EPISODE 3.06

BILLY

Written by: Tim Miner and Jeffrey Bell

Directed by: David Grossman

Responsibility

What does it mean to be responsible? The word is used in two different though inextricably linked senses. First it means to be capable of rational conduct, in particular in the way we make choices. Secondly it means being morally accountable for the choices made and the consequences they bring. Clearly this is an episode in which responsibility in both senses becomes an issue.

When Billy was released from his prison in the demon dimension there were a number of people who could be said to be responsible for the fact:

	There was the Blim family; presumably Wolfram and Hart didn’t decide to help release Billy simply out of sympathy for the poor, misunderstood lad.
	Wolfram and Hart themselves were of course paid for their services. But a very wealthy and very powerful client in any law firm can also exercise such influence with the law firm that they are not entirely free agents.

Then there was Lilah. She was obviously the key player in organizing the break out. She may have been the one who came up with the idea of getting Angel to help. But she is also someone who came very close to being “cut” only recently, someone who feels she has to prove herself if she wants to preserve her career (among other things) and someone who is under siege from people like Gavin who are just waiting and watching for a chance to undermine her.

Next we have Angel. He was, after all, the one who (aided and abetted by Wesley) effected Billy’s escape after having been warned that he was a menace. Of course for Angel the motivating factor was helping Cordelia and he did not know for certain that Billy was dangerous. No doubt he too felt as if he were being left with little choice.

Each of these consciously played his or her own part in the escape. Each must be answerable for the choice they made. The one player who could not be said to be responsible was Cordelia. Of course Angel released Billy for her. But he acted without her knowledge. By no standards could she be said to have been responsible for what he decided to do to.

But for what do Angel and the others have to accept responsiblity? Billy’s release in and of itself is nothing. What is important is what he does with his freedom. Now, it is true that none of those responsible for his release - the Blim family, Wolfram and Hart, Lilah nor Angel – ultimately controls that. He alone decides what he does. But everyone was warned of what his actions were likely to be. Everyone in the Blim family (and we must assume everyone in Wolfram and Hart concerned with the project) would have known what he was capable of. They all clearly acted on the basis that he would continue to behave in the way he always had. Angel, for his part, may not have known the details of what Billy was capable of but he was warned in fairly stark terms that no good could come of his release. Besides, isn’t everyone in the Angelverse called William or any variation thereof bound to be a very bad boy. So, he could hardly say that he didn’t know what he was doing.

Am I My Brother’s Keeper?

The way that each of the forgoing accepted or filed to accept their responsibilities makes for a very interesting set of comparisons. Corporately Wolfram and Hart and, as an individual, Lilah seemed to have defined their responsibilities as being owed solely to their clients. So, when Lilah finds out that Billy is back after having been gone for three days she is concerned for him, not for what he might have done:

Lilah: “Billy, your family has been worried sick. Where have you been?"

Billy: "Went for a walk."

Lilah: "A walk. For three days?"

Gavin: "The boy was feeling cooped up."

Lilah: "Gavin, why don't you go - close an escrow or something? (Turns back to Billy) You're not supposed to be out on your own. You remember what happened the last time, don't you? You don't wanna end up in that awful place again, do you?"

Congressman Blim: "Well, of course he doesn't. - No one wants that."

Despite what he later caused Gavin to do to her she remain loyal to Billy, warning Angel:

"Stay away from my client."

Nor does this complete unconcern with what Billy does to others change. She regards with equanimity the fact that others might become infected. She even positively seems to enjoy the prospect of Angel being touched by Billy. Of course, she has no reason to feel sympathy for him but then he is not ultimately going to be the one to suffer the consequences. What seems to change her mind is Cordelia who challenges her own assumptions of her toughness. She first asserts this with pride:

Lilah: "I know the risks of my job and I accept them."

Cordelia: "Then why where you crying five minutes ago? - There's not a thing about badly reapplied mascara that I don't know."

Lilah: "I'm not Lindsey McDonald. I don't switch sides whenever it gets tough.”

But Cordelia has the perfect answer. She relates her own experience of being attacked to Lilah’s:

"It's not the pain. It's the helplessness. The certainty that there is nothing you can do to stop it, that your life can be thrown away in an instant by someone else. He doesn't care. He'll beat you down until you stay down because he doesn't even *think* of you as alive. - No woman should ever have to go through that, and no woman strong enough to wear the mantel of 'vicious bitch' would ever put up with it.

