Angel Season One: A Question
For some reason I can never remember the details of AtS. I've watched it through twice, but am very vague about what happens. Now Angel is back in the Buffyverse, and AtS is on Netflix, and so I'm rewatching.
Season one basically shows Angel in a good light. The end of Sanctuary is my all-time favorite Angel moment. He really is a wise and ( Read more... )
I find Lindsey really interesting, but also don't particularly like him. I do think there's plenty of room to say that Angel is harsher on Lindsey than on Faith because Faith was desperate when she turned for help in a way that Lindsey isn't. But like Bookishwench, I mostly think Angel sees himself in Lindsey and sees that he's not nearly as different from Lindsey as he'd like. Others above have said the situation is most parallel to Angel's attempt to return to Darla... with the signal difference being that Darla never would have taken Angel back, so he never got to find out what he'd do when he got the sort of temptation Lindsey got when Holland Manners welcomed him back with open arms. Lindsey is much shallower, like you say. But the nature of his ambiguity mirrors Angel's in a lot of ways.
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Yeah but that’s assuming there even was a temptation to go back to her again, which I don’t think we can. He originally tries to go back to her in Five By Five and she threatens to kill him but he then went back to her in Darla, so it’s not as if he’s afraid of her. I think the fact he doesn’t go back for a 3rd time is because after what happened in China he realised he just couldn’t “pretend to be something he’s not” and not because Darla would never accept him again. After all, she tries to bring him back in BtVS S1 so I disagree that she’d never take him back. He does some pretty murky stuff over the next few years (the donut shop guy etc) but I don’t think he has any real temptation to embrace evil so fully again like he tried to do in Darla, because he clearly just couldn’t stomach it.
The difference between Angel/Lindsey is that, when Angel returns to Darla as hard as he tries he just cannot participate in that kind of behaviour again. He’s disgusted by Spike and Dru when they brag about killing the slayer, he tries to steer Darla away from the innocent family, and he saves the baby from her. Whereas, Lindsey goes back to W&H and fully embraces evil again until his next crisis in Dead End. So whilst they were both tempted to go back to evil (and they both did) only Lindsey could truly turn to his own ways, and we can't really blame that on Angel. After all, nobody was there guiding Angel's hand away from Darla and he still made the decision to take the baby and run, and never return.
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I have a bit of a hard time with this, because Angel was still actively participating in evil, disgust or no. He killed people. Granted, the people he was killing were "evildoers"--"murderers and rapists, thieves and scoundrels"--but it's still deeply wrong. He was willing to do evil until he reached his limit, which is pretty similar to what happens with Lindsey leading up to Blind Date, and then again up until Dead End.
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I’m just trying to think about what Angel’s worldviews would have been at that point in history because Darla clearly doesn’t consider it evil or wrong (hence her anger), whereas in AtS S2 if he’d started doing that I’m pretty sure she’d have been overjoyed that he’s turning “dark” again. I'm not really trying to get him off the hook, I just think the way Angel/Darla both talk about it, it just makes me realise that they were very much products of their time and that Angel simply evolved with society when it came to his POV on such matters. It doesn’t mean I don’t look back on it and feel it was wrong but if at the time it was deemed more or less justified from his POV he wasn’t doing “evil”, just pretending to. Whereas, Lindsey knows what he’s doing is evil when he joins back up with W&H. Am I making sense at all?
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I still see 1900 Angel and 2000 Lindsey as more similar than different, though I'm not trying to say that Angel is better than Lindsey. I think Angel would know that snacking on "bad guys" is still wrong (though maybe not), but he lets himself be seduced into thinking it's okay; moreover, Angel really wants to be evil, but (to his credit) can't manage it. Lindsey lets himself be seduced by Holland's moral philosophy and convinces himself (and his poor upbringing and his understandably jaundiced view of humanity really does matter here) that his only real options are to have power or be powerless. I mean, he's evil and all, but some of his evil comes with a moral philosophy attached to it that is drilled into his head regularly, which is not that dissimilar to the argument about Angel's justification for killing in 1900.
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Halfway. ;-)
Sure, Angel is a product of his time (his times, really. Having lived through different time periods and societies) and society.
So is Lindsey.
At the core of it is person A, who thinks he's entitled to decide who's to live and who's to die (and that was a seriously fucked up world view in, like forever. 1900, 1600, 2000, doesn't matter. The invention of law and societal punishment is really old - 3800 years old...).
Person B thinks he's entitled to power and money, even if he gets his hands "a little bit" dirty (and that's alright according to our society/LA-society in AtS).
I think, Lindsey didn't actively choose to become "good"/turn away from "evil", and in the end that's his downfall. But, he tries to get a mentor (if we read his early arc friendly. Perhaps he was just full of himself). Said mentor turns him down (which is absolutely within the rights of a mentor, btw.).
The WTF moment is more that Angel is that mentor, someone who very well should know that it is hard to become "good", a bit of help on the right path actually works and who on top of that is in the business of "saving souls".
Me personally? I think Lindsey would have needed more than Angel could give to embrace the fight for the people. What sits uncomfortably with me is Angel's prejudgement. Angel's live very well depended several times on the goddwill of people who choose to believe in him. Unfortunately, Angel doesn't return the favour when he himself sits at the top of the chain (but then, if he was Saint Angel, the show would have been boring ;-)).
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No doubt, but Angel could've served as a doorway. The least he could do is pay it forward and instead he's appointed himself the gatekeeper of redemption. What gives him the right?
(but then, if he was Saint Angel, the show would have been boring ;-))
I think there's a lot of space between Saint Angel and what we got, personally.
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Can i keep that sentence? :-)
I actually see it the same way - i just wanted to point out that Lindsey was probably a difficult case of soul-saving. ;-)
I think there's a lot of space between Saint Angel and what we got, personally.
Well, there's also a lot of space between innovative (and gender neutral) TV and the show we got. ;-)
It is a bit difficult to paint someone who is, basically, a vigilante, in a positive light. In the "Lindsey case", Angel falls because of his inner issues, which replay on the big screen from season 1 to season 5. If Angel were more understanding of Lindsey, he would have a hell of an easier time to actually be good (instead of spreading destruction).
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Can i keep that sentence? :-)
You may indeed! Please treat it well. :D
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So is Lindsey.
Yes, that's what I was trying to say with my response to vampmogs--but it didn't quite work. Thanks.
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If we would be talking in my mother language, i'd probably go for long winded explanations full of internet-fail. :D
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