"Beauty and the Beast"
I ended up watching a few Season 3 episodes and jotted down some thinky thoughts. This post sadly possesses a sense that's not when it comes to structure. Welcome to my brain.
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Fantastic catch about the smooch spot being in the woods. I think that pretty much makes it text that Angel either did or could very well have killed somebody. What's interesting about this episode is the sense that Buffy can't deal with that fact because she has to deal with even more pressing ones. Willow and Oz can deal with, head-on, the possibility that he has killed someone, and try to figure out what that means; but in a way it's because they have the luxury of knowing that it is possible to control Oz' beast, and that there is a human in there.
I think the Angel-kills-Pete scene can be unpacked even further. I love what you wrote, and I only gestured to it in the notes (which, sidebar--a lot does kind of get left out in them, doesn't it? these episodes tend to be more than 5000 words rich, or ~2000 if you want to do a per person). But the scene has Angel coming back to himself by killing--i.e. by reclaiming the worst parts of his nature for "good." It's rather like Oz relishing turning into a wolf so he can defend himself against Pete. The episode has a fairy tale ending but it's pretty dark and grim/Grimm. (Shooting script says "grim," so I'll go with that, but definitely it's a Grimm fairy tale in style, too.) Angel is a bit of a feral dog who still has loyalty to his owner. It makes it unclear whether redemption is possible or not--can his
The moment actually foreshadows the similar one in Wild at Heart which furthers the Oz/Angel parallels. Veruca is many things that Pete isn't, but she is a dark mirror for Oz as well as being an alternate mate. She's what happens if Oz doesn't consent to being caged. And Oz is tempted by that. In the end, though, he kills his dark mirror to save Willow, just as Angel kills Pete. But in a way Wild at Heart is less of a fairy tale and more "true", because it follows that after killing his dark mirror he turns to kill Willow and has to be stopped. And it's sort of what happens in Graduation Day with Angel feeding on Buffy--she forces him to access the feral/animal state in Angel which knows only self-protection and not protection of her. It's not really Angel's or Oz' fault, really, but it's there and it's hard to deny. Oz and Angel both leave after this. Angel was going to leave before GD, but I suspect that he gained the strength to leave from seeing his animal (not exactly the same as his demon) take over and nearly kill Buffy. Oz' return in New Moon Rising and his inability to handle Willow's new relationship foreshadows Angel's return in Chosen a bit, and his return in season eight a lot--not so much in the inability handle a mate thing, though Angel beats up Satsu and then Twilight!Angel nearly kills Spike--but in the sense that he returns to Buffy promising that he is better, with the confidence that he has left his baser instincts behind. Oz can be with Willow again! Angel can be with Buffy, and they can even have sex without the release of his demon. Alas, Willow is the one thing that brings the wolf out of Oz, and Buffy is...well, not the only thing that brings out Angel's dark side, but one of the many items on the list.
There's more WAH foreshadowing in the way Oz immediately starts pursuing Willow when she (and I am kind of in love with this moment so maybe I should put it in bold) drags him off Faith by the tail so that he doesn't maul her; she knows that the wolf would just see her as more meat, just like Buffy knows in GD that if she punches a barely-conscious Angel enough times he'll suck her nearly dry.
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None of those things are completely wrong (human and wolf Oz are pretty separate, etc.) but they're not the complete truth either, and this episode is about the characters trying to negotiate that gap.
Yep yep. Cordelia has this really great line where she cuts through the story of Pete. Buffy acknowledges it when it comes to Pete, but both Buffy and Willow have to keep their monsters separate in the stories they tell themselves. Otherwise it's too much.
Cordelia: So it was like a real killing. He wasn't under the influence of anything?
Buffy: Just himself. Uh... I'll see you guys later.
Buffy walks off to talk to Scott.
Cordelia: Great. Now I'm gonna be stuck with serious thoughts all day.
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Right, she can't deal with that directly, but in a way isn't she dealing with it? By bypassing the murder and going straight into figuring out if Angel can be redeemed or if she has to kill him, she's tacitly acknowledging that she thinks he probably did kill someone before she locked him up (or if he didn't yet, he was about to). If not, why lock him up? She has no way of knowing how long he's been back. And really, do we the audience know how long he's been back? (Long enough to steal some pants. Maybe he killed the man wearing those pants. Who knows?)
So yeah, she doesn't deal with the fact that he's a killer because she's too busy dealing with whether she'll have to kill him.
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What it does mean, though, is that the person who may have died is a ghost in the narrative and gets no attention. But that's the way the show works. Maybe they only wanted to suggest Angel killed someone because they didn't want to fully go there? Just flirt with it and then begin setting him up for his exit to go be a "hero" in LA.
From Buffy's POV, I think researching people who died would make her go crazed. Note how it's always Giles or Wesley who are reading the papers for dead bodies. If Buffy started doing that, I'd be worried she'd shortly snap. Every death would read like her failure to save the victims, the Theresas. She didn't patrol long enough on Tuesday, she should've gone by the Bronze first on Thursday. I think focusing on the threats is how Buffy maintains her equilibrium.
