My complaints about this mini-arc from the previous video, which mostly centered around
the baffling trilogy of episodes that follow ‘Reunion’ feeling like a story from an
entirely different arc, echo in my head through nearly every scene Angel has in ‘Blood Money.’
But, I don’t have anything particularly new to add that I didn’t mention in ‘Redefinition.’.
This…joking prankster noir detective Angel doesn’t feel particularly dark or fallen
to me, the two places the arc leading to ‘Reunion’ seemed like it was going to go.
Still, it’s clear by the end of ‘Blood Money’ that the die is cast.
This is the Angel we’re going with and it would be a mistake to keep ringing the #notmyfallenAngel
bell because I’ve realized that doing so when I have watched the episode in the past
caused me to miss some interesting things that ‘Blood Money’ actually does really
well.
So I’m going to seriously definitely, for sure…probably put that bell aside for this
one and try to focus in on a pretty entertaining episode here, at this…very odd spot in Angel’s
second season.
…I’m not sticking to that promise with ‘Happy Anniversary’ though.
Not a chance.
*Have Gun will Travel theme over Angel Guide Credits
Summary The episode’s cold-open features a...serious...major...important
development in the series.
00:15 “Go on, English.
Make your move.”
It’s the first use of Gunn’s pet name for Wesley.
Team Investigations has taken to hanging out at Cordy’s and waiting for either a vision
or an Angel to call.
Cordy has a vision.
2:00 “It has two heads.
And it breathes fire.”
*shot of Angel burning Darla and Dru in ‘Redefinition’ Taser Face “It’s METAPHORICAL.”
Somewhere out in the city, a particularly friendly Angel bumps into….
2:20 “I didn’t hurt you did I?”
It’s Anne Lilly Chanterelle.
The vampire fetishizing, teenage, nomad who Buffy passed her pseudonym onto in the Buffy
Season 3 premiere.
According to IMDB, her character’s full adopted name is now, ‘Anne Steele.
Taser Face “It’s METAPHORICAL.”
Anne and Angel actually met in Lie to Me, but given their change in...well everything
between the two episodes, neither of them seems to recognize each other.
It’s a kind hearted and smiling exchange.
As Angel’s true intentions are obscured from us, the viewing audience, we’re momentarily
left to wonder if perhaps good Angel is making a return.
That Angel we enjoy who gets along with the team and is learning to be a source of hope
in the wor...nope he stole her wallet.
It’s still jerk-Angel.
We get an intimidating closeup that feels like a callback to let us know this is still
fire breathing Angel from the last episode, as the camera pans across his desk to show
us he’s been shadowing Anne for a period of time already.
Wesley and Gunn go after a 20 foot demon on their own.
6:27 “Wait till his back is turned.
GO.”
“I thought you said he breathed fire.”
That may be...one of my favorite fart jokes ever.
I also wonder, since the monster is an Angel metaphor, if it’s being able to shoot fire
out of it’s backend is writer code for Angel is currently being an *bleep*-hole.
Angel has a conversation with Merle that is more hard boiled noir than almost any bit
of dialogue in the first season.
“Do you have the information I need or am I going to have to see what the inside of
that head looks like?”
“Pro bono...it’s gotta be an angle.”
“Always is.”
He brings Cordy’s clothes to the shelter as an excuse to see Anne.
She gives him a tour and tells Angel about the upcoming W&H fundraiser for the shelter
called ‘The Big Holdup.’
Merle takes a door in the face from a new demon named Boone, who wants to know what
Angel has been up to.
At Merle’s mention of lawyers, Boone goes to visit the new co-head of Wolfram and Hart
special projects, who bring him on board.
Team Investigations debate what the name of their new company should be and I’m probably
being elitist but why are they celebrating with Steel Reserve tall boys?
They’re starting a business, not a frat.
Sorry.
“Stee Reserve.”
Because I am blessed with a blissfully selective memory, I always forget the scene with Cordy
mocking Gunn’s name exists.
And, because I do, I cringe hard enough to break bones.
Every.
Time.
it.
Happens.
Not to worry.
I’m not going to play the clip here.
…that would be mean.
Angel experiences an attack of conscience and comes clean with Anne-relle, explaining
that Lind-lah are going to steal the money from the fundraiser.
Lindsey brings Boone who beats Angel off.
Wait...no.
Lind-lah discusses stealing the money in public and are sure they were just recorded.
