, that series-spanning story arc, where the one thing that could
be known about the apocalypse was that the vampire with a soul was going to
play a major role, emerge victorious and, as a reward, would achieve his
humanity, he was the one x factor. They could make people lose all the hope and
love for one another they wanted, quietly move their agents into greater and
greater positions of power, but one way or the other, Angel was going to play a
significant role.
He'd either be slaying that dragon or riding it, and they wanted him on its
back.
So they forged a golden saddle, trusted that the power and creature comforts
their operation could provide would prove a sufficiently corrupting influence
and lull him into a acquiescent complacency and rolled the dice. It was
arguably impossible to know that -- exactly as Buffy did -- he would force
their hand and take the apocalypse to them.
They just had to try.
And right up until "Power Play," Angel seems to be playing right
along -- focusing on profits over people, focusing on the busywork above the
big picture, and shutting his friends out left and right. From where they're
sitting, it must look like mission accomplished.
And while Cordy would never allow him to take that deal, the direction she
ultimately provided allowed him to wage the most effective campaign from where
he was.
For now, she's in a coma.
And maybe that's exactly where The Powers That Be need for her to be.
If I'm not mistaken … they're no longer out lounging by the pool.
Bring it home, Joss.