This is what touches Lilah. She rebels against the feeling of helplessness induced in her. So, ultimately when Lilah shoots Billy it has nothing to do with sympathy for his victims or a desire to stop him from hurting others. It has everything to do with her pride and a desire to claim back power over her own life.

The Blim family itself is clearly only concerned to protect Billy. As Lilah warns Angel:

“You can't touch him. Nobody can. Billy as in Blim? As in congressman Nathan Blim's nephew? That family is the closest thing this country has to royalty. They'd own half the eastern seaboard even if they weren't clients of ours. The law won't go near him."

It is of course true that the family keep him under wraps and that he has to arrange his own escape from the mansion. But that was hardly out of concern for others. It was to avoid anything happening to Billy. After all they have known about Billy for a long time and don’t really show a lot of interest in stopping him from hurting people. As Dylan, one of his cousins says:

"You gotta know the rules around Billy. Everyone in the family knows the rules. You never leave him alone with your girlfriend, keep him away from your pets and don't *ever* let him touch you. Like, if he wants money you gotta leave it on the table and back away."

So long as you – and those you like – are not affected by Billy what else is there to worry about. Even a pet seems more of an object of concern than the elderly couple whose 30 year marriage ended in violence because of Billy. And Dylan of course was perfectly willing to see Billy take off in a plane from Santa Monica, destination unknown and irrelevant:

“Billy said he wanted to fly some place. I don't know where. Vancouver, Tahiti, he didn't say. Hopefully far away."

As I said, who cares what Billy does to people far away?

In my review of “That Vision Thing” I suggested that Billy’s imprisonment in the Hell Dimension might not be quite as straightforward as it seems. There Skip said of Billy:

“Oh he’s supposed to be here. You have any idea how monstrous a guy has to be before he gets sent to us?”

But the evil we see Billy do here is strictly run of the mill by Angelverse standards. We certainly see nothing that would justify being burnt alive. Remember Lilah said he was “unfairly” imprisoned. Perhaps the following remark to Gavin explains this

“Had his own private room in hell. Family connections.”

Perhaps what she meant was that it was his connection with the Blim family that got him special treatment. Perhaps the unfairness was that his punishment was related not to what he did but to who he was and perhaps in this family we see a new and major player in the Angelverse.

In any event, what we see from Wolfram and Hart and the Blim family doesn’t come as much of a surprise. Responsibility in the sense of moral accountability for the choices we make implies that we owe those adversely affected thereby some sort of duty; that they have the right to be considered. The Blim family and Lilah simply do not accept that proposition. Neither see themselves as accountable to others for the choices they make and both make their choices based solely on very private and personal considerations of what matters to them.

Billy himself is the ultimate example of this. First of all he does not even accept that what happens is his choice at all.

Angel: "You like to hurt women, do you, Billy? That make you feel like a man?"

Billy: "I have never hurt a woman in my life. I just like to watch."

And later when he thinks he is about to cause Angel to attack Cordelia:

"No, I won't hurt her. *I* won't hurt her at all!"

The clue to his attitude comes when we learn of his views of both men and women:

Billy: "You think I hate you because you're a woman. I don't."

Cordelia: "Gee, and I was feeling special."

Billy: "I don't hate women. I mean, sure, you're all whores who sell yourselves for money and prestige, but men are just as bad. Maybe even worse. They're willing to throw away careers or families, or even lives for what's under your skirt!"

Men are powerless, lacking in basic self-control. Women are corrupt and corrupting. They deserve what happens to them and they are in fact themselves the cause of it. He is after all just the bystander. This is a repudiation of any sense of responsibility for his own actions.

Nothing could be further removed from Cordelia’s attitude. This is defined for us very early on. When Angel recognizes Billy as having been on the scene of the murder of the elderly married woman, Cordelia immediately takes responsibility for what happened:

Cordelia: "You're sure this is him? This is the guy?"

Angel: "You pull someone from a hell dimension, you tend to remember their face. Yeah. That's him."

Cordelia: "Well, then now we know why the Powers made me experience that woman's death. -She died because of me."

Angel: "No."

Cordelia: "Yes! Angel, if he's somehow responsible, then so am I."

This is a statement she repeats on the runway in the final confrontation with Billy. She refuses to leave even when she thinks Angel is going to turn violent against her:

"I can't. I have this problem. This is happening to you because of me. Because of *me.* So, I can't leave you, Angel. I won't."

