|
|
|
|
The First Soldier Down
Whistler Revisited In “You’re Welcome”, Cordelia refers to Doyle as the first soldier down. But in truth the term “soldier” doesn’t begin to do justice to the wide variety of roles that Doyle played in his short time on ANGEL. In plot terms he played the part of a messenger from TPTB and not just in the sense of someone who has visions of those whom Angel was supposed to help. In this context the interesting thing is his similarity to Whistler, the demon who persuaded Angel to get out of the gutter in “Becoming”. Both were badly and cheaply dressed; had a slightly shady, down at heal air but were articulate and carried themselves with a certain confidence. Each knew who Angel was and had a definite message for him. This suggested to me that the writers’ early concept for Doyle was that he was to continue in the Whistler role. Whistler was sent first of all to find Angel and convince him to give up his self-imposed exile and play an active part in the struggle between good and evil. It is also implied in “Becoming 2” that Angel