Chapter I:
For Unto Us A Child Is Born

An Impossible Pregnancy

Finding out at the start if season 3 that Darla was pregnant was something of a shock.  After all as Angel had confirmed to Buffy in “Bad Eggs”, vampires can’t have “little vampires”

Buffy:  "Oh, I told you, that faux parenting gig we're doing at school.  Like I'm really planning to have kids anytime soon. Uh,

maybe someday, in the future, when I'm done having a life, but... right now kids would be just a little too much to deal with."

 

Angel:  "I wouldn't know.  I don't... Well, you know, I... I can't."

 

Buffy:  "Oh.  That's okay, um... I...I figured there were all sorts of things vampires couldn't do. You know,  like work for the Telephone Company, or volunteer for the Red Cross, or... have little vampires."

The pregnancy therefore needed to be explained.  Moreover, the events of season 2 were only just behind him; he had a new direction – concentrating on helping others and not thinking so much about his own redemption.  Or perhaps to put it another way he was intended to advance his own redemption by thinking about others.  A child and the responsibilities a parent has for a child are very difficult to reconcile with this new outlook.  Having a son by definition forces you to concentrate your energies very close to home.  For both of these reasons introducing a child into Angel’s life at this stage seemed an odd choice.  So why do it?

Well the obvious answer to that question can be found in the way that Connor became central to the developments in the show almost for the entire remainder of its run:

Without his character, the last three seasons of he series would have been unrecognizably different.  Strikingly none of the other supporting characters in the series, not even Cordelia, proved so central to its plot development.  One has to admire the efficiency of the use made of the character if nothing else.  But there was more than that to his introduction.  Connor also became important to the development of the basic themes of the series in its last three years.  We can see this even when he was a baby.  So, for example in “Offspring” we saw the duality of Angel’s nature as both a vampire with a dark past an imperfectly controlled instincts and a human being.  We also saw in Darla a soulless killer forced into the role of a life-giver.  This raises some very interesting questions about the offspring of this pair and what its nature may be.  This in turn opens up some more general questions about good an evil and its place in the world, especially how difficult it can be to separate them in everyday actions. In Holtz too we are introduced to a man who believes that he is acting in the name of justice while at the same time doing unequivocally evil thongs. In “Quickening” the writers on the one hand stressed the power of family ties.  But on the other they have foreshadowed threats to Angel’s own potential ties to the child both from Holtz and from the child’s possible involvement in the Tro-clon.  And in “Dad” we see the potential for conflict between Angel’s responsibilities to his son and that to others. 

All of the elements that drove the show for the remainder of its run were therefore here: the conflict between right and wring within individuals, how an important aspect of that is the clash between public responsibilities and private feelings and above all how we can do evil without really believing we are.  But it was Connor’s characterization as a teenager that we got the best illustration of these important themes.

Chapter II:
Return from Quor'Toth

Right and Wrong

From the time he was first introduced into the series, it was clear that Connor had a soul and, therefore, a conscience.  That is to say he had a knowledge of good and evil and the difference between them and an instinct to do good.  But we obviously had to wait until  his return from Quor’toth to understand what this actually meant in the context of the series.   In the season 3 episode “A New World” one of the first things he did was to save Sunny, a teenage runaway, from being raped by a man named Tyke.  Because of this, we cannot simply say that he had been so brutalized by his environment as to loose his innate sense of right and wrong.   But that environment and his upbringing by Holtz had given him very black and white view of good and evil as well as his definition of an appropriate response to evil.   After rendering Tyke helpless, he seems about to slit his throat before Sunny intervenes to stop him.  Tyke was, to put it mildly, a low life.  He sells drugs and is clearly abusive.  But as Sunny herself said killing him would be wrong:

“I know Tyke’s a bastard.  But the cops are even worse.”

He was a human being, with a capacity for both good and evil.  We do not know why he became what he was or whether at any stage he might change.  But for Connor such considerations were quite irrelevant.  He was bad and Connor killed bad things.  As he said himself:

“I will cling to the good and I will lay waste to the evil.”

It was that simple.  The point that Sunny was making however, was that society in LA could be as neatly compartmentalized as Connor might wish: the good and the bad, each clearly identified as such. Ironically her own death later in the same episode, proved how right she was about this.  She was the one who went looking for drugs from Tyke.  When presented with the opportunity she stole them (and his money and jacket) from him.  She was then the one who gave herself an overdose in the bathroom.  Tyke fed off the inadequacies of people like Sunny and we may be sure that he certainly didn’t beg her to get help.  But in the end, Sunny’s death was largely of her own making.  It’s a complicated world and bad things don’t happen just because some bad people cause them to happen. 

