Drusilla and Spike are waiting for the Judge to regain his strength when Drusilla has a vision of...
something having to do with Angel.
Angel is struggling in the streets when a smoking woman happens upon him.
You know if 'Buffy' were a show made by Quentin Tarantino
I imagine a lot of the vampire kills would look like this one.
Buffy quietly sneaks back home and Joyce seems to think she looks different.
The gang haven’t found Buffy or the vampires with the box, all night.
Xander suggests they head to the factory to try and save Buffy,
and Cordelia very pragmatically recommends against it.
"And do what?"
"Besides be afraid and die."
Sure Xander and Cordelia still trade barbs for the sake of keeping their secret from the gang
but there's something about the extra venom in Xander’s tone
and the hurt in Cordelia’s eyes that gives you a sense of where his loyalties still lie.
As she later points out, Xander is always quick to protect Buffy or Willow but he NEVER sticks up for her.
Quite the opposite actually.
Then again, last episode he did ask her to go to Buffy’s party as his date.
Buffy strolls in and lets everyone know the Judge is assembled.
Angelus casually ambles into the factory cribbing lines from Tom Joad’s final speech from 'The Grapes of Wrath'.
The Judge tries to burn Angel to the ground but can’t
and Drusilla realizes that there is no humanity left in him.
We’re going to have to talk about the Buffy soul canon and some things that may seem inconsistent about it.
The common understanding of the show's lore that I’ve heard and read about is that the soul is an individual’s conscience or moral guidance.
Ensouled creatures are capable of moral, unselfish decisions
and creatures without one are not.
A version of a character with a soul and without aren’t two separate characters.
It's just that the souled version of a character is simply empowered with greater freedom and choice to act altruistically.
But the character’s essence is the same.
"When you become a vampire the demon takes your body but it doesn't get your soul..."
"...that's gone."
"No conscience, no remorse."
"It's an easy way to live."
There are a few problems with that interpretation though,
including vampires in later seasons OCCASIONALLY acting for the benefit of others rather than themselves.
But one of the MAJOR exceptions to that interpretation is Angel
...and Angelus.
The shows, both 'Buffy' and its spinoff 'Angel', treat Angel and Angelus as two DISTINCT characters that occupy the same body.
Angel’s soul contains more than just his conscience.
It seems to contain much of the essence of Angel the character.
His very identity.
And again, that situation is unique to Angel.
The show deals with the soul very differently in later seasons with other vampires.
Consider as well this scene with our humanity acid-test the Judge.
In 'Surprise', the Judge's first words to Spike and Dru were…
“You two stink...
...of humanity.”
"You share affection and..."
"... jealousy."
And the Judge found enough humanity in the gang’s geekpire to burn him to the ground.
So he seems to imply he’s capable of destroying Drusilla and Spike because they retain some of their essence from when they were human.
Also, remember in 'What’s My Line' when Drusilla was torturing Angel for the horrible things Angelus did to her family.
It was as though those things had happened to HER.
Which brings us back to the factory and the Judge not being able to burn Angelus.
Angelus is devoid of what made him human, completely distinct from the Angel we know.
So here’s how I personally interpret what’s going on.
The soul IS the metaphorical conscience of the characters
but within the lore is specifically the seat of identity.
Not only that, but in the process of a human becoming a vampire,
the soul can depart completely
or leave a residue of itself, for lack of a better term.
But regardless, it would explain Spike and Dru’s love
(yes, I do believe it is love),
the geekpire’s death
and the Judge’s inability to burn Angel.
It also explains why a character like Angelus is totally distinct from Angel,
while (mild spoiler here)
a character like Spike might not be AS distinct from his human self.
Spike’s “soul residue” gives him a desire for things that make him FEEL.
Angelus desires the destruction of those things
- starting with Buffy.
Spike will comment on this VERY specifically in
Becoming (Part 1) *(Part 2)
I’ve included his line from that episode in a section called “Further Discussion”. Check the video description.
If you haven’t finished the series I would avoid it.
Just my theory of course. I’d like to hear yours in the comments below.
We’ll be coming back to this over and over again as we go. *Check later reviews for a revised interpretation
For now, what this is all means is that Angelus is a very pure - perhaps uniquely evil vampire.
And he’s back.
Spike and Drusilla invite Angel to their...
