EPISODE 5.11

Damage

Written by: Steven DeKnight and Drew Goddard

Directed by: Jefferson Kibbee

Duality and Ambiguity

From its very beginning ANGEL the series has been about the struggle of its titular hero for redemption.  But certainly since season 2, the writers have made it clear that Angel’s struggle cannot simply be seen as an effort to “pay back” a debt caused by past misdeeds.  Integral to his journey has been the need for him to resist the darker urges of his nature and the efforts of Wolfram and Hart to play upon those urges.  There is nothing predetermined about his journey.  To be capable of salvation we must also be capable of damnation, and this is certainly true of Angel.  For us all, the crucial question is how we choose between these possibilities.

There is, if you like, within us an elemental conflict between good and evil.  This is sometime referred to as the duality of human nature.  Of course evil may manifest itself in a desire to cause senseless harm.  But it is far more usual to see it appear as a selfish desire to satisfy personal needs without regard to the consequences of those desires.  And often there is, at least in the beginning, no clearly evil consequence to the satisfaction of a desire.  Original sin, for example, is humanity's fundamental point of departure from the will of God – the very definition of evil.  But this sin lay in Adam and Eve thinking they knew what was good for them when they did not.

For while the freedom to choose between good and evil implies an ability to understand and discern, our capacity to do so is limited by factors such as our inability to foresee all the consequences of our actions, our own complex and imperfectly understood psychology and our failure to understand our own true motivations.  In particular it is limited because often our life experiences shape our psychology in a way that we have great difficulty in dealing with.  It follows, therefore, that our ability to choose between good and evil is also compromised.

When our choices and the actions based on those choices are reasonably capable of more than one interpretation, they can be properly described as ambiguous.  And when this ambiguity concerns the moral nature of the choice, then they can be described as morally ambiguous.  In “Home”, Angel made a decision.  He chose to take control of the LA Offices of Wolfram and Hart.  He did so no doubt thinking that he could turn them from a source of evil into an instrument of good.  But he also did so because he loved his son and wanted to buy him a second chance.  And he never disclosed to the others – who were all affected by his choice – why he made it.  In “Conviction”, Gunn chose to receive certain knowledge and skills from the Senior Partners.  He too clearly thought that these new abilities of his would serve the cause of right.  But he also wanted to be something more than “muscle” and this was a way he could achieve this.  He was, like Angel, also less than honest about his decision or the real reasons for it.  In both cases there is a mixture of motivation.  The principals believe – or choose to believe – that a synergy exists in this mixture.  But there is certainly the potential for conflict.  Are both of them therefore following personal agendas without regard to the consequences?  Herein lies the ambiguity of their situation.

And it is these two related ideas of duality and ambiguity that we have central theme for this episode.  Nothing is simple and straightforward.  It is not quite true to say that there is no clear good and no absolute evil.  After all we have in the character of Walter Kindel a standard of evil. Murder wasn’t enough for him:

"Fear. Anguish. Pain. He needed them to suffer."

But then he is less an individual in this piece than an agent, a creature whose only importance lies in the influence he exerts on his victim, Dana.  Those who do have a recognizable role as individuals in this episode – Angel, Spike, Gunn and Andrew but above all Dana – are drawn not in black and white but in shades of grey.  We see not only the good and the evil, we are also left to wonder where exactly you can draw a clear distinction between the two.

The Psychotic Slayer

And in exploring this theme Dana plays a crucial role. She is at  one and the same time a helpless victim and a monster.  At one point we see her in her “natural” state, as a young child cowering in fear from Kindel.  This is the very personification of innocence.  Her later behaviour we are told is not the result of anything within her, but rather is the direct result of outside influences – Kindel’s abuse on the one hand and the elemental force of the slayer bloodline on the other.  One of these is an act of evil, the other “a brilliant stratagem” intended to provide a powerful army to destroy evil.  Of course, without that “brilliant stratagem”, Dana would never have become a monster.  As Dr  Rabinaw explains

“Her family was murdered in their home when she was 10. Whoever did it took Dana... and tortured her for months. She was found one day naked and bleeding, wandering the streets. Barely functional, nearly catatonic ever since.”

