Monsters and Outcasts

[ptnewell]

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
Anna Karenina


The Scoobies are a happy family. Xander loves Buffy and Willow and Dawn, and Willow loves Buffy and Xander and… The strength of the core relationships are the immovable foundation of BtVS. Unfortunately, immovable foundations are not a vehicle for a story that moves anywhere. In the seventh season, as in the first, more or less the same group of people are hanging around more or less the same places, and they all still love one another, forever and ever amen.
The members of Team Angel call one another family from the first season on. But it is not nearly as happy a family, and unhappy families change. In an unhappy family, people can die. Estrangements can last longer than one or two weeks, war has casualties, people do not just fight because one turns evil (for the week). The personal and series journeys are longer in AtS than BtVS. In Angel, life happens, in Buffy, life is suspended.
The members of Team Angel have farther to go. Wesley arrives a penniless incompetent bungler, a mere Giles wannabe. Fred, after coming out of her cave, holes up in her room, making Willow look like a social butterfly. Xander was never so far out of mainstream society as Gunn was while living on the mean streets of L.A. Other members of Team Angel are not even human: for the first three years Angel is the only one of his kind in the world (and even with the addition of the ensouled Spike, they are just two of a kind among billions). Lorne is the only one of his kind on Earth. Ilyria is, apparently, the only demon goddess living among humans. If you are too odd to fit in with the Scoobies (like Angel, Wesley or Spike), you might be enough of a monster or outcast for Team Angel.
Partly because they start so far down, the characters on AtS can evolve farther. Wesley’s intense determination to become the efficient demon fighter his father was leads him to do things other Buffyverse heros do rarely, if at all. This includes embracing torture (actually starting just a few episodes after joining the cast), to make extensive use of firearms (which gradually increases), to keep secrets almost compulsively, and to conspire and see conspiracies everywhere. A paranoia demon in AtS S2x02 proclaimed Wesley “especially paranoid”. Sometimes that serves him well (as when he rightly assumed the Watchers in “Sanctuary” were going to double cross him) and sometimes poorly (when he learned Angel had altered memories when joining Wolfram and Hart, Wes assumed the worst – only to learn that what Angel had covered up was more secret keeping and conspiracies by Wesley himself concerning Angel’s son, Connor). Wesley tries everything. He uses magic the best he can, and learns hand-to-hand combat as well as he can. Although he never does win his biological father’s respect, he wins something perhaps better: Angel finally realizes than Wes is the ruthless capable man who always gets things done, no matter what. Unfortunately, that hard won respect probably leads Angel to send Wes on a mission that was just too difficult. But Wes died knowing that the love of his life had loved him, and that he had finally reached his life’s goal: he died a bad-ass.
The evolution of Angel the Series mirrors the evolution of Angel, the character. When we first meet him on Buffy, he has been solitary for decades. (From “The Harvest”, BtVS S1x02)
Buffy: I've got a friend down there. Or at least a potential friend. Do you know what it's like to have a friend?

He lowers his eyes as a look of sadness fills them.

Buffy: That wasn't supposed to be a stumper.


Angel assumes that Buffy would reject (or kill) him if she found out the truth. Buffy changed the unlife of both Spike and Angel, but in very different ways. Angel already had the impulse for do-gooding. He had tried, for example, to help the residents of Hotel Hyperion in the 1950s. But as soon as they found out he had no food but blood in his room, they turned on him, and hanged him. This ineffectual act led him to give up (apparently not for the first time) on human society.
Buffy ultimately did love him even after learning the truth. Thus Angel arrived in L.A. with his impulse for do-gooding (and atonement) restored, but still isolated. Doyle, in the first episode of AtS tells him he must connect with humanity. This he reluctantly does, first with Cordelia and Wes, later with Gunn and Fred (and probably others). He also develops non-human friends like Doyle and Lorne. As a result Angel and his series evolved: Initially fighting alone (Doyle and Cordelia did not participate) he began to tackle more cases as Wesley then Gunn fought alongside him. The efficient machine seen in AtS S2x01 is much changed from AtS S1x01, and so is Angel. Instead of a fighting man, there was now a fighting team.
(end first of two parts)

