The Importance of Being Angel
So, I closed my poll. The result wasn't close and didn't look like it was gonna be, and the topic chosen required a lot of work, so I thought I should get cracking on it right away. It's coming along fine, but it's gonna take a bit more time to cook -- with myths like this one, I've discovered you have to do a lot of long, boring research and transcription in order to properly debunk them.
In the meantime, a conversation I was having over at Barb's Journal got me to thinking about something else: how important is Angel?
I mean, obviously, Angel is a hugely important character in the Buffyverse -- he's technically the reigning protagonist of one half of it, thanks to his spinoff show, and his (to some fans, infamous) reappearance in the BTVS comic book series posed him as a character of nearly godlike significance to the plot, theme and characters. But how important was he on the original "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" TV series?
No, this is not a troll for "Bangels." This post has nothing to do with who Buffy really, really loved-loved, or wanted to settle down, marry and have bouncing baby bloodsuckers with. I also personally like the character of Angel, and am a huge fan of his TV show, which I sometimes think gets too little credit from BTVS purists. Still, I do tend to think that Angel stopped being an important part of the "Buffy" saga after season three. As far as I can tell, there's just not enough of him around in seasons 4-7 to cobble together a meaningful continuation of his narrative there.
But, I'm willing to peel the coffin lid open a little and examine it. Let's look at some numbers, first...
Including brief appearances in dreams/flashbacks and episodes where he appears for a single scene, Angel appeared in a total of 58 episodes of the show's 144 episode run. This included:
- 7 episodes in the ( admittedly short) pilot season.
- All 22 episodes of the second season
- All 22 episodes of the third season.
- 3 episodes in the fourth season: "The Freshman"(dream sequence), "Pangs", "The Yoko Factor"
- 2 episodes in the fifth season: "Forever" (single scene), "Fool For Love"(flashback, as Angelus)
- 2 episodes in the seventh season: "End of Days"(single scene), "Chosen" (the same single scene)
Now, 58 episodes -- or 40% -- isn't a small number, and I don't think anyone could sanely argue that Angel wasn't a tremendously important character for the first three seasons of Buffy -- and perhaps even the most important Scooby of all during that time, considering he occasionally pulled double duty as a Big Bad. But this importance dropped off sharply after his departure at the close of the third season, when he moves to L.A. to start his own TV show Ghostbusters franchise existential crisis paranormal investigation agency. He only appears in a total of seven episodes afterwards, and usually in a cameo sort of way.
By itself, his total number of appearances proves nothing. When it comes to storytelling and symbolism, a character who appears only a few times like Maggie Walsh could be far more important to the story than someone like Graham Miller, who appeared in almost twice as many episodes. Sometimes this significance can even continue long after the character's physical death, as it did with Maggie's cruel inventions (Adam, Riley's chip, Spike's chip). I think Angel retained a similar kind of "aftershock" importance to the story after he was killed off Put on a Bus at the end of Graduation, a theory which I'll get to in a sec.
But, just for shits and giggles, let's compare his appearances to a few of the other major and recurring characters on the show:
- Willow Rosenberg, 144 episodes (100%)
- Xander Harris, 143 episodes (99%)
- Rupert Giles, 121 episodes (84%)
- Spike, 96 episodes (66%)
- Anya Jenkins, 81 episodes (56%)
- Dawn Summers, 66 episodes (46%)
- Joyce Summers, 58 episodes (40%)
- Angel, 58 episodes (40%)
- Cordelia Chase, 54 episodes (38%)
- Tara Maclay, 47 episodes (32%)
- Daniel "Oz" Osburne, 39 episodes (27%)
- Riley Finn, 31 episodes (22%)
- Andrew Wells, 28 episodes (19%)
- Jonathan Levinson, 28 episodes (19%)
- Faith Lehane, 20 episodes (14%)
First, let's get the business portion out of the way. The art of "Buffy: the Vampire Slayer" is bound to the world of commerce. In the entertainment industry, business decisions are made, and then a creative team figures out a logical, entertaining and artistic way of getting it done. This skill is a big part of what "creativity" means in the entertainment industry. Now, it's true some of the show's creators have made noises about having exhausted the Buffy-Angel romance by the third season, but it's also probably true that negotiations for the "Angel" spinoff ran concurrently with many of the creative decisions about Sunnydale. I'm not sure which chicken hatched which egg there, but what's clear is that an opportunity had come up to tell a somewhat different story with a somewhat different cast of characters, and to potentially make bags and bags of money in the process. But first they had to solve a certain problem.
So the creative problem at hand was, "How do we write off such a major character and primary love interest in a thematically coherent way?" Well, Angel is introduced to us as a mysterious outsider with dark past. He symbolizes the need for redemption that many of us feel at one point or another in our lives. As Buffy's natural enemy turned ally, he also offers Buffy a peek into a somewhat muddier moral universe than the one Giles and the Council present. Buffy is attracted to his vulnerability and worldly wisdom, and Angel is attracted to her youth and hopefulness....
They kiss, they fight, they make up, they save each others lives. They fall in love.
The end.
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Oops! Wait, no. Not the end.