It was only when she became a slayer that she became a danger:

“Increasing levels of agitation accompanied by explosive outbursts of inhuman strength.”

But equally she was only a danger because of the abuse by Kindel.  Otherwise she would have been another potential to be trained by Buffy and the others.  It is the confluence of these two forces that made her what she was.  Accordingly, Dana has really no identity and no personality of her own.  Fred says that what’s happening isn’t her fault, Gunn describes her as “non compos mentis”  and Angel sums things up by saying she was “an innocent victim”.  And it is because of this that the writers can invite us to look at her behavior simply as a reflection of the outside forces just described.  Thus we can better understand the importance of the lessons learned from her behavior for the actions of others.  So, perhaps with this in mind we can now turn to Dana and see just how her character does exemplify the duality referred to above.

When Angel and Spike enter her room in the Hospital Psychiatric ward, they see dozens of pictures.  They all have a common theme – a monster and a girl.  The meaning of the pictures seems obvious.  The monsters represent the person who kidnapped and tortured Dana; she is the girl, the helpless victim.   Only that isn’t what the pictures portray.  As Angel later explained to Wesley:

“Look, there were drawings of demons in her room. Hundreds of them. Some with a little girl in them. I thought it was Dana, but they're all different. It's not her.”

Indeed they are not.  As a “potential” who has, thanks to Buffy and Willow, now become a slayer she has

“vivid dreams... some say nightmares... of the heroics of past slayers.”

And in her pictures she depicts those past slayers who have come to her in dreams.  But they are more than merely memories.  As Andrew goes on to explain:

“But this Dana girl…she's an anomaly that no one could have foreseen - tortured, traumatized... driven insane by Yoda knows who. “

To someone with her damaged psyche, the effect of the dreams was to confuse dream with reality:

Angel: “And then the dreams of demons and superpowers she's always had suddenly become real. “

Wesley: “The dreams of slayers are usually just that - dreams. But Dana's mental instability may be making them seem more real. “

So she acts out the role of a slayer.  When she kills the two guards in the psychiatric ward she chooses the means quite deliberately.  She decapitates them.  As she later explains to Spike: 

Dana: “Heart and head. Stab the heart, cut off the head. Only way to be sure.”

Spike: “That's slayer talk, isn't it?”

Dana: “Keep cutting till you see dust.”

Then when she has killed her second victim, she marks her face with blood in the form of tribal stripes, thus echoing the very first slayer.  And when she confronts Spike she becomes first of all the Chinese slayer that he killed during the Boxer rebellion and later the slayer he killed in the subway car in New York.  As Angel warns Spike, as a slayer:

“she exists for one reason—to destroy creatures like us.”

And her killings are not random.  When the supermarket clerk tries to stop her taking food she simply breaks his arm; she doesn’t kill him.  She only kills those whom she confuses with monsters.  Her kidnapper had drugged her with a hypodermic syringe so when she saw the hospital guards with the same syringes she identified them as monsters.  Thus, we have the decapitation.  In her flashbacks she confused both the security guard at the supermarket and the night watchman at the docks with her kidnapper as well.  And most obviously of all, she knew that Spike was a vampire (calling him “William the Bloody”) and that too was sufficient to convince her that he was her kidnapper.   And in his case she was primarily concerned to ensure that he couldn’t hurt her again.  That is why she cut off his hands so he:

“Can't touch me ever again.”

Even here there are two different sides to the slayer.  Andrew refers to her memories of past slayers as dreams or nightmares.  There is the heroism certainly, but there is also the struggle and the death - the darkness at the very heart of what it is to be a slayer.  But Dana is not only the slayer; she is also a monster.  When she escapes from the Hospital Psychiatric ward she is driven to return to the place:

            “where her pain lives.”

Not only that, she does so in a way which sees her swing between acting out the part of Kindel and his victim. When she gets to the basement where she had been held captive, she recognizes the place. She finds the hiding place where Kindel secreted some hypodermic syringes. In a flashback she sees him take a syringe out of the box, hold  it up and squeezes the plunger, squirting some of the blue liquid out of the needle, saying: 

“Let's try the blue one this time.”