...kill everyone on Earth party
and Angel asks them to lay low first so he can deal with the Slayer.
At the library, the rest of the Gang is researching how to stop the Judge.
Xander attempts to make peace with Cordelia for snapping at her earlier
"Willow! Uh."
"We were just--"
Willow sprints from the library and Xander catches her to try and smooth things over.
"---I'm--" Xander: "Willow."
"We were just kissing."
"It doesn't mean that much."
"No."
"It just means that you'd rather be with someone... you HATE..."
...than be with me."
*deep sigh*
I don’t often side with Xander,
but I gotta say here I don’t really think that Willow has a leg to stand on.
While the two of them had some flirty scenes in the beginning of ‘When She Was Bad’
they’ve never before or since been close to anything but platonic.
Sure, she’s been interested in Xander
and Xander has been aware of her interest
but they’ve never spoken of it openly.
Remember what I said about Xander asking out Buffy in 'Prophecy Girl'?
"Xander did entirely the right thing in asking her."
"If you're interested YOU ASK."
But Willow has NEVER done that for Xander.
I have empathy for how much it's gotta sting seeing your crush with someone else,
let alone someone they spar with as much as Xander and Cordelia have.
But Willow has NOT earned the right to punish him for her feelings here.
He may be making a mistake but it's his to make and you can’t help someone who hasn’t asked for it.
Regardless, Alyson Hannigan steals every scene she’s in this episode.
This is one of her best performances so far.
Buffy tries to find Angel at his place.
As she enters, Christophe Beck tortures us with a few notes of the Buffy/Angel love theme.
[Buffy/Angel love theme]
Amazing what a few notes on a piano can do.
Even on this run through of the episode I felt the faintest hope rising.
And theeeeen...
"You just disappeared."
"What?"
"I took off."
"Like I really wanted to stick around after that."
Hoi.
This scene is PAINFULLY brilliant.
As ever in the show, it’s working on two levels.
We have a scene occurring between 16 year-old Buffy and her boyfriend she just had sex with,
who is now acting like an emotionally distant asshat.
We also have a scene occurring between Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angelus, who wishes to destroy her
- starting from the inside out.
Angelus pulls every slimeball trick he can in this scene, even going so far as to counter Buffy’s sexual insecurity
by implying she’s a whore.
[laughs]
"You were great."
"Really."
"I thought you were a pro."
Jenny is talking with her Uncle Gypsy stereotype to try and make an argument for Angel’s value in the good fight
and Uncle Stereotype tells her she's already too late.
He explains the way the curse worked:
"One moment where the soul that we restored no longer plagues his thoughts,"
"and that soul is taken from him."
So now we have the first clear description of Angel’s unbelievably big dumb curse.
Angel’s soul was restored so he could suffer intolerable misery and sadness for all the bad things Angelus did.
But if he experiences a moment of true happiness,
i.e. doing it and doing it and doing it wow with your amazing vampire slayer girlfriend,
then he loses his soul again and unleashes Angelus back on the world.
I say unbelievably big dumb curse for a couple of reasons.
First, whoever cursed Angel must’ve been drunk because they FORGOT TO TELL ANGEL about the the fine print.
Angel has proven himself to be a moral being and clearly would never want to release Angelus back on the world
- so the likeliest explanation for his even entering into a relationship with Buffy
is HE DIDN’T KNOW what it would lead to.
Second, and I’m just spitballing here;
what if Angel REALLY liked football (or American Soccer).
Picture it.
It's the 1980s
and he’s slumming around Europe eating rats. *He wouldn't actually be in Europe in the '80s based on the show's timeline but bare with me for this example.
He happens into a scummy pub
and on the TV there’s a football game.
The boys in green are taking on Spain in the World Cup.
Hamilton passes across the middle.
It’s blocked.
But OH MY GOD Armstrong is there to put it in.
This is incredible
... and Angel’s lost his soul.
Then there’s the notion of how a human BECAME a vampire in the first place.
By restoring the soul, you’re really more punishing the person they were before they became a vampire.
Sure, some vampires became undead willingly.
But SOME are victims.
Drusilla for instance.
Angel tortured and murdered her family before FORCING her to become a vampire.
Would punishing who Drusilla was before she became a vampire be just?
"It is not justice we serve..."
"...it is vengeance."
*sigh*
Whatever.
Willow comes back and explains her willingness to not let her feelings get in the way of saving the world.