It was because of this that she left the safety of the hotel and tracked Billy across LA. It was because of this that she quite self-consciously kept one step ahead of Angel all the time. She knew he would come to Dylan’s apartment looking for Billy. She could have waited there for him. Alternatively if she thought Billy might have been getting away she could have contacted him herself and told him where to go. Instead she took the task of facing Billy on her own shoulders because she thought herself responsible. And she believed that because she felt that anyone adversely affected by Billy mattered and that because of that she owed a duty to them.

To the extent that this emphasizes the obligation we each owe others, the need if you will to take responsibility for them, this is a good and important point for the writers to make. Certainly it stands in marked contrast to the attitudes we have just been discussing. And it is entirely in character for Cordelia now to have this sort of empathy. At the start of this series I was very dubious about the idea of visions being sent by TPTB as a plot device. Truth to tell it can still lead to some lazy plotting. But as a device to introduce Cordelia (who had formerly been so insulated in her own little world) to the suffering of the real world it has worked very well. When Angel takes the crime scene photographs of the first victim from her saying:

"Maybe you shouldn't be looking at that."

She reminds him that he cannot protect her from anything contained in them:

"Tell that to the Powers. They already ran the THX version in my head, remember?”

In terms of good intentions you cannot therefore fault this aspect of the episode. What you can fault is first of all its definition of responsibility. As I have already said, responsibility is about choice and the moral accountability that comes with it. If Cordelia had encountered Billy in a different way she would want to help, to prevent him hurting others. But that would not make her responsible for him. Nor does the fact that she was victimized to obtain his release. The choice of whether or not to free him, and therefore the responsibility for that choicem fell to others. And this is where the episode’s treatment of responsibility falls down badly. The heart of this debate is between Cordelia and Angel. Both share a common objective – to put Billy out of business. But it is the difference between them that is important and the difference was that Angel was given and made a choice. His choice may have been the right one or the wrong one. It was certainly a difficult one. He had to release a creature who was a danger (admittedly of unknown quantity) or lose not only a friend but also his link to TPTB. But it was the choice he and no-one else made and it was with him that the responsibility rested. The counterpoint between him and Cordelia lay in this fact and the “moral” of this story (if that is the right word) lay in Angel accepting that responsibility and using that fact to challenge Cordelia’s appropriation of it.

But he didn’t do that. Prima facie at least he shuffled off responsibility onto Lilah:

Angel: "You're not the one who broke him out and put him back on the streets. I did that."

Cordelia: "For me. You did it to save me."

Angel: "And I'd do it again."

Cordelia: "Angel..."

Angel: "Hey…Hey, whatever's happening now, you're not responsible for this and neither am I. But I know who is."

That is simply not true. Lilah has her own burden of responsibility to carry but she did not release Billy. Angel did and he did so knowing what he was doing. He made a choice. He has to carry the responsibility for that choice. The fact that he got so annoyed with Billy suggests that he realized this. But the writers seem to have little or no interest in pursuing this point. Instead of concentrating on Angel and the way he exercised his choice they introduce the issue of domestic violence, its causes and effects and especially what women should do about it. And it is this fact that ultimately makes “Billy” as an episode such a thematic mess.

As I have already argued, primary responsibility for freeing Billy rests with Angel and the fact that the writers allow Cordelia to appropriate that responsibility suggests that they have a different agenda. That agenda is to show women standing up for themselves and reclaiming power over their own lives. Not only is that why Cordelia takes the lead in tracking Billy down. It is why she persuades Lilah not to accept the abuse she suffered at the hands of Billy as a hazard of the job and fight for herself. In doing so as we saw she drew explicit comparisons between the suffering inflicted on her to help Billy escape and that inflicted on Lilah by Billy. The message is clear. No woman should accept that abuse. She should make sure that the abuse pays for what he has done and stop him doing it again. There is only one problem about this. Billy did not abuse Cordelia. Lilah did. If the message is about women standing up to their abusers why then did Cordelia go after Billy? Why didn't she go after Lilah? If that was the person who was responsible for her helplessness surely she had to reclaim it from her. Why above all did the writers so muddle the concept of responsibility on the one hand and women standing up to abuse on the other that Lilah, who was responsible for the abuse of Cordelia, is portrayed in this episode as the innocent victim who needs to reclaim control over her life when she attempted to control Angel through Cordelia? Weird.

The Male of the Species…

I also have some trouble believing that this was really an attempt to explain the causes of violence against women. Because if it was it was truly incompetent. Our starting point must be Lilah’s explanation for the effects that Billy has on men:

Cordelia: "Billy Blim makes people crazy."