But that was not the way Connor saw things.   As far as he was concerned Sunny wasn’t weak and foolish.   She wasn’t the author of her own death.  She was good and the victim of evil.  That evil was Tyke, even though it was only because of Connor that Sunny got the drugs from him in the first place. So he intended to kill him.  The fight against evil on Quor’toth consisted of hunting and killing things.  He marked his victories by taking things from the creatures he had killed.  When he first defeated Tyke to save Sunny he cut off his ear.   His reason was for doing so very simple. He wanted a trophy; something to remind both himself and Tyke who had won their contest.  In taking the ear he was therefore equating Tyke with all the monsters he had fought and killed in Quor’toth.

This attitude helps explain the extreme nature of the revenge that Connor sought to take on Angel in “Tomorrow”.  The cold blooded calculation, the careful planning and execution, the self-control and the sheer cruelty to his own father that we see in that revenge are clearly not the result of a simple emotional outburst when confronted by some great grief.  Rather it is the reaction of someone for whom pursuing what he sees as justice is a deeply felt passion. That is the thing about Connor.  There is no sense of balance in his life – he is a person of extremes (indeed perhaps that is the very definition of a teenager).   He needs to believe in clear and definite things.  Hence, we have his confusion over his father.  Holtz had taken Connor from Angel and obviously meant to keep the two apart.   Moreover, he had very personal reasons to hate him.  So we may be sure that he lost no opportunity to fill Connor’s mind not only with the certainty that Angel was truly evil but just as importantly that he was a deceiver who cleverly covered his true evil with a more acceptable disguise.  So when Connor said to Angel:

“You're the prince of lies."

He was no doubt simply echoing what Holtz had been telling him all along.  But in spite of everything Connor still wanted to see his real father.  There is a connection there that goes too deep to be ignored. And we see the nature of that connection in a fight in a bar in “Benediction”, where Wesley noticed the way the teenager moved “just like his father”.  As Angel later describes it:

Angel: “The kid was born for it... the way he anticipated. I'm telling you -- it's in his blood."

Cordelia: “You don't say?”

Angel: “There we were, and it was like we'd never been apart. He felt it too. I know he did. You should have seen us together.”

When Connor later tells Holtz:

 “Father. He was everything that you said. He tried to trick me. Thought he could deceive me by saving people. But it didn't work. I've seen his true face.”

Holtz’s reply is:

 “And I've seen yours.”

By that Holtz meant that he now feared that because of Connor's underlying connection with Angel, all his influence and the 16 years he had spent trying to mould him was lost.  This is our first indication of just what family means to Connor.  But Connor couldn’t just accept that family connection for what it was because he couldn’t accept Angel for what he was. 

Angel is a classic example of someone who inhabits a world of gray – indeed that was the whole point about season 2.  He has a dark past, both as a human and as a vampire.  He now wants to make amends by helping people.  But he has the vampire legacy which still haunts him and his actions are too often driven by his weaknesses.  But as we have seen, Connor cannot really understand such moral and psychological complexity.  So, instead of seeing and dealing with his father as a man who has both good and bad in him, Connor sees only a two dimensional figure.  In “Soulless” he tells Angelus:

“Angel's just something that you're forced to wear. You're my real father.”

To Connor Angel was a surface appearance forced upon Angelus and therefore his actions as an ensouled being, while benign, meant nothing about the real him.  Angelus was the reality behind Angel and he was evil, regardless of the disguise he wore.  So, when Cordelia tells him that Angelus has revealed to the others the fact that they slept together he says:

“Angel doesn't care if everyone knows. Why should I?”

Cordelia has to correct him by saying that it’s not Angel who revealed their secret. It was Angelus. Connor didn’t take the point because for him nothing that Angel said and did affected his core demonic identity.  Hence the parallel we see made in “Spin the Bottle” between Connor’s attitude to Angel and the latter’s attitude to his own father.  To both of them the father is a “self-righteous bastard who has done his fair share of sinning” but assumes an air of moral superiority.  It is this sense of being disconnected from Angel because of what Connor sees as his evil nature that leads Connor to feel so alone and isolated, a feeling only exacerbated by Angel’s decision to expel him from the Hyperion; a decision which showed no real understanding of what it was that Connor really needed.  For what he needed was a family.   It was that need for a family that Angelus used to attack him in “Soulless”:

Angelus: “Darla felt the same way. Made her sick, you squirming inside her, so she jammed a stake into her own heart just so she wouldn’t have to hear your first whiny breath.

Connor:  “You don’t know anything.”

Angelus: “Then there was Holtz. You disappointed him so much, he stabbed himself in the neck.”