When she confronts Spike in the same basement, her words confuse him:

Dana: “No escaping. “

Spike: “That's right. No escaping. Now, all the same... don't wanna have to hurt you.”

Dana: “Doesn't hurt if you hold still.”

Spike: “Right.”

The reason for the confusion is that  Dana is now playing the part of the abuser not the victim and repeats to Spike the same promises and threats by which Kindel sought to control her.   Later she also repeats words she would have heard time and time again: “don’t be scared…don’t cry…they can’t hear you”.  Finally she also stabs Spike with a hypodermic needle, this time containing a yellow liquid.  Evidently Kindel had used the same liquid on her and in one sentence she sums up her own duality:

“Yellows make you weak. Not weak anymore.”

In these words Dana is both victim, the person who was made weak by the liquid, and the abuser, the person who was no longer weak but was making Spike weak.  And as if to reinforce the point she begins to repeatedly punch him.

In the same spirit we see the kidnapper carry Dana across the basement and chain her to pipes and we also see Dana drag Spike to the same pipes and chain him there.  Then she makes the role reversal even more explicit.  When she  removes Spike’s hands she says:

“No more Mommy…no more Daddy…no more hands.  Can’t touch me ever again.”

Just as Kindel had taken away her parents, so she was now taking something away from him (or the person she thought was him).  She was taking away not only something that was important to him, but also the means by which he could hurt her.  That she was actually doing something else (just as when she was killing the guards in the hospital, supermarket and dock) is just one more example of the duality we see in her.

Her intent was not to do evil; but the effect of her actions was.  Now, as I have already said we cannot really judge Dana on the difference between her actions and their effects.  She is “non compos mentis”.  This is a phrase which literally means “not in control of [her] mind” and generally relates to a situation where the person concerned lacks understanding of the nature and quality of her actions.  By definition this is a person for whom good and evil and any ambiguity between them has no meaning.  That is why I have avoided the word "ambiguity" in her case.  And this is the crucial difference between Dana and everyone else.  At the end we have this little exchange between Angel and Spike:

Angel: “She's an innocent victim.”

Spike: “So were we... once upon a time.”

Angel: “Once upon a time.”

The emphasis on the past is important.  Angel and Spike became something evil against their will.  But with a soul they have full understanding of the difference between right and wrong, an ability to choose between them and therefore responsibility for their choices.  They cannot claim to be innocent victims of forces beyond their control.  The legacy of the past, the “damage” done to them if you will, remains.  That damage affects them and is reflected in their behavior.  But unlike Dana they do understand the nature and quality of their actions and must therefore also accept responsibility when their actions demonstrate the same sort of duality as Dana’s.  In such a case there is true moral ambiguity.

The Burden of Choice

And this is true not only of Angel and Spike.  It is also true of others.  Take Buffy as an example.  Andrew describes the genesis of slayers as follows:

“Eons ago, on the dark continent, 3 wise elders decided to fight evil with a taste of its own sinistro. They took a young girl, and they imbued her with the power of a demon. Thusly, the first Slayer of the Vampyrs was born. But alas, the existence of a slayer is often brutal and short-lived. And the "primitive," as she was called, boasted no exception. But... the elders had foreseen this inevitability and...and devised a way for her power to live on.”

The slayers were, by their very nature, a fusion of human (with the human conscience) and demon – of good and evil.  At one level this symbolizes quite neatly the duality we have been discussing.  But more importantly for our purposes it was the result of a conscious choice – a choice that, at  one and the same time, gave humanity a weapon to use against evil and inflicted pain and suffering on generations of teenage girls.  Is this a good or an evil or both?  The question reveals that it is almost the definition of a moral ambiguity.  At one point Buffy was simply the victim of that choice and the whole of season 1 of BTVS was about the struggle she had to come to terms with her fate.  But ultimately she and Willow, in their own way, replicated the choice made by the Tribal elders:

Andrew: “Buffy, Vampyr Slayer extraordinaire, had her lesbian witch make with the beaucoup de magique. One light show later...

