I Came, I Conquered, I Felt Really Bad About It
Happy Day-After-Thanksgiving, y’all.
I’m mooching some Internet from my uncle to bring you this message, which is why you’re receiving it now instead of last night.
Anyway, I suppose y’all can guess what I’m going to talk about today. 4.08 “Pangs”. Yup.
Mostly, I’ll just type as I rewatch, and then probably let myself take a nice long ramble and get distracted by some minor detail. Won’t this be fun?
I’m actually going to cut this in half, because it’s four pages long. So, today you get Spike and Angel, and you’ll get Willow and Anya, with minor appearances by Buffy and Riley, either tomorrow or Sunday.
Here at the beginning we get a little nod to Buffy’s vampire senses, which seem to have improved a good bit since her traumatic discovery of Angel in 1.07 “Angel.” She knows the boy she’s talking to is a vampire before she sees his face, and she can feel that Angel’s nearby. She hasn’t honed completely, yet, however, and still doesn’t quite find Angel.
I have this habit of forgetting that it’s Angel that Giles is talking to in his apartment, and I also forget about the opening scene ending with a pan over to Angel lurking in the bushes while being accompanied by very appropriate music.
It’s fitting, right? Angel first met her by stalking her into an alley, now he’s stalking her again. Full circle. Closure is nice.
It’s really creepy, and not in the least bit romantic.
I think Angel’s behaviour in this episode is pretty unacceptable, honestly. He follows her around, stares into her bedroom window, and doesn’t even speak with her. Buffy has every right to get upset with him. Everything in his relationship with Buffy happens on his terms. He decides if she knows he’s there, he decides if she gets to be with him. They don’t get to talk this out, it’s Angel’s decision.
Angel is in charge and Angel is completely dominant.
Not a good way for a relationship to function.
Angel, to some extent, knows that his behaviour in this episode in unacceptable, which makes it both better and worse. Worse because, well, he’s still doing it even though he knows it’s wrong, and better because at least he feels a little bit guilty about it.
(And here I haven’t even gotten to the opening credits.)
Giles points out that it isn’t Angel’s place to be over-protective of Buffy. Angel returns the comment, but Angel’s not really right. Giles was employed to look after Buffy, and decided to continue to do so after being fired. Angel has already walked away, but returns because he needs to look after her, insinuating that she can’t do so herself, but also that it was his job to take care of her. That being in a relationship with Buffy was a chore for him that made him obligated to take care of her. Again, this is not okay.
A romantic/sexual relationship should not be comparable to a job. If it is, then something is obviously wrong.
Don’t back down, Giles! You have the high ground!
Spike breaks my heart, in this episode. Not that Thanksgiving has much significance for him, but he really does have nowhere to go. At the end of the day, just because the Scoobies don’t want to visit with their biological families, they still have their chosen one.
“Home’s the place that when you got there, they have to take you in.”
Spike has no home. He has no family.
He’s lost both.
His mother’s been dead for a good long while now, strangely enough, and Drusilla and Angel won’t have him. He’s too good for Dru, to evil for Angel, and he’s got no one else to go to. Even Harmony, who I’ve always interpreted as a one-night stand gone horribly wrong, won’t have anything to do with him. And for a lot of the series, you get that this is his primary motivation for pretty much all of his actions. Spike wants someone to want him, he wants to be loved and he wants to have someone that cares about him. But he has no one.
Poor Spike. He can hardly stand and they’re still so nasty to him.
And shouldn’t he and Angel have noticed one another, by the way? They’re both in and out of Giles’ throughout the episode, and towards the end they actually end up pretty close to one another. They should have smelled one another. Why did neither of them mention the other?
At the very end, Spike kind of grins at Buffy, like he was in on Angel being there the entire time, but I’m not sure he was. And I definitely don’t think Angel knew that Spike was there, because he definitely would have said something about it.
Maybe they can’t smell anything over the turkey?
Angel directs Giles to a priest that he knows.
I really, really, really wish we’d seen this priest before. I wish we’d gotten to see him interact with Angel, especially before this episode. I wish more would have come from this.