He had grown up without his real father or mother.  And the man who had acted as a substitute father, had obviously never shown him any love at all.  In “Soulless” we saw most clearly Connor’s problem in trying to come to terms with this need for a family.  And that problem can be summed up neatly in the word “identity”.

A Matter of Identity

As Jasmine said later the only thing that has been a constant in Connor’s life is pain. And here she was not really thinking about the struggle to survive in Quor’toth which Connor seems to have taken in his stride, at least judging by the matter of fact way he dealt with Holtz’s training methods.  No, here she is referring to Connor’s internal agonizing over the question of his identity.  As I pointed out in my review of “The Magic Bullet”, throughout season 4 Connor had been trying to figure out who he was.  He was, for example, concerned at suggestions that he was connected to the Beast. It had for example arrived on Earth at the very place he had been born.  And there was always that mysterious connection with the Tro-clon, that cosmic convergence which might result in the destruction of mankind.  Was he really a force for good or for evil?  His mother had died when he was born.  Holtz had never really been a father to him.  And, as we have seen, he could not bring himself to regard Angel as his father.  But where did that leave him?  Where did he belong?  The answer to this question was provided for a time by Cordelia.   Early on he felt a bond with her because she was once nice to him.   But at the same time he is a sexually inexperienced teenager and she is a woman.  She was in particular a woman whom his father has an interest in and who finally chose him over Angel.  And she was a woman who became pregnant with their child.  Here at last was the family that Connor yearned for.  Here was his sense of identity.

But the irony – perhaps tragedy would be a better word – was that by seeking to define himself as part of Cordelia’s family, Connor lost his chance to forge a real identity for himself.  He had a family in the form of his father – who loved him and wanted to help him, no matter how imperfectly he sometimes showed it.  And he had his own moral code – a fierce though somewhat warped and inflexible sense of right and wrong.  In “Inside Out” Connor was forced to choose between doing the right thing and doing what his new family needed him to do for them.  And he chose the latter.  Cordelia persuaded him to kill the teenage girl out of purely selfish motives and completely disregarding what was best for Connor.  To that extent she was selling him a lie.  And in doing so she made him choose against his real family:

Cordelia: “It's your father. This is how much he hates you." 

Darla: “I love you. Please.”

Cordelia: “Torturing you with this sad imitation of your dead mother.”

Darla: “Don't let her do this.”

Cordelia: “Are you going to let them do this to us? Are you going to let them kill our baby?”

Darla: “Connor, listen to me...”

Connor: “You are not my mother!”

Darla described Connor  as the one good thing that she had done in her life.  She justified her sacrifice of herself for him because she and he shared a soul and because she felt the good in him.  But Cordelia calls that a lie. And Connor believes her.  Worse, Cordelia makes Connor implicitly accept his father hates him and deny his mother.  And at the same time she blackmailed him into acting against his own moral principles.  His actions in “Inside Out” therefore cut him off from real things that he could believe in even though they were far from perfect.  What replaced those real things was false.

Of course Cordelia’s involvement with Connor did not survive “Inside Out” but that didn’t really matter.  He now had Jasmine – his daughter -  and it was with her that all his hopes for a family now rested.  At the beginning of “Sacrifice” Connor taunts the members of Angel Investigations:

“All your talk about saving the world. Well... now somebody's gone and done it. Made everything right... and good. And you can't stand it because you're all so full of yourselves.”

And he also refers to their hate poisoning the city.  This is of course right out of the Jasmine handbook.  And certainly he expresses his love for his daughter and belief and pride in what she is doing.  When told she is enslaving people he says:

“She'll bring them together.”

Of course his assessment of what she was doing was wrong.  But really for Connor this isn’t about everyone else.  He actually doesn’t care about those she helps or those she sacrifices, as witness the fact that he is perfectly willing to see a room full of innocent people eaten.  Under the surface his concerns are with his own problems.  He tried to buy a family, a sense of identity and of belonging, and he paid a very high price for it in the sacrifice on an innocent girl and his own sense of morality.  He did so because he wanted to believe that finding this sense of identity with Jasmine would be an end of the pain for him.  That is why to Angel at the start of “Sacrifice” he insisted that he now had something he belonged to.  That was why, at the start of “Peace Out”, he repeated this to Wesley:

“Don't you get it? You're all alone now. All of you. You're the ones left out in the cold. You... don't... belong.”

Telling him and the other members of Angel Investigations that they are the ones who don’t belong is clearly intended to emphasize the contrast to himself and the feeling that he did indeed belong. To him the peace that Jasmine promised everyone had a very personal and deeply felt resonance. When, in “Peace Out” he finally finds Cordelia he tells her:

“It's started, Cordy. The new beginning. Just wish you'd wake up and see it. Just what you wanted. I mean... it is what you wanted, right? Why you came to me? You know...what this was all about? Protecting our baby—Jasmine—so she can...be, and make this world the... the kind of place you wanted.”