Good on her.
She asks ‘where’s an army when you need one’,
and this spurs an idea in Xander.
Then the lights go out.
Angelus tries to eat everyone.
Buffy shows up, pleading for Angel to look inside and find himself.
“Dream on, schoolgirl."
"Your boyfriend is dead.”
Xander saves Willow
...again.
Angel kisses Buffy...
or maybe 'karate chops her face with his lips' is a better description
before throwing her aside and leaving.
Oh man, her thousand yard stare just KILLS me.
In the library, Giles tries to figure out the trigger for Angel’s turn.
And it dawns on Buffy that there WAS a trigger and she must be it.
Willow realizes what it was as well and tries to silence Giles’ questions.
Back at the factory, Spike is wondering why Angelus didn’t kill Buffy
but Drusilla has figured it out.
"You want to hurt her,..."
"...just like you hurt me."
The parallels that started the last episode between Buffy and Drusilla are just as interesting here.
Consider, Drusilla is super-powered.
She’s not a potential Slayer and doesn’t have the physical abilities that Buffy does, but she is precognitive.
She’s a seer.
And Angel destroyed her life, drove her insane, and then turned her, making her a sort of living embodiment of the terrible things he’s capable of.
A memorial to his evil.
And now, an undead example of what he desires to do to Buffy.
Buffy has a dream in which Angel tells her she needs to know what to see.
She turns and sees Jenny Calendar.
Remember in her second dream of Drusilla when she saw the back of Jenny Calendar’s head and ignored it?
Buffy wakes,
heads to school,
and confronts Jenny in front of Giles.
Jenny swears she didn’t find out what was going to happen until after it did.
Giles patriarchal denial spares him the realization for a moment before…
"But-but how-how do you know you were responsible for?"
"Oh."
Xander, Cordelia, and Oz head to the military base.
Cordy and Xander sneak inside to steal a weapon of some sort while Oz and Willow wait in the van.
Xander uses a bit of knowledge leftover from when he went all military in 'Halloween' to get them past a guard.
This leads to one of the best lines of the season.
"Well, does looking at guns make YOU want to have sex?"
"I'm seventeen."
"Looking at linoleum makes me want to have sex."
Man, it's hard to describe the scene between Oz and Willow in the van without sounding like a hyperbolic jackass.
It's like being tasked with critiquing Beethoven’s fifth symphony or like
...the perfect grilled cheese sandwich.
The scene is just better than I have words for describing it.
And what I love about it because of this is how elegantly simple it is.
Willow, still feeling slighted by Xander’s affection for Cordy asks Oz to makeout with her,
and Oz finds a way of rejecting her so tenderly that the rejection is better than most people’s direct declarations of love.
We should all be so lucky as to be rejected by Oz.
Now is as good a time as any to talk a little about Willow’s path through this season.
Willow has steadily been growing more
into the confident woman she showed glimpses of in first season episodes like 'The Pack'.
In 'When She Was Bad', her crush on Xander is in full bloom
but she gets relegated to backup when the Slayer is back in town.
And again in ‘(Inca) Mummy Girl’, her disappointment in Xander’s affection for another woman is obvious.
"Willow?"
"Boy, they really like each other."
Her Eskimo costume at the dance later in the episode is symptomatic of her shyness
- a physical expression of her desire to hide.
But notice even then in that episode, Oz sees past it.
In 'Reptile Boy', a bit of Willow’s expressive side bursts through as she chastises Angel and Giles’ lack of empathy for Buffy’s human needs.
"Why do you think she went to that party?"
"Because YOU gave her the brush-off!"
"And YOU never let her do anything except work and patrol and I know she's the Chosen One but, you're killing her with the pressure. I mean, she's 16 going on 40!
(she is the character more connected and in tune with Buffy than anyone else.)
In 'Halloween', Buffy tries to coax her into being a bit more physically expressive.
Willow, once again, initially chooses to hide but has by the end found confidence she didn’t know she had.
Looking at it, I think all of these moments were shafts of light shining through a crack in the doorway to Willow’s better self.
In this scene, Oz throws the door wide open,
and, maybe inadvertently, invites her to walk through.
Jenny takes Buffy to see her Uncle Gypsy Stereotype but Angel has gotten there first.
Across the wall, he’s scrawled a particularly repulsive message in blood about Buffy and his first time together.