Angel: All the potentials become slayers. ”

And in deciding to inflict the burden of slayerhood on all the potentials,  Buffy included people like Dana.  It is simply not true that she was an:

            “anomaly that no one could have foreseen.”

No-one may have been able to foresee her precise circumstances but the possibility that out of perhaps thousands of new slayers there might have been a number with psychological baggage that would make them very dangerous as slayers was certainly all too easily foreseeable.  After all they already had the example of Faith in front of them.  So, Buffy’s choice was, morally, in its own way a highly ambiguous one.  As was indeed her decision to entrust Andrew with the mission of taking Dana away from Angel and Wesley as well as Wolfram and Hart.  In his self-importance and naïveté Andrew is in many ways reminiscent of the early Wesley.  When he tells Spike:

“You're not the only one who's changed. Mr. Giles has been training me. I'm faster, stronger, and 82% more manly than the last time we…”

and then promptly trips over something the resemblance is particularly marked.  But near the end he suddenly does become very self-assured and decisive.  Here too is a duality and perhaps he does indeed have it in him to become something more than he was.

But this was still the same Andrew who was the last surviving member of the Geek trio and someone who must bear his own share of responsibility for Tara and Jonathan’s deaths.  Now he is apparently welcomed and trusted by the old Scooby gang in a way that Angel and Wesley aren’t.  Not only that, but when Spike referred to him as “double-crossing” Angel he was only speaking the truth.  For Andrew didn’t come out in the open and ask for help in retrieving Dana.  Instead he deceived Angel and the others about his real agenda and ambushed them at the end, seizing Dana by a threat of force that could – indeed would - have seen very significant casualties.  And, as he himself pointedly asks, where did he get his orders from?  The moral ambiguity is once again too obvious to need further emphasis.

Then there is Spike.  Again and again in this episode the continuity between his ensouled self and his vampire past is emphasized.  Once he finds out who Dana is he points out :

“I killed 2 slayers with my own hands.”

And when in actual combat with Dana, as we have already seen, she remembers him and who he was.  He is also the first one to make the comparison between Kindel’s treatment of Dana and the activities both he and Angel used to indulge in:

“Not like we haven't done worse back in the day.”

And again, that comparison is made very real by Dana’s confusion of him with Kindel.  But there was more to the parallel than that.  At the end, in his hospital bed Spike is, for him, in a very reflective mood.  He says:

“I never did think that much about the nature of evil. No. Just threw myself in. Thought it was a party. I liked the rush. I liked the crunch. Never did look back at the victims.”

And we can see exactly the same traits in his attempts to track down Dana.  He is clearly enjoying the “rush” of the chase.  He never shows himself especially sympathetic to the plight of the victim.  He may describe himself as a “hero of the people” now but he says of Dana’s breakout:

“Heard one of the simples went for a stroll”

He is in fact very unsentimental indeed about his past.  When Angel says of the harm that he has done:

            ” it's something I'm still paying for.”

Spike’s response is:

            ” And you should let it go, mate. It's starting to make you look old. “
 

All in all he seems far more interested in the hunt and the kill.  When he thinks that Dana is the victim of some sort of possession, he wants a fight:

“Oh, yeah. Look at the big, bad demon hidin' inside the helpless little girl.  Why don't you come on out of there, and let's have a proper go, mate?”

Or after pursuing Dana to the basement he is conscious first and foremost of the thrill of the chase:

“All right, pet. No getting away. Got your scent locked in now. Could track you for miles.”

And because of this he has no patience with Angel’s step by step approach.  At one point he says:

“You can hang out for the show-and-tell-me-nothing. I got a demon needs repossessing.”

And then he simply charges off.  Even when he nearly comes to grief the first time and then learns the truth about Dana, it doesn’t deter him.  Angel again tries to persuade him to exercise a little caution, but he charges ahead.  He is now clearly using his strength for the good of people rather than to harm them.  And he clearly understands the difference between right and wrong.  He accepts the loss of his hands almost as a proper punishment:

“The lass thought I killed her family. And I'm supposed to what, complain 'cause hers wasn't one of the hundreds of families I did kill?”

But even now he is a creature whose past still affects him and it makes his efforts to do good very ambiguous.