His words here echo the words he used at the beginning of the episode to taunt the members of Angel Investigations.  To him it seemed that all they wanted was continuous conflict when all he wanted was peace.  And this was exactly the same allegation he levelled against Angel: namely that he only wanted a world fit for him to fight in.  What he wanted was a different world:

“Not harsh and cruel—the way that Angel likes it so he has a reason to fight. 'Cause you know that's what he's about, him and the others. Finding reasons to fight. Like that's what gives their lives any meaning. The only damn thing! I'm not like them. I just... I want to stop. Stop fighting. I just want to rest. God, I want to rest. But I can't. It's not working, Cordy. I tried. I tried to believe. I wanted it. Went along with the... the flow. Jasmine, she's...she's bringing peace to everyone, purging all of their hate and anger. But not me. Not me! I know she's a lie. Jasmine. My whole life's been built on them. I just... I guess I thought this one was better than the others.”

But while all Connor wanted was to find peace from the eternal conflict raging inside him about who he was, this peace continued to elude him.  In my review of “The Magic Bullet” I pointed out that it was logical that Connor would be unaffected by Jasmine’s influence because he, just like Cordelia, had a blood link to her.  And he confirmed as much in “Peace Out”:

Lorne: “I just gotta know one thing. The reason our little blood ritual didn't raise any veils for you. You've always seen Jasmine's true appearance, haven't you?”

Gunn: “You gotta be kidding me. You know what maggot-face looks like, and you're still big with the worship?”

Connor: “I grew up in Quor'toth—a hell dimension full of all sorts of things you can't even imagine. So, you know, appearance? Not that important to me.”

But the other side of the coin is that Jasmine’s spell cannot give him the same certainties as it gives others.  Even as she is about to be sacrificed, a girl called Susan shows us the sort of peace that Jasmine can create for a person:

Susan: “Thank you. Thank you so much. Before you came, my life was a mess. I had no job, I was being evicted...”

Jasmine: “It's all right, Susan. You'll never be burdened with those worries again.”

Susan: “The emptiness, the weight I've been carrying all my life…it's gone. All I feel now…”.

This is a peace that Connor cannot know because he is immune from Jasmine’s influence.  Nor did he find a peace from forging a sense of family with her. Certainly she (and others) know and refer to him as her father:

“I could never hurt Cordelia Chase any more than I could you. You're my parents, my tether to this world. It was your love that brought me here.”

But he doesn’t really trust her.  In the basement of the Hyperion there is a very interesting exchange between Wesley and Connor:

Wesley: “Connor, what does Jasmine eat?

Connor: “What?

Wesley: “The creature in the sewer. It called her the "devourer." Devourer of what?" 

 Connor: “I don't know.”

He lied.  Why did he lie if he didn’t believe that what Jasmine was doing was wrong?  Not only that, he clearly suspects Jasmine of eating Cordelia too:

Jasmine: “Cordelia.”

Connor: “Yeah. What did you do with her...exactly?”

Jasmine: “I told you. She's exactly where I need her to be, out of harm's way.”

Connor: “Yeah. I think I should know.”

Jasmine: “But there's no reason for you to know. Just take comfort in my words. She's safe, and... You think I ate her.”

Then he disregards all her assurances and goes looking for Cordelia on his own and behind Jasmine’s back.  These are not the actions of someone who really believes in Jasmine or in what she is doing to bring world peace. After all Jasmine is about to achieve the sort of total world domination she had been after from the very start.  Connor was meant to watch over the members of Angel Investigations in order to safeguard her plans.  But he leaves them without giving a second thought to the danger they may pose. 

More to the point they are not the actions of someone who genuinely believes that Jasmine is part of his family.  He doesn’t trust her and he cannot confide in her how he feels.  He obviously doesn’t feel the same connection to her as he feels with Cordelia.  And that is why he focuses all his energies on finding her.

As I have already said, what Cordelia and Jasmine offered Connor wasn’t a real family in which people genuine care for one another because of the boind between them.  Nor does Jasmine’s efforts to create world peace really satisfy Connor’s own moral standards (submerged though they may be).  So, he doesn’t believe in Jasmine and her promise of world peace. He doesn’t feel that he really belongs with her.  So, she cannot bring him what he really wanted.  And that was peace.  That was why he realized that what he had sold his own moral standards and his own family relationship for was a lie.