Angel in AtS focuses on the victims because he's making amends. Buffy has to focus on the threats to the victims, otherwise I think she'd go insane. And okay, bringing this to another level, I was just having on Gabs' journal -- that's why she snaps in Season 7. Not only is she living the victims' deaths in her dreams every time the First kills a Potential, but she's got all the victims living under her roof. Buffy can't help getting personal with people. I think that's why as the Slayer she often withdraws because she cares about people she's just met like Cassie. She cares about all the Potentials she called as Slayers, that's why instead of going to Rome for a vacation, she chained herself to a mission to train and guide them all.
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I do want to say that a kind of ideal "perfect" Buffy and Angel that don't exist and shouldn't be expected to would examine the fact of his death. The reason I think this is that the episode puts a lot of focus on Willow and Oz (and Xander) wanting to find out whether he killed someone; it is important to know that piece of information, even though Oz had no control over that, it would matter, because it's part of the impact his life has had. It's actually pretty much irrelevant whether Oz killed someone or not, too, in terms of what they should do going forward. But it matters for some reason--that reason being that the consequences of one's actions and even existence matter, even if it's not your "fault," even if there isn't much more that can be done. That Willow and Oz have the luxury of confronting this directly but that Buffy and Angel, in order to maintain their sanity, don't, is because Oz isn't a continuing threat in the same way that Angel is. There's less pressure on them, and less guilt already present, so it gives them more space to deal with the additional guilt/responsibility that an Oz-killing would mean. I'm not criticizing Buffy, but more admiring the show for pointing out that a person can't deal with every piece of information that might be relevant. They have to tell themselves a bit of a story in order to contend with the world. In ABH, the Sephirilian or whatever makes a point of saying that all its faces are out front; it does not hide behind deceptions. We don't have that luxury, and we have to try to deal with our limited ability to cope by only selecting a finite subset of the problems we have to deal with, and reacting to them. Buffy takes on more than most, maybe the most of anyone in the 'verse, but she doesn't take on everything she "should" ("should" = the ideal, not the expectation of what a real person should do), and it's no disservice to her to point that out.
Word on what causes Buffy to snap in season seven, btw.
Angel still doesn't focus on the victims all that much in AtS. And as discussed in Maggie's Angel thread, he kinda sorta doesn't own up to the fact that he was killing people with a soul during the Boxer Rebellion, and in fact he even explicitly lies about it in Angel (the episode) ("I haven't killed a single human since that day" or whatever). But to a degree maybe even he believes what he's saying--that it's more or less accurate despite not being literally, factually true. It was only thieves and murderers, and plus Lawson on that boat that time, and those people in the hotel totally weren't his fault, right? How do you deal knowing that you're capable of evil? Even Spike does it to a degree, with his thing in LMPTM about how slayer/vampire opposition is just the way it is.
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I'm arguing that Buffy is human and that she does what she does as a survival mechanism. I'm never going to argue that people dying doesn't matter nor that their deaths don't deserve attention (which is why I critiqued how the narrative treats this poor nameless man (I'm assuming man 'cause of pants!) like a ghost).
If it helps, my baseline is that all people matter. Even the people I'm indifferent to or I don't like matter. I mean, that's why I'm paying so much attention to figuring out if Angel killed someone. Unlike Buffy, I can deal with it. And so I kept on digging to figure it out where as it seems like a majority of fans have decided he was just hunting game (which doesn't make sense to me really since game for vampires is humans).
So baseline: the person who died is important, but Buffy is important too and she has to take care of herself. I think in this regard, she did what she had to do to maintain her sanity, that she was prioritizing the living over the dead she couldn't save.
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I agree with all of this. I never thought that you were arguing that the dead person didn't matter, btw--but was wondering if you were arguing that it didn't matter for Buffy to find out who it was. Ultimately Buffy has to take care of herself, because if she doesn't, she burns out and dies and then no one is there to protect the world. Altruism is not incompatible with taking care of oneself. It's just a very hard balance to strike!
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Indeed! She's also constantly dealing with death and the knowledge that she's the only one who can save the people who died. If she starts putting faces to her failures, I'd be worried about her mental sanity. She has a hard enough time when Angel loses his soul, Jenny gets killed (her guilt), Dawn gets kidnapped by Glory.
It's weird to think that Buffy stays sane by staring at the monsters instead of the people. This means she doesn't see the victims she failed to save (also, remembering her cavalier attitude in Lessons about the spirits in the basement), but it also means she's not as aware of the people she does save. It's easy to get lost. Gah, that's why her Class Protector award is wonderful. It's not S8 Slayer hero worship, it's heartfelt gratitude for the value of her contribution to the community.
Oh! I meant to add that one of the reasons I identify with Buffy is that I feel she believes all people matter like I do (even the demons fighting for redemption matter to her because they've become people in her eyes).
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