The phrase, "sometimes when you lose, you win" is what comes to mind when I think about this episode. I've been thinking a lot and posting a lot about the heroic suicide angle (angle, angel haha!) and the whole hero jazz, and I keep coming back to how wonderful it was for me too see Angel be really human in this episode. Not that fake humility hero jazz, where we have a beautiful, tortured, anti-hero who finds his true calling in an almost perverted (thank you Anna!) altruism. No. My favorite thing from Angel this time around was the fact that after all he has lose, after the pretentious self-sacrificing bullshit he has put himself through, he looks genuinely scared to die.
You can look at him and know that the words he is repeating over in his head are not something deep like "Now I've found my calling, I am at peace with death...", Nope-- he's probably saying something more like "Shit, do I really want to end my life for some people(demons) I don't know."
A big part of me knows he would have still done it even if Doyle hadn't stepped in. I get it. I'm not trying to take away all his superhero brownie points. I just want to draw attention, and actually glorify his human (sorta) frailty, and say that maybe that is worth just as much as being a hero.
4 comments:
Angel's fear of death is obvious but I don't really think he was debating on whether these half-bloods were worth the sacrifice. I think his emotions were the result of the recent sacrifices he made. He had already given up his humanity, and a life with Buffy, for the 'greater good'. It would almost be ironic to have him sacrifice all that just to die the next day.
That would have been an awesome twist, I love the idea of that! Doesn't he end the show in a sacrificial kind of way? I never saw the end b/c I didn't watch this in syndication. I hope they did kind of put that into the ending of the show. I feel like Whedon would have been into that.
I really dig what you're saying here, I wrote Angels "oh shit" reaction, and you said his honest but altruistic one. I can totally believe that he must have been wrecked by the irony of having just given it all up for a life of saving people ( at least it's a LIFE) and now he's faced with death.
I won't spoil the ending of Angel in this forum, but Cait, I can fill you in in person, if you'd like!
I love this post (and the series of posts that inform it). The way it says something new but builds off of previous posts, the way people are making smart comments: it exemplifies what good blogging should do/look like.
Oh snap, now I've got to know!
Maybe you should tell me and then I will go illegally watch the final episode. I hope it's a good culmination. Angel is a complicated character, I see that, and I am really curious to see how Whedon "ends" him, and the show.
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