Angel returns to Anne to tell her she shouldn’t take the money from Wolfram and Hart because
she’s only going to see a small portion of it and the rest will go to funding evil
Wolfram and Hart’s evilness.
At the fundraiser in question, we get a glimpse of sweet-surrogate evil-daddy figure Holland.
Gone but never forgotten.
Before getting to meet new-Coke Holland, Nathan.
30:30 Nathan: “I like to think of my job as underlining the ‘heart’ in Wolfram
and Hart.”
All right.
Fine.
That’s gloriously awful.
One point for Holland-Zero.
The fund raiser begins with celebrities holding up rich people with plastic weapons.
Cute.
32:37 “Serena I have to know.
This thing with making your character gay: is that like, all about..ratings?
Because I don’t get it.”
Amusing bit of Buffyverse meta commentary on Tillow there.
The show the fund raiser actors are from is also called ‘Life Lessons.’
Wonder if it’s some kind of adolescence allegory?
Boone, Anne, and Angel were all in it together.
As Anne approaches the player with the tape, Lindsey and Lillah panic and run to the screen
only to discover it’s all a big prank.
“Price.
Wesley Wyndam Price.”
In 1995’s First Knight, Alexis actually got to hone that Sean Connery impression in
the flesh.
Turns out the prank was a ruse to steal the money.
Anne is angry at Angel because she risked the shelter on his word.
Diet-Holland explains why Wolfram and Hart want Angel alive.
“Angel plays a major part in the apocalypse.
Which side he’s on is the grey area.”
Boone returns for a classic western standoff.
And the episode ends with a severely bloodied Angel returning the money to Anne.
Review (A knight without armor in a savage land)
This time through, something clicked for me with ‘Blood Money.’
As I watched the episode, I started imagining that ‘Redefinition’ didn’t exist and
this was the episode that IMMEDIATELY followed ‘Reunion.’
When I did that, suddenly ‘Blood Money’s’ version of Angel made a certain kind of sense.
It follows that some point along the path of the Darla-Buffy mirror arc would revert
Angel to a version of himself he was pre-Doyle post-Sunnydale.
Angel chose to leave Buffy’s life and self-isolate.
Darla being stolen from his might cause him to end up in a similar place.
SO, yeah, Angel as a burned out amoral private dick with an axe to grind makes a kind of
sense, giving away Cordy’s clothing, and pretending to be nice to Anne while stealing
her wallet.
All as a means to an ends.
I like it.
This version of Angel makes a lot more sense to me, even if I have to throw out ‘Redefinition,’
in my head to get there.
And even ignoring his character arc, Blood Money is a solid and entertaining episode.
Revisiting Anne-ter-elle is a fun step in the post-Reunion mini-arc.
And, I love the use of Boone to explore a Western Noir mashup, and all of the elements
the contrast of those genres reveals.​ Boone is played by a virtually unrecognizable
Mark Rolston, a Richard Jenkins style, ‘seen him in everything,’ working actor who has
been in Aliens, X-files, and The Departed.
Though I probably most remember him for the emotional scars he gave me in ‘The Shawshank
Redemption.’
Angel: I thought you’d be in Brazil by now.
Boone from Shawshank: Honey…hush.
The American western genre mashup with film noir is extremely interesting.
While their cultural roots are different, both rose to prominence around the same time
period.
Classic noir films are visually defined by the claustrophobic binary between light and
shadow while telling tales of morally ambiguous characters.
While classic American westerns are visually defined by bright wide-open vistas and morally
binary tales featuring clearly defined good guys in white hats who care deeply about honor
and justice.
15:30 “The son came up.
I let him go.”
“You let him go.
Why?”
“The sun came up.
Don’t you people know anything about, honor?”
Boone is dressed in typical western garb: a light duster, red shirt, and boots.
His outfit next to Angel’s actually makes him the good-guy white hat and Angel the bad-guy
black hat, thematically perfect for this stage in Angel’s post-Reunion fall.
“And yet somehow, I just can’t seem to care.”
“Don’t you people know anything about honor?”
I couldn’t find confirmation of this but I’m guessing Boone’s name is a reference
to ‘Richard Boone,’ the actor who played Paladin on ‘Have Gun - Will Travel.’
Paladin, the hero of ‘Have Gun - Will Travel,’ is an educated American gunslinger-for-hire,
clad in black, whose job often makes him play the part of outlaw, body guard, and detective.