Nihilism

So, when in “Peace Out” Jasmine called to him for help he didn’t bring her what she wanted.  When he first approaches Jasmine and Angel she turns to him and asks:

“Connor, I still have you. Angel's ruined everything. But he can't defeat both of us. You still believe in me, don't you? You still love me?”

Connor’s reply is a simple “yes” but then he punches Jasmine in the head so hard that his fist goes right through her skull and kills her.  Later Angel describes his reaction upon doing so:

“I've never seen him like this. He wasn't hurt or angry, he just... killed her. And his face, it…it was just blank, like he had nothing left.”

Jasmine was still Connor’s daughter and I think he was sincere when he said he still loved her.  And certainly he had no strong attachment to Angel’s vision of a world in which there was free will.  If anything he suffered because he wasn’t able to benefit from the suspension of free will along with everyone else.  And from his reaction to the intended victims of Jasmine gathered in the banqueting hall, he was hardly motivated to kill Jasmine by the desire to save human life.  No, ultimately Connor rejected Jasmine and what she offered to him for very personal reasons of his own.  And those reasons are to be found in the mood of nihilism that has clearly now overtaken him. He still wants to believe in family.  It’s just that he cannot because all his experience tells him that people betray their family.  While wandering aimlessly through the riot torn streets in “Home” he sees a cop on the roof and goes to talk to him.  The cop is confused, agitated and perhaps suicidal so Connor tells him to go home.  The cop then shows Connor a picture of his wife and daughter:

“That's Sarah, and that's Jill. That's my home right there, right there.”

But this seems only to make Connor angry.  He replies:

“That's your family.  That's your family, and you were just gonna leave them like that? How were they gonna feel if you didn't come back?”

He then attacks the cop punching him repeatedly for his betrayal.  Later in the Sporting Goods store, he tells one of the hostages that he isn’t holding his daugter right.  And when Angel arrives Connor’s main complaint to him is that he was abandoned by everyone he loved:

“My dead mother couldn't even love me.”

But he reserves his most deeply felt bitterness for Angel himself:

Connor: “You tried to love me. At least I think you did.”

Angel: “I still do.”

Connor: “But not enough to hang on, dad. You let him take me. You let him get me. You let him get me. Cordy...you swore you loved me. Where are you now?”

Here we see Connor’s feeling that he has lost love, lost a sense of being connected to others and above all that he lost his real father.  For that is where he lost his sense of identity.  We see the feelings of lonlieness, betrayal, lack of self-worth and perhaps even guilt that derrived from this sense of loss.  It is interesting that he blames himself for not experiencing Jasmine’s “love”:

“I didn't feel anything! I can't feel anything. I guess I really am your son... 'cause I'm dead, too.”

In the cop contemplating suicide and even in the much more minor case of the father who didn’t, in his view, show enough love to his daughter Connor sees a reflection of the way he was himself abandoned and his expressions of anger at both men are reflections of the anger he feels inside at the abandonment he has experience in his life – by Darla, by Angel, by Holtz and even by Cordelia.

The fact that deep down he does want love and a sense of belonging means that he is not perhaps a nihilist in the strict sense of the term.  But the fact that he feels he has no prospect of such love or any sense of belonging, perhaps even that he doesn’t deserve it, makes him as good as one any way.  There is nothing he can believe in, nothing he can hope for.  There is only survival – the day to day existence of his life bereft of meaning and purpose. Is it at all surprising then that Connor doesn’t care if he dies or indeed if anyone else dies either.  As exemplified by this dealings with the cop and the father in the store, he has probably concluded the world and everyone in it was loveless.  They were better off dead.  And if you are not afraid of death and there are no other values or people that mean anything then why not embrace it. Death is the only absolute in life, we cannot be sure of anything in life but death, so why should we try to defer what we know is inevitable? Why not accept it and bring it about, not only for you but for everyone else?   As he said to Angel:

“There's only one thing that ever changes anything... and that's death. Everything else is just a lie. You can't be saved by a lie. You can't be saved at all.”

It wasn’t therefore enough for Angel to stop Connor killing himself and others in the sporting goods store.  He had to give him a reason to live.  He had to give him a sense that he was loved and that he did belong.  In other words he had to give Connor a real family.  And that is what in fact Angel arranged for Connor to have.