It turns out that Angel is leaving the show to go do some fairly awesome, noir-ish, L.A horseshit, and that there actually is life after high school (sorry Harmony). Given that Angel can't be a regular cast member for a whole season (at the very least), the writers and story editors needed to adapt his arc in a way that was thematically strong, yet flexible just in case the "Angel" spinoff flopped. So, for the Franken4th Season, Angel's role in the story shifts from that of an active plot-driver and romantic lead and begins changing into more of bittersweet memory and a cautionary tale of trust.
In the first three seasons of the show, Angel's relationship with Buffy was filled with yearning and pain, as his curse prevented him from getting as close to her as they both wanted, and Buffy learned both how risky and how beautiful this special kind of intimacy can be. In the fourth season, she is stung when she tries to recapture it with Parker, wrongly assuming that his "normalcy" will make the whole enterprise less risky. Of course, after sleeping with Buffy, Parker immediately loses his soul, transforms into Parkerus and tries to destroy the world acts like a callous douchebag dickweed from Dickweed Mountain.
From there onward, the writers begin to flesh out what will become a tragic flaw for our hero; she longs for deep emotional intimacy, but becomes increasingly convinced it's too risky, and that she isn't capable of it anyway. Although she finds a level of comfort, camaraderie and sexual fulfillment with Riley, deep down she knows that it's not the same level she was trying to reach with Angel The reason she doesn't attempt to go there with Riley has less to do with Riley himself than it does with some major trust issues that were building up in Buffy since Angel went all Non-Soul-ee and World Destroy-ee, and were compounded when Parkerus treats her heart like a wad of chewing gum.
In that respect, Buffy's romantic entanglements in the fourth season felt like a transitional period. She's trying to "get back out there" and rebound from a very deep, emotional and somewhat traumatic relationship. Now, if "Angel" flopped and thus made his character available again as a cast regular, who knows what direction the writers might have taken things? But the series got renewed, and so the creative folks in the BTVS crew had to keep the story moving in the established direction and the character of Buffy evolving in a way that made sense. So, from the fourth season on, Angel's actual character becomes less important than Buffy's memory of him, and the way her past experiences with him affect her view of other relationships. His few remaining scenes on the show are brief and almost ghostly cameos, and he is usually tangential to the events at hand rather than an active participant in them. He gallops into the frame to help or comfort Buffy, then, when the music stops, he gallops back off into the mists of bittersweet nostalgia. In these moments, he has become like a more literal interpretation of the guardian angel his name implies; hovering somewhere in the ether beyond the story, watching over our hero from afar.
There are always multiple layers to these Buffyverse tales, and the surface-level riff the writers played here was "first loves." Our first loves always occupy a special place in our hearts, even after we meet someone else, marry, pop out the kids, etc. I'm sure everyone is different, but when I ran into my first love a few years back, I remember there was this all this electricity; a big, electric bundle of unresolved feelings, fears, desires and regrets that was as confusing and terrifying as it was wonderful. Then she cut my hair, which was even more terrifying.
I believe the writers and actors managed to pull off this crazy feeling of electic nostalgia with Angel's final scene in "End of Days/Chosen." I might be alone in thinking the scene worked extremely well (even writer/director Joss Whedon expressed some misgivings about it in his "Chosen" DVD commentary), but I think it's a great example of creative people tackling a certain problem -- "How do we get Angel involved in the finale without totally putting the brakes on everything and mucking up the story" -- and solving it in an artistically satisfying way.
But, uh, that's it. That moment was all there really was to Angel, post-third season.
I mean, Angel's scant other physical appearances (i.e. not in a dream or flashback) -- in the bushes of "Pangs", in the alley/dorm hallway in "The Yoko Factor", at Joyce's grave in "Forever" -- feel a little bit like that series of goodbyes from the houseguest who stands in the doorway but just... won't... leave. Sure there's a bit of the stalwart "he's always there when you need him" trope in these scenes, but not a ton of dramatic meat on them otherwise. Part of what made his reprisal work in "EOD/Chosen" was that he hadn't appeared on the show at all for over two seasons. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and all that jazz.
Looking at the series as a whole, I think that Angel's storytelling function turned out to be very similar to that of Faith and Riley, with all three occupying a relatively small amount of story time compared to their relatively large effect on Buffy's worldview, her self-image and her ability to be intimate with others. Main characters on the show tended to fall into one of three categories: Scoobies, Misfit Ex-Scoobies, and Big Bads. Faith, Riley and Angel become Misfit Ex-Scoobies (which ironically makes them Misfit Misfits... but I digress). And while the betrayal of Angel(us) isn't a conscious or deliberate one, it has the same emotional effect of walling off Buffy's willingness to trust both others and herself, and this is the kind of trust that is necessary before intimacy can take place.
Buffy eventually does learn to trust again, after much loss, pain and fraught effort. Along the way, she finds a person to share that trust with. Interestingly, it turns out to be an old enemy, and someone who should be the least trustworthy person in the world.
They kiss, they fight, they make up, they save each others lives. They fall in love.
The end.
Oops! Wait, no. Not the end.
WTF???