Back at the factory, Angelus and Drusilla set out with the Judge to wreak havoc.
There’s a nice bit of blocking where Angelus pulls Drusilla away from Spike,
expressing his unspoken plan to actually take her away from him.
The Judge begins nuking everyone
and Buffy shoots him with a crossbow to get his attention.
Then she fires Xander’s birthday gift and bits of the Judge rain on gathered mall goers.
Buffy chases Angelus, and the two of them fight.
And, again we get a scene working on two levels
- the physical confrontation between Buffy and Angelus
and Buffy having to emotionally confront Angel’s death.
When the moment comes to stake him she can’t seem to do it and Angel mocks her with a grin.
And THEN…
There are several moments in the series when I actually wanted to stand up in my living room and cheer.
TWO actually this season.
This was one of them.
"Alright!"
[cheers and applause]
"Go!"
[cheers and applause]
"Go!"
After saving the world...again Giles drives Buffy home in his hoopty
and repays the kindness Buffy showed him at the end of 'The Dark Age'.
In that episode, Giles was facing the consequences of having lost himself in the demon Eyghon
and struggling to forgive himself, speculating that maybe he shouldn’t.
Here, Buffy is facing the consequences of having lost herself in Angel,
and expecting Giles to be disappointed in her.
Buffy’s birthday finally ends,... on the couch... with Joyce...grieving.
I think Whedon summed the episode up (and Buffy as a whole really) when in the commentary he said,
“The two things that matter most to me:"
"emotional resonance and"
"rocket launchers.”
Action,
and the reason to care.
'Innocence' is the complete fulfillment of the show's ambition to be a high school horror show
and using monsters as a metaphor for impediments to growing up.
It's a play on the virgin trope in horror movies and how the loss of virginity
typically leads to a character's murder, flipping that on its head here by making the death,
Angel’s.
It's also the story of a teenage girl sleeping with her boyfriend for the first time
and him being a total asshat to her after they do.
'Innocence' is also the payoff episode we’ve been building to all season.
In 'Some Assembly Required', the Frankenstudent (hiding in the basement) who previously dated Cordelia
would rather now kill Cordelia and make another monster than be alone.
'School Hard' is loaded with sexual symbols and innuendo.
“--I’ll make it quick."
"It won’t hurt a bit.”
In 'Inca Mummy Girl', Ampata literally kills men with her kiss.
In 'Reptile Boy', Buffy ditches her responsibilities as Slayer
and ends up in a frat house basement being attacked by a giant reptile penis monster
that she ultimately cleaves in half.
In “Halloween,” Buffy tries to turn herself into ‘just a girl,’ thinking that's what Angel would be looking for
and she nearly dies in the process.
In 'The Dark Age', Giles shows us the consequence of losing oneself completely,
as he loses himself in Eyghon and unleashes a monster on the people that he cares about.
'Bad Eggs' is loaded with foreshadowing.
Buffy misses the Sex Ed class covering the consequences of being sexually active.
In a make out session with Angel, she says to him…
“Angel, when I look into the future,
"...a-all I see is you.”
Then she fights a...
...giant wet vagina dentata monster that happens to have just EATEN a male vampire.
Stitched throughout most of this...
...is Xander and Cordelia’s relationship.
Which started in Buffy’s basement.
It's a relationship that the two of them speak openly about how wrong it is and yet can’t stop giving into their desires.
Or as Willow puts it:
"It's against all laws of God and man!"
In 'Surprise', Buffy’s subconscious is beginning to understand and try and warn her.
She sees a version of herself as Drusilla killing Angel and maybe has an opportunity to avoid the inevitable.
But too late
...too late.
All roads lead to 'Innocence'.
Somehow though, analysis feels a little vulgar when considering an episode like 'Innocence'.
Academic, and in the end, irrelevant.
We can talk about rhyme and verse
and the elegance of a particular couplet or the meaning of a stanza.
But in the end, there's only one relevant question:
[Goodnight...]
Does the poetry speak to you? [...-my love]
[The tired old moon is descending]
[Goodnight, my love]
[My moment with you now is ending]
[It was so heavenly]
[Holding you close to me]
[It will be heavenly]
[To hold you again in a dream]
[The star above]
[Have promised to meet us tomorrow]
['Til then---]
[cheers]
"Alright!"
[cheers]
"Alright!"