Quoting from an IMDB summary: We never learned his real name, he was simply
Paladin and on his business card was the chess symbol of the knight…
Doyle: Is it a lobster?
‘Blood Money,’ contains a couple other mainstays of the western genre including a
robbery and a final standoff between the white and black hat, nicely symbolic of Angel’s
regular internal struggle.
I love that the sequence is even filmed from the hip-level prototypical western standoff
perspective, even if it’s pretty funny that the camera angle exists because the two of
them are supposed to have guns strapped to their hips.
Of course, the rules of any medium are eventually subverted.
The revisionist western sub-genre began in the 1960s, and there have recently even been
a handful of noir westerns like ‘Hell or High Water,’ and ‘No Country for Old Men.’
‘Blood Money’ got me thinking: if Angel were a character in a Western he pretty closely
resembles William Munny in ‘Unforgiven.’
A former outlaw bad-guy gunslinger, mourning the loss of his wife, who goes on one last
job that requires him to be an avenging angel.
“I’ve killed women and children.
I’ve killed everything that walks or crawls at one point or another.”
…Humans don’t fight back
Julia Lee’s evolving performance as Chan-Lilly-Anne is pretty great.
Chanterelle had the air of someone keeping the world at bay inside the bubble of this
naive little vampire worship club she’d found.
By the time she was Lilly, that safe bubble had shrunken to just the one she lived her
relationship inside of with Rickie.
And, after sharing similar personal realizations with Buffy and taking her first tentative
steps back into reality, her bubble became just…Anne, the identity that Buffy gifted
to her.
And I love the idea of Anne choosing to actually create the thing in the world she’d been
looking for the whole time.
The shelter is hope for the people who need it.
And, by ‘Blood Money,’ 2 years on from the events of her last Buffy episode, Julia
plays Anne as a weathered battler, committed to not giving it up, no matter the cost.
Because…
“What is hell but the absence of hope.
The substance is the tactile proof of despair?”
As a former Buffy proxy (she was a mirror for Buffy to experience and learn from what
had happened to her with Angel,) Anne also works well at this juncture in Angel’s Season
2 arc.
There was a very important trilogy of episodes in Buffy’s third season: The Wish, Amends
(or Angel the Series, episode zero,) and Gingerbread.
I’m not going to completely rehash the discussion of those episodes here, there are links to
them in the video description.
Loosely, ‘Amends’ was about whether Angel’s life could still mean something (even in the
face of all the terrible things Angelus had done before.)
And, in Buffy and Angel’s world, that meaning is something accessed through ‘the fight.’
“Strong is fighting.
It’s hard.
And it’s painful.
And it’s everyday.”
But, in ‘Gingerbread’ Joyce asks Buffy a question particularly relevant to this season
of Angel.
Joyce: Evil pops up, you undo it.
A-a-and that's great!
But is Sunnydale getting any better?
Are they running out of vampires?
It's not your fault.
You don't have a plan.
You just react to things.
I-i-it's bound to be kind of fruitless.
If Buffy was meant to keep fighting and Slaying, then why hasn’t her fighting managed to
convert Sunnydale to some kind of utopia yet?
Why hasn’t she won yet?
Is victory even in sight?
It’s a question that frames Buffy’s efforts in absolutes.
“It’s pure.
Sometimes I miss that clarity.”
Throughout ‘Blood Money,’ Angel speaks to Anne in absolutes but she refuses to sacrifice
her kids in the name of Angel’s war.
Angel: "There is blood on that money, Anne.”
Anne: "You don't know what it takes to run a shelter..."
Angel: "Help me.”
Anne: "Why should I?"
Angel: "Because it's right.
In the long run, it's better."
Anne: "Most of my kids don't have a long run.”
If Boone and the genre he comes from are about black and white, binary truths, Anne’s is
about the grey.
Life is complex, rarely as simple as winning or losing.
And I think there is a very telling detail in the way the episode’s final scenes unfold.
Boone comes back to Angel saying he has to know whether Angel is better than he is.
He throws the money on the floor.
There is a big dramatic western-style buildup BEFORE…We cut away.
A very battered Angel brings Anne the money.
Did Angel win?
Did Boone and just walk away?
I think the episode’s statement is in the fact that we never find out.
For the episode to fixate on who won would’ve been to miss the point.
Sometimes there are no victories.
There is only the battle and the thing we’re fighting for.
“What’s this stuff on it?”
“Blood.”
“...it’ll wash.”