In Ats 2.05 “Dear Boy”, Angel notes that he rarely goes to church, which is true, especially if rarely is taken as ‘never unless I have to for reasons other than religion’, but Angel is or was Catholic. I want more to have come from this than having nuns be his thing. I want this to be more important!
What a loss.
Angel notes that he’d forgotten how bad it feels to be looking at something you can’t have. But no love for Spike. It always baffled me how little responsibility Angel was willing to take for Spike. He owed up for himself, and for Drusilla, and sometimes even for Darla, but Spike… Spike was a monster, what Spike did was all Spike’s fault.
I’m not asking for the two of them to sit down and have a nice Thanksgiving dinner together. I mean, neither of them is American, Angel doesn’t even eat food (well, he does twice and once while possessed), and they don’t always get along all that well, but I always thought that Angel’s lack of sympathy for Spike was just awful.
I understand that it’s to underscore Angel’s selfish and hypocritical behaviour, but he tries so hard to help Darla when she receives her soul, and when she has to deal with Connor, and he just doesn’t have it in him to do the same with Spike.
It was my interpretation that Spike cared a lot more for Angel than Darla ever did, but Angel’s memories and views are often self-serving. (“You just want it to be the way you want it to be.”)
Darla will attack Angelus, the persona she’s in love with, but Spike will still look after Angel, the persona he supposedly hates, as seen in 3.08 “Lover’s Walk”.
I love Darla. I’ve probably mentioned it before, but I love Darla. I can’t stand when people write fanfiction and then either just ignore her in a place where she should logically be, or suddenly have characters she got along with start talking about what a bitch she is and how much they hate her.
But as much as I love Darla, she doesn’t deserve what she receives from Angel. Or she would, but only if Spike go the same. Spike willingly gets a soul (I’m skipping ahead here by a good bit now, huh?), Darla has one forced on her. But Angel keeps going on about how Spike is still evil, while obviously Darla can be redeemed.
Angel’s a flawed character, and I love him for this, but I was always so sad that no one, no one, ever called him on his favouritism. That’s what’s really unfair about it.
I just wish he could have offered something to Spike here, though. I mean, he’s obviously starving, and miserable, and lonely. Angel won’t even spare him a look, much less any comfort/empathy.
Angel’s soul is no comparable to Spike’s chip. So, why should Angel be empathetic? Angel’s soul makes him want not to be bad, Spike’s chip just makes him not be bad, but in the end, they’re both thrown out of the world they’ve known for the last one-hundred years, expelled by force from an external cause. And Angel brought the soul on himself more than Spike did for his chip.
We have scenes of Angel, lost, lonely, and starved. He was miserable, and he notes later to Darla that no one should have to go through that, especially not alone.
But he’s more than willing to let Spike suffer.
Spike’s little shoulder-slump when he’s watching the other vampires just makes me so sad.
I think Angel and Willow have an interesting relationship. Or, had, since they’ve both changed a lot recently, and they’re both pretty different people now. But I like the scenes they share, usually. I think Angel makes Willow just a little bit uncomfortable, because he’s really immune to her adorkableness. But she’s Willow, and she’s pretty goofy and sweet and cheerful and she doesn’t really let that get her down. She understands him pretty well, too, which is important, even though he doesn’t really understand her inn return.
Which is, of course, in contrast to Spike (how many of Angel’s traits aren’t?), who understands Willow very well, often better than Buffy does, as we see as soon as the next episode, 4.09 “Something Blue” and which will become even more important in 5.19 “Tough Love”.
When Angel realises that Buffy is going to be attacked, he sends Willow, Anya, and Xander on ahead while he looks for a phone. But Angel’s the best fighter of all of them by a landslide, and Xander’s very ill. This plan makes no sense to me, other than for the less-than-dramatic scene of the three racing to the rescue on their stolen bicycles. Angel's not very much for the planning ahead, I suppose.
I hope y'all all had a nice holiday free from vengeful spirits, stalking exes, and syphilis.