It is the same with Gunn.  I have already referred to the reasons why he got the mental upgrade.  At the start of this episode he is in a fight with the DA:

“Yes, I know, but he wouldn't have pled nolo contendere if he'd known about the exculpatory evidence being withheld by the prosecutor. Look, look, set up a meeting with Judge Braedon. Closed chambers. Screw the D.A. He's the one trying to pull a fast one. Let him read about it in the paper.”

When challenged about this he replies:

“Just a little professional rivalry. You want ugly, see us go at it on a golf course.”

Here Gunn is revealing the true nature of his activities.  What is meant to be a process for the discovery of truth and the application of justice has become a game.  Is this an appropriate way to achieve those high purposes or is this simply a contest where the victim and the accused count for less than the egos of the attorneys?  And there is a striking parallel here to Gunn’s other work at Wolfram and Hart:

“Look, I know our move to Wolfram & Hart hasn't been all flowers and candy, but we've been able to do some serious good while we're here. Lives saved, disasters averted, with all our fingers and souls still attached. End of the day, I'm thinking we made the right choice.”

Is this an objective judgment or is it Gunn’s own personal happiness with the work that he is doing speaking?  Or take the way he reacts to the proposal to fire Eve.  There are no doubt good and practical reasons for staying Angel’s hand on this one.  But when Gunn minimizes the seriousness of what she did by referring to her “alleged” efforts to harm Angel and laying emphasis on the fact that she was simply trying to put him in a permanent hallucinogenic coma as opposed to killing him, you have to wonder at his judgment.  I have already discussed his sense of insecurity and while it isn’t really featured much here it isn’t hard to understand the way his newly found “rational” side, his ability to articulate reasons for a particular course of action and to sway the others to his way of thinking, gives him a sense of self worth that he was sorely lacking.  It is equally easy to understand how this may sway his judgment.

Which brings us very nicely to Angel himself.  No less than Spike, his actions in this episode appear to be a reflection of his past.  As a soulless vampire his focus lay on the victim.  As he said himself he would have regarded Dana as a masterpiece.  Here too his concentration is also on the victim.  But this time he empathizes with her.  Unlike Spike he wants to know about her.  That’s how he finds out she is a vampire slayer.  And when he wants to know where she has gone he looked at things through her eyes, trying to find out what she was looking for.  So, the duality in the way he thinks is clear for all to see: exactly the same sense of understanding used for diametrically opposite purposes.  Not only that but he makes use of the resources of Wolfram and Hart.  First and most obvious of all the nurse only gets help for Dana because she wants a personal advantage for herself from the firm.  He uses their name to get access to the information he needs.  He uses their numbers on the ground to help search for her, their money to pay the psychic that reads the clues for her whereabouts, probably their contacts to get the realtor to show them the house where Dana was taken and finally their muscle to apply the tranquilizer.  This is indeed a very practical example of the good that Angel can do through Wolfram and Hart.  The question remains though, at what price?

The Judgment Tale

Each and every one of the characters just discussed has a legacy from the past and that legacy to one degree or other has damaged them as individuals.  Because of this they share the same duality of nature that we see in Dana – the mixture of good and evil.  But we also see the difference in the fact that for Angel, Spike, Buffy, Gunn and Andrew there is understanding and there is choice about their actions.    They do not wilfully choose evil.  But their legacy has damaged them to such an extent that their judgment about the actions they perform is not entirely reliable.  And that is why they are caught up in the world of moral ambiguity.  And this is the fascination of the writers' approach.  There is, I believe, in the African oral tradition a short story known as a judgment or dilemma tale.  These are stories with endings which are either open to conjecture or morally ambiguous.  Typically they concern conflicts of loyalty, the need to arrive at a just response in a difficult situation or the question of where to lay the blame when different parties seem equally guilty.  An example concerns a young boy who must choose between his a father who has been an unjust and cruel man to him or a friend who has been kind and generous.  These stories do not give the answer; rather they leave to listener to debate that with themselves and with others.  And here too we have the strength of this episode.  We see the choices open, we see why they are made and we see the ambiguity therein.  We do not see the answers, at least not yet.