Chapter III:
Summing Up Connor Mark I

So, in Connor we have a classic father/son conflict, a conflict brought on not by hatred but rather by love denied.  Connor was in many ways the victim in part of circumstances and in part of poor choices by his father and Wesley and the outright malevolence of others – especially Holtz and Jasmine in her many guises.  He did not ask to be born of two vampires.  He did not ask to be used as a pawn in Holtz’s desire for vengeance.  He did not ask to be the victim of Wesley’s misguided efforts to save him.  He certainly never asked to spend his childhood in Hell.  When he returned from Quor’toth, his father (who professed to love him) often thought more about his own ego than of his son and certainly look few pains to teach him about the world and what living in it meant.  And Jasmine’s only interest in him lay in how he could serve her plans.  He was lied to, ignored, patronized, seduced and callously manipulated.  It’s hardly any wonder that he was screwed up.  Without these influences he would not have killed an innocent girl or ended up in “Home” threatening to blow up a group of strangers.  But in the end, he too had free will.  He too made choices.  And responsibility for those choices was his and not Holtz’s or Angel’s or Wesley’s or even Jasmine’s.  

Ultimately therefore at least until the end of season 4 Connor’s is a dark tale partly about our ability to let down those we love when our relationship with them is dictated by our own selfish needs and partly about the inability of at least some human spirits to rise above their situations.  And there is no denying the power of the questions it asks about our responsibilities to others and our responsibility for our own lives.  Thematically as I have already stressed it covers all the major issues lying at the core of the series: the duality of human nature  with its intent to do good but its possession of inherent flaws that mean that we are all subject to desires that can subvert that intent.  And as we go through life we are the subject of outside circumstances that shape our actions and leave us less able to make good choices.    There is nevertheless a recognition that we do have free will.  Our choices have consequences and we have to  take responsibility for both choices and their consequences.

Importantly however in dealing with all of these issues in the form of Connor, the series gives us a character who engages our attention and even concern for him.  Like Wesley Connor is a character of some complexity.  There are layers to him which are only gradually revealed.  At the start we are conscious of his soul and need to do the right thing.  We are also aware of his ambivalent attitude towards Angel.  But it is only as season 4 progresses that we see how this has led to such a crisis of identity that he cannot be at peace.  Indeed, in many ways Connor himself seems to discover this at the same time as we do.  At first he gives every appearance of having a grievance against Angel and the way he treated him – pretending to be better than him while being corrupt inside.  Because of this he seems to force himself to believe that he really does hate Angel rather than admit the truth – how much he needs him and feels betrayed by him.  He therefore tries different ways to deal with his sense of emptiness – by hating Angel, by competing with him for Cordelia, by serving Jasmine.  None of this works.  And it is only in extremis that he finally confronts the truth, when he is so harsh on what he saw as others’ erring fathers and so clear in his bitterness of what he lost from his own.  In many ways therefore we follow him on a journey of self discovery which builds both interest and sympathy. And again just as in Wesley’s case, these demons are neither trivial nor superficial.  Rather they go to the heart of who Connor is and we can fully understand why he reacts as he did, even at the same time as we know he was acting wrongly.  For in his efforts to deal with these demons, Connor is given agonising decisions to make: especially when he had to choose between the life of a teenage girl and protecting Cordelia and his daughter.  We never doubt but that here (as well as in other cases) he made a morally wrong choice but it is because he was subject to the manipulation of others and because we sensed that he would pay a very high price for that choice, he never forfeited our sympathy.

But ultimately these undoubted strengths in Connor’s story are undermined by a number of significant flaws.  As we have already seen, he is neither immoral nor amoral.  He has repeatedly shown that he does have a very strong sense of right and wrong – as indeed would anyone brought up by Daniel Holtz.  His problem has always been that his judgment about what is right and wrong is warped.  And as I have already said, the best example of this was clearly his treatment of Angel in “Tomorrow”.  There is a difference surely between Connor embracing a cruel and remorseless revenge in the name of justice and Connor standing idly by and even welcoming evil.  We saw the struggle that Connor went through before he participated in the sacrifice of the girl in “Inside Out”.  And even then he clearly felt the weight of responsibility of what he was doing.  I can understand how he might force himself to do something like that to save the lives of his daughter and Cordelia.  I can even believe that he may very well embrace Jasmine’s mind control of the population.  It would strike him as a very effective way of combating evil and it would be consistent for him to believe that this was a price worth paying.  But to show no doubt at all when Jasmine decided that Fred and Angel had to die and to think that eating innocent human beings was “cool” this does strike me as very hard indeed to square with what we know about him.  So, I think that here the writers went too far.