Lilah: "Not all people. Just men. He brings out a primordial misogyny in them. Turns them into killers."

Let me start out by being pedantic. “Primordial” means “dating back to the earliest times”. I assume that the writers don’t actually mean this as it is quite hard to imagine a primordial protoplasm being misogynist – it not understanding concepts like gender or well anything else really. I will assume they mean that misogyny is genetic. Actually I have a hard time understanding how a social attitude like misogyny can be determined genetically as well but I was never very good at science so I will take that on trust.

This means first of all that violence against women is not caused by social or cultural attitudes – indeed any form of learned behavior – or by any personality disorders or indeed personal inadequacies. There are those who may find this somewhat simplistic. It also means that violence against women has a different cause to any other form of violence. Billy could only affect males. No-one affected by Billy attacked another male - it was only women. When Wesley was stalking Fred what we heard was the traditional litany of complaints used to justify violence against women: promiscuity, being a tease, stupidity, being manipulative. The violence is therefore indeed very specifically and particularly something men do to women. And then there is the curious fact that Angel isn’t affected, a fact he puts down to:

“Well, that thing that Billy brought out in others? - The hatred and anger... that's something I lost a long time ago."

So the fact that he went psycho in “Reunion” and toured LA here threatening to kill Billy was nothing to do with anger or hatred? I don’t think so. The anger and hatred he is referring to her is that directed specifically against women. Again the writers are emphasizing that this is very different to any other form of aggressive behavior. So, if a man comes home and beats his wife and then goes on to beat his children then there are different causes at work. There are those who may find this unbelievable.

Of course the really interesting part about this is that as it is genetic, there is really nothing that can be done about this form of violence. One area of responsibility that I haven’t touched on so far is Wesley’s feelings of guilt for his going psycho:

Wesley: “Fred, I tried to kill you."

Fred: "That wasn't you."

Wesley: "How can you know that? Something inside me was forced to the surface. Something primal, something..."

Fred: "Do you wanna kill me?"

Wesley: "Oh, God, no."

Fred: "It wasn't something in you, Wesley. It was something that was done to you."

Wesley: "I don't know what kind of man I am anymore."

Fred: "Well, I do. You're a good man. Will I see you back at the office?"

Wesley: "Yeah."

Fred: "Good."

Certainly something happened to Wesley, but as we have seen this episode is quite clear it was something from within him that was the cause of the violence. The exchange here certainly absolves Wesley of blame on the grounds that he had no control over what he did. But there is nothing to suggest that this wasn’t actually Wesley. Indeed may of the things he says to Fred are for him very character specific. For example when he warns her about being evasive and lying to him there are echoes of the warning he gave to Gunn. And it is not hard to see in his words here an echo of the way that his father treated him. When he complains about her provocative outfits and the way that she brushes up against him he seems to be reflecting his own attraction to her. And the sense that she is humiliating him by saying things behind his back is no doubt due to his own sense of insecurity. Indeed the way he taunts her about being cleverer than she is also hints at an insecurity about his intelligence. All that seems to have happened is that the normal social inhibitions repressing his impulses were removed. If we look at this in the context in which it was meant to be seen – domestic violence in the real world – we get a very startling proposition. The implication is then that anything in the real world which has the same effect of lowering inhibition – alcohol for example – is also something done to men. The fact that they beat up their wives under the influence of alcohol then isn’t really their fault and doesn’t mean they stop being “good men”. There are those who may find this pernicious. Aside from any other consideration it is almost wholly impossible to make this consistent with the idea of responsibility for the choices we make. In the context of an episode that should be about this how can you make this suggestion? Is this really what the writers intended?

But the thing I find most interesting about the this aspect of the episode is that, despite being plainly intended as a progressive and perhaps even a feminist work, “Billy” quite bizarrely lapses into the most traditional form of gender stereotyping.

The first thing to note here is that misogyny is identified with violence. Of course misogyny is a complex social phenomenon and can take many forms, often very subtle and refined. But in the writers’ minds it has to be a violent phenomenon because men are by nature violent. When confronted with a problem that is their basic impulse. Women on the other hand are not by nature violent. Let us look at a few examples of these propositions in action.

First while Cordelia and Angel are training we hear the following exchange:

Angel: "Then - just keep moving the line. You'll be able to keep an attacker busy until... You know."

