BtVS S8.33 "Twilight" Part Two
Angel is a character I’ve never found easy to love (Daddy issues, it’s a thing). He’s had his moments though. Puppet Angel, goes without saying. Jasminified peace n’ love Angel (dear god that shirt). Manilow loving seventies hair Angel. Guise will be Guise “I’m not a eunuch” Angel. Awakening cheese fantasy of perfect happiness Angel. TIGQ “I signaled her with my eyes” Angel. All good times but in #33 Angel I think we finally have a winner. Possibly it’s the glow talking but the actual words selected fully live up to the “if taken literally, incredibly gross“ tradition of Angel’s romantic utterings. Bodies singing is marginally less off-putting than Riley’s humming but “flushed with this unholy power.” “Flushed.” Also the whole "I loved you the moment I saw you," the bulging glow, the history-making, the destiny earned is quintessential Angel, who always wanted to believe he’d make it. Like in the musicals. Somehow. Someday. Somewhere.
(NARRATION) “BUFFY”: But there’s millions of people go into making a name. People facing things they couldn’t imagine they would.
If S7 was about leadership, S8 is about celebrity. The Slayer used to be one girl in all the world but her identity was a closely guarded secret. S8 began with one girl having become a multitude but there was only one Slayer with her name on everyone’s lips. In the Twilight arc that fame was given the metaphorical treatment. Buffy got f#@%ing superpowers and in the first issue these were directly linked to the sacrifices made by her fans and followers. #33 overturns that in favour of something more Brangelina, Pickford-Fairbanks or Bogie and Bacall. On his own show Angel’s character has always had an alchololic subtext. If Dracula was Norma Desmond, Angel (as Twilight) strives for Norman Maine. And speaking of A Star is Born, spot the Twilight symbol embedded in the double page image of Buffy crashing through Angel’s HQ and carrying him with her as the sun rises left.
Enough of the subtext. What of the text? Angel claims that playing Twilight was the only way he had of minimizing the governmental fallout and pushing Buffy into becoming the Omega to his Alpha but while his methods have certainly achieved the second goal, the first sounds a lot more dubious. If governments were prepared to listen to a masked superhero, he could have just told them something closer to the truth about the Sunnydale crater, which is where the whole terrorist thing started. However, that might have made Buffy less pushed, less ready, less worthy. Their joint f#@%ing destiny of f#@%ing would have been tragically delayed.
Giles talks as if that destiny is something to be averted rather than hastened. Possibly that something he tried to get Faith to prevent by taking out Gigi, who would have blown her entire inheritance on the chance of being 'that girl.' More on what that’s all about in next issue’s true history of the universe but if GiD made the Shadowmen look bad for violating a girl so she could fight demons for them, making it about some kind of Bene Gesserit breeding programmme for a world-ending super-being is even more disturbing.