But above all, in order to mean something, Connor’s story requires the major protagonists – Angel and Connor – each to recognize their own personal responsibility for wrongdoing.  As I have already stressed I see ANGEL as falling very much into the classic genre of tragedy.  And in tragedy, by the end of the story, the protagonist must have survived or been destroyed by an enormous struggle.  It does not actually matter which because the real point is that through the struggle he arrives at the finale having undergone a fundamental change.  As we have seen, Angel while professing to love Connor often acted in a very selfish and uncaring way towards him and undoubtedly contributed to Connor’s fall. Perhaps in his decision to turn his back on his own principles in “Home” there is an implicit recognition in this but  if so it was a very odd recognition.  Instead of accepting his own responsibility for the boy and recognizing that he should have been a better father, Angel compounded his own error by taking the easy way out and abdicating all responsibility for making Connor a different person.  As for Connor certainly we can understand  why a sense of identity became an issue for him given his kidnap, upbringing by Holtz and the attitude Angel all too frequently adopted towards him.  But as I have already said, the real test was how he responded to these challenges.  Angel was flawed as a father; but he was essentially well intentioned towards his son and if Connor had acted differently Angel would have responded better.  In the end, Connor at least understood that he had acted on the basis of lies but he never accepted that he had helped kill an innocent girl and stood idly by while Jasmine killed many others.  But even then he never faced up to his own poor choices; there was therefore no recognition of a need to change and no real effort on his part to do so or to make amends.  His salvation was a free gift from someone else.  Can that really be salvation?

Chapter IV:
Salvation

The Exercise of Free Will

Connor’s story in many ways ends with season 4.  And what we see in season 5 is a fundamentally different one.  Of course in many ways Connor in “Origins” is the same person that we had seen in season 4.  He had the same strength and speed.  And the fact that he was willing to fight Sahjhan, despite being woefully ill-prepared for it, says a lot about his courage.  Indeed his comment to Angel:

“You almost broke that guy in half! That was awesome!”

shows that there are a fighter’s instincts somewhere within him. He also had retained many of his old “interests” as was very humorously displayed when he saw Illyria

Illyria: “Your body warms. This one is lusting after me.”

Connor: “Oh... no, I—I— It's just that—it's the outfit. I guess I've always had a thing for older women.”

Angel: “They were supposed to fix that.”

But the real difference is highlighted earlier on when he reveals his knowledge of the deception that his parents had perpetrated upon him:

“It's cool. I mean, my parents are liars and I can never trust them again, but it's cool.”

This is all said humorously, indicating that Connor really does understand and forgive.  Connor Mark 1 had major trust issues and it is very difficult to believe that he would have been as understanding as Connor Mark 2.  But then Connor Mark 2 has only memories of a loving and caring family life:

“When Connor was 5, he got lost in a department store. He wandered off while his family was shopping. It scared the poor child nearly half to death…. He remembers screaming in the middle of the store. He remembers his mother rushing towards him. And he remembers his father sweeping him up into his arms.”

This gave him the very sense of identity that he so lacked as Connor Mark I – a sense of identity that he simply could not find as Connor Mark I.  It was indeed loyalty to his family that led Connor to fight Sahjhan in the first place.  But even so, he shows that he now has ethical standards that he lacked before:

Angel: “You're not alone in this. I'll be right there with you.”

Connor: “You gonna hold Sahjahn down while I stab him?”

Angel: “Prophecy doesn't say you can't have a little help.”

Connor: “Hardly seems fair.”

Angel: “Fair's not something we worry about.”

Connor: “Maybe you should. I'm not a bully. If I'm gonna do this, you gotta let me do it my way.

This is hardly the same teenager who attacked his father, locked him in a chest, sank it at the bottom of the ocean and lied to everyone about it.  Indeed instead of doing the sensible thing and making a sneak attack on an unprepared Sahjhan, he gives him the chance for a fair fight by openly telling him that they are going to fight.  Again this has a lot to do with the fact that he has no memory of being in a serious fight before coming to Wolfram and Hart, unlike Connor Mark 1 who grew up having literally to fight for his life every day of it.

It was, of course, only when Connor Mark 1’s memories came flooding back – the Connor who was permanently “cranky” – that Connor Mark 2 was able to defeat the demon.  I think we have to see the importance of this in the context of “Origins”.  In that episode there is a parallel between him and Wesley.   Both of them were presented with two different sets of memories – a fantasy one and a real one.  The real memories told the truth about both of them and a less than flattering truth it was.  What really counted, however, was the way that each reacted to the memories.   And unlike Wesley, Connor was able to cope.  Indeed he initially maintained the pretence that nothing had really changed at all. 

“This whole fighting thing, I'm not... I'm not really sure it's for me.”

But his parting shot to Angel at the end of the episode shows differently:

“You gotta do what you can to protect your family. I learned that from my father.”