Cordelia: "What? Until he dies of old age or until *you* swoop in to save me? Angel, I didn't ask you to train me so I could save. I already know how to save. *Now* I need to learn how to fight!"

Angel: "You don't think that I would?"

Cordelia: "Would what?"

Angel: "Save you."

Cordelia: "Men-folk not always around to protect the women-folk, you know? Besides, what if it turned out *you* were the guy I had to fight? Could happen."

Angel: "Okay."

There seems an unspoken assumption here, even by Cordelia, that women only fight defensively and not offensively. Nowhere does she for example point out that a good reason to learn to fight it to go after nasty, ugly, pointy things instead of waiting around until they come after her. And throughout this episode whenever women use violence it is (with one exception) never in an overtly aggressive fashion. It is always defensive. Even when men aren’t infected by Billy they, more often than not, are aggressive. The female cop shoots her partner in self-defense. Angel is harsh and aggressive with Lilah, he threatens the men standing beside the taxicab where the fare has been killed and he is equally aggressive with Dylan. In fact his whole approach is macho and not very effective when compared with Cordelia. It’s no wonder Lilah chides him by saying:

"This isn't some three horned Gurnarbeast you can just chop into meatloaf!"

Cordelia on the other hand is much more sophisticated and insightful in her dealings with Lilah (and probably Dylan for that matter). That is why she is continually one step ahead. When they confront Billy the difference in attitude is also marked. Cordelia is firm and is even prepared to used a tazer to stun him and a crossbow to intimidate him. But she simply wants to put him back in his dungeon. This is in spite of the fact that she has no means of doing so. Angel just wants to kill him. Fred probably didn’t have much option but to run from Wesley but the interesting bit here was the way she reacted to Gunn telling her to hit him. It was of course the obvious course of action but she could not bring herself to do it until he actually threatened her. Then there is the one piece of true aggression from a woman in this episode – when Lilah killed Billy. For Cordelia to kill someone who is more human than Angel would of course be a big no-no, especially since it was not plausibly necessary to save Angel. Lilah, on the other hand, is of course the evil bitch lawyer who can actually kill for revenge because by doing so she confirms that that is contrary to the nature of her gender just as she herself is.

Plot

The fact that this episode is such a confused mess thematically is a real shame because as a piece of storytelling it has some great strengths. First of all it is always a pleasure to see a character, Billy, introduced to the audience in one episode with an eye to the part he will play in a subsequent one. As a result the appearance of the character in the subsequent episode doesn’t feel forced and you get the feel of an organically developing storyline. Here that technique was especially successful since it enabled the real story in “Billy” to get off to a flying start with the minimum of introductions. We already know all we needed to about Lilah and Billy (and indeed about Angel and Billy for that matter). So, in the teaser there was a minimum of further set up. We only needed to learn the fact that he was the scion of a wealthy and powerful family and that he had been missing for three days. Once that was accomplished the writers could (almost literally) hit us between the eyes with Gavin’s shocking and unexpected attack on Lilah and Billy’s slow smile of satisfaction as he walked away. This not only grabbed our attention. It established that something really was wrong with Billy. Of course at this stage we were just not yet sure what. But Cordelia’s subsequent vision of the man killing his wife suggests a common thread between this attack and the one on Lilah. From this we get a fairly good idea of what Billy does for kicks and the rest is really detail. The basic simplicity of the set up is one of the strengths of the episode because it means that, from very early on, the plot just keeps on moving in a very economical manner. Despite the centrality of the issue little time is wasted analyzing the implications of Angel having freed Billy. Instead Angel Investigations just gets on with doing something about it.

But nothing about their task is predictable. At first things go well. Despite Lilah’s hostility, Billy is easy to find and it seems absurdly easy for Angel to gain entry to the Blim mansion. They hardly seem to have heard of the word “security”. But just when he has Billy right where he wants him the police turn up. Of course our expectation, like Angel’s , is that they are there to protect Billy from him. But they are there to arrest Billy instead. At first this seems inexplicable but in retrospect it does make sense. And that is important because this is the key moment in the plot. Now Billy really does disappear. Finding him becomes much more difficult than it was before and he is free to wreak more havoc. It is also the point that really starts the main lines of action in the episode as we see the race between Angel and Cordelia to find Billy develop and the events at the Hyperion unfold.