[ptnewell]

(Second of Two Parts: Monsters and Outcasts)
In the second year of AtS, Angel spiraled downward toward isolation and deep depression. Unlike BtVS, where estrangements never last for more than a week or two, in AtS they can last months or longer, and are more likely to result from emotional conflicts than possession by evil forces (though both happen). It is true that the mind games played by Wolfram and Hart play a role in Angel’s disintegration, but not necessarily in the way intended. His failure to save Darla in any way whatsoever after a long all-out struggle took a heavy mental toll. Angel decided that helping the hopeless one-by-one was not enough. Instead he attempted to wage war – a dark unprincipled war – against evil on Earth, or at least in L.A. Isolated again, his one vampire campaign sputtered out futilely. He learned two lessons: not to fight alone, and that waging war against evil powers is pointless, since evil endures. Once again he integrated into a team, and returned to helping the hopeless.
In S4, Team Angel and the series swerves again. Now for the first time they spend an entire season fighting a single world-threatening Big Bad (Jasmine).
This does not contradict the lessons of S2, since Team Angel (like the Scoobies) are fighting a menace to the status quo. In other words, they are not fighting to change the world, or to eliminate the evils that live among us. They are fighting to preserve the world as it is. But the Team is finally effective enough to face world-wide threats.
S4 has a second departure. Angel consistently made his associates promise to stake him if he ever became Angelus again. But when the worst happens, and Angelus gets free, Wesley decides he will not let that happen (a recurring theme seems to be Wesley caring more about Angel than he admits). He conceives a fairly ruthless scheme that recovers Angelus intact – at the near cost of Faith’s life. It is difficult to imagine the Wesley of S1 or even S2 capable or ruthless enough to pull it off.
S5 sees the team going into new territory, and it does squarely contradict one of the lessons learned in S2. In S5 Angel decides NOT to accept the evil that lives among us. Unlike any other season of Angel (or any season of Buffy), in S5 the team does not fight to preserve what is, but to attack the corruption that surrounds us at the highest level. This is not a battle against a Big Bad to preserve the life we know. In one bold stroke over the course of perhaps an hour they destroy the Senior Partners power on Earth. In S2 Angel had learned two lessons. One of those, that a big battle against evil was pointless, is now seen to be wrong.
The most interesting part of this turn is that it depends entirely on the changes in Angel himself. The effective strike in S5 is not a one man effort, as the fruitless battle in S2 was. It is possible only because Angel is convinced that his team will trust him when he asks. The plot of S5 requires Angel to pile up evidence damning him in multiple ways; to blow off his team mates concerns for weeks; even to fabricate seemingly impeachable evidence against himself. His plan for restoring trust? He gets a few minutes of unmonitored time with the group and asks.

ANGEL
: Look, we don't have a lot of time here, so I'm gonna have to make this short. Everything you think you know, everything you've heard, is a lie.
GUNN
: Why should we believe you?
ANGEL: 
Because I'm the one who told it.

Before he met Buffy, Angel had given up on do-gooding and society altogether. The concept of friendship was a stumper, and he hid what he was from everyone. By the end of AtS S5, he had a team willing to follow him on a possibly suicidal mission. The attack in Never Fade Away could never have worked had he and his team not come so far from where they started.
Toward the end of BtVS S7, Buffy insists that she be followed into the final battles without a vote. At the end of AtS, Angel tells his team that he can’t do it without them, and can’t order them to do it, so he holds a vote. It is possible the man who, eight years ago, knew nothing of friendship has in some ways surpassed his teacher.

[The Night Lord]

Nice work ptnewell. That must have taken a while. Well done *karma*

[Alexiness]

That was a really good summary. And long. Nice job.

[ptnewell]

Nightlord, Alexiness: I appreciate your taking the time to read my work. Pat

[Malsad]

Wow
is this some sort of thesis paper or some thing?

[gumgnome]

I think that this is well summarised but am lost a little on the central theme. What is the point that you are attempting to impress?