While on the surface this statement is ambiguous – he doesn’t say who his father is – in the context it can only have one meaning.  The father who sacrificed so much for his son was Angel.  And in these words Connor is telling him that he knows, understands and appreciates the fact. He can overlook the fact that he was lied to.  And he can live with the memories of his former sociopath self.  He is now going back to his faux family and resuming his normal, non-violent life.  But before, it was a choice that Angel had made for him and so anxious was he to keep Connor locked within this new and happier life that he even allowed himself to be intimidated by Cyrus Vail’s threat to restore Connor’s memory using the Orlon Windows:

“It's a fascinating little spell. It allows warlocks such as myself to see the past as it once was. You have to be careful with it, though. If it were to break around someone whose mind had been altered, then all his old memories would come rushing back. Careful, Angel! I gave Connor his happy life. Are you certain you can kill me... before I can take it away from him? I... built your son.”

But in the end Connor remained Connor Mark 2 in spite of the fact that he found out the truth.  Connor Mark I no less than Connor Mark 2 could have taken that same responsibility for control over his own life but did not.  Because Connor Mark I did his salvation from that point onwards was not a gift of others but his own choice.  So here too we see the continuation of the writers’ exploration of one of the major themes of the Angelverse – the tension between free will and the idea that things beyond our control drive our destiny.  Yes, giving him a happy set of memories with a loving family helped him make the right choice but ultimately it was Connor himself who did so.  When confronted by a similar choice, Wesley made the wrong one.  He could not save himself from the darkness within.  The contrast to Connor is clear.   He could have easily taken offence at the dishonesty involved as well as the implicit unwillingness to trust him. 

The comparison between the deceit attempted by the Reillys at the start of the episode and Angel's attitude to his son are too perfect to need much comment from me.  Both acted in the best interests of the child but they were motivated fundamentally by an inability to trust Connor.  That is why in both cases they attempted to take control of his destiny from him.  But in both cases that attempt was doomed and in both cases the teenager showed that their lack of trust was misplaced.  In particular Angel, like Illyria, seems to have feared that Connor would be no more than the sum of his memories.  And the falsity of that proposition was (albeit unknowingly) best summed up by Sahjhan:

“I gotta tell you, kid, you're making a good case for the whole concept of free will.”

He meant of course that Connor was making a lousy job of fulfilling the part that prophecy ordained for him.  But it does catch very nicely the success with which he took responsibility for his own life.  And that success is its own rebuke to any attempt to take responsibility for his own life away from him.

Sadly, however, this approach does have its problems.  As we have seen, the whole interest in Connor’s character lies in the tension between his struggles over his identity on the one hand and his free will on the other.  Of course the manipulation by others (Holtz and Jasmine) and Angel’s own neglect greatly influenced the course of those struggles.  But to show him shrug off all the same issues – the identity of his father, the influence of Holtz, his training in Quor’toth, his conflicts with Angel – as so easily and quickly resolved scarcely does them justice.  And above all the memory of the girl he helped kill in “Inside Out” seems to have been just air-brushed out of the picture.  I suppose, however, we should also understand that by this stage writers were interested in only one issue in relation to Connor – his relationship with Angel.

Angel's Salvation Too

It was because Connor took control of his own life that the hold Wolfram and Hart had on Angel disappeared.  Angel was now not only free from their threat to Connor but he was able to re-establish a connection with the boy that he had previously severed.  And we can see the importance of that connection from their scenes in “Not Fade Away”.  Here he spends his free time before the final battle sharing in his son’s future by helping him write a resume for an internship.   And after they fight Hamilton together we see this exchange:

Connor: “What do we do?”

Angel: “You go home.”

Connor: “Huh?”

Angel: “This is my fight.”

Connor: “That's some serious macho…”

Angel: “Go home...now.”

Connor: “They'll destroy you.”

Angel: “As long as you're OK, they can't.”

As I said in my review of this episode, it is to help ensure that Connor continues to have a future that Angel is fighting.  It is not for pride, not out of revenge but because he cared about his son and had therefore his own connection with humanity.  And because of this he cared about more than just his son.  In fighting for Connor’s future he was fighting for the future of everyone.  Hamilton could not understand what Angel had left to fight for once he had given up his Shanshu.  Angel’s response was telling:

 “People who don't care about anything will never understand the people who do.”

As we have seen, Angel lost control of his life because he lost heart in what he was doing.  And he lost heart because he lost the meaning of the fight against evil.  And he lost that meaning because he lost his connection with his son and therefore with humanity.  Once he refound that connection, then what happened to Connor and everyone else really began to have a meaning for him again.  That is why he decided to strike at the Black Thorn.   So, ultimately the entire five year long arc of ANGEL as a series rests on one of the oldest of human propositions – the circle of life.  Death is a natural happening to all forms of life.  Without it indeed there would be no life since all life is maintained by the death of others.  The really important thing therefore is not whether we live or die but how we live our lives.  And Angel chose finally to live his life no longer in service to things beyond his control but rather by asserting the things he believed.  And because of his son he believed in a future for everyone.