I have to say the hunt for Billy seemed a little aimless. It started out from the logical place – the site where the cop car crashed. But after that we really got a series of loosely connected set pieces rather than a sense of anyone following a trail in any sort of connected way. Equally there was never very much dramatic tension. Alright we can all agree that Billy getting away was a bad idea but there was never any real sense of threat connected with his escape to help focus tension. No-one had to stop him doing something nasty. Nor was there any race against time to stop his getaway. When Cordelia caught up with him he was just waiting on the runway. Nevertheless the individual scenes we did get had their pleasures. The bitch-fest between Lilah and Cordelia was quite wonderful. They were very different people but in many ways very alike. I love it when Cordelia’s inner bitch surfaces and it certainly did here. The exchanges between them were severe yet perfectly controlled and afterwards the gulf between them remained but they were able to establish a common understanding. Also very effective was the final confrontation on the Santa Monica runway. Here Cordelia in a very cool, calm and collected way proved herself master of the situation – an elegant but steely determination betraying an inner strength that was clearly more than a match for Billy’s arrogance and bravado. And of course there was the added uncertainty caused by the fact that Billy tried to infect Angel. Here I thought Angel’s reaction – screaming at Cordleia and becoming all nervous and jumpy – was a little forced but we could never be sure what was going to happen until he hit Billy. The one disappointment was with the ending. It had surprise value but it was hardly shocking. It was obvious from the beginning that neither Angel nor Cordelia had any plan for sending Billy back to the Hell dimension so there really was only one way this could have ended. And to have Lilah intervene was just too pat and too convenient to be wholly satisfactory.

However, in terms of dramatic effect the hunt for Billy paled into insignificance when compared with what happened between Wesley and Fred. I observe in passing that this somehow seems wrong and that the real dramatic focus should have been on Billy’s escape. What worked about this aspect of the plot was the fact that it was so unexpected. From what we had seen before it appeared that Billy infected a victim by actual contact. When Wesley examined his blood there was certainly a clue for us to pick up on:

Fred: "Looks to me as if some of the red blood cells are kind of supercharged."

Wesley: "Those would probably be from Billy's demon lineage."

Fred: "So, however Billy is putting the mojo on people, the power seems to be in his blood. Which means it can also be in his sweat or his saliva or even his touch."

This should have alerted us to the possibility of Wesley becoming infected but it was only when he began to say strange things that the warning bells started to go off. First he says:

"Speaking of saliva, where is Cordelia?"

This was very odd. Then he warns Fred:

“Lie to me again and we're going to have a problem."

From that point onwards it is obvious that something is wrong ad Wesley gets ever more nasty and violent. And the key element here is AD’s fantastic performance. He never shouts, he never overplays the aggression. It actually seems very controlled, very deliberate. But it is all the more threatening for that. We get a sense of things running out of control and of Fred’s life being actually at risk. Then there is the context in which this happens – a creepy, old abandoned hotel in which the dilapidation adds greatly to the atmosphere. And add to this two very well judged twists. The first is the sudden appearance of Gunn. Initially he is the cavalry riding to the rescue and all further threat from Wesley seems to have gone. Then there is the mounting disbelief and shock as he is revealed to be just as much a threat as Wesley. Finally just when it seems that Wesley is about to close in on the helpless Fred, it turns out she isn’t that helpless after all and things are brought to a sudden and violent conclusion.

Overview (C)

And here I think I am being generous in mt marking. Thematically, “Billy” aimed for the wrong targets and missed most of the targets it aimed for. I was looking forward to an episode about the consequences of the choices we make and the way we have to live with those choices. The problem here is that the episode’s concentration on Cordelia distracts attention from this central idea. In doing so the writers are confusing guilt on the one hand with responsibility on the other. As a result they have little of any consequence to say about the latter. More seriously still the theme of responsibility is engulfed in an ill-though out, simplistic and frankly implausible excuse for social comment. In many ways domestic violence is the sort of topic that Angel should be addressing. But to do so in this ham fisted manner does more harm than good. This episode’s treatment of this theme is so incoherent that it actually ends up in part sending a message the writers cannot have intended, as well as undermining any idea that this was an episode about taking responsibility. The one good thing about the episode and the only thing that saved it from a D (or worse) was that despite its obvious thematic failings it was a very fine piece of storytelling which remained very watchable throughout. Both Cordelia and Wesley shone. I especially welcomed the way such great use was made of Wesley because he has been sadly neglected to date. The scenes between him and Fred in the Hyperion had everything – tension, excitement and some unexpected twists and turns. It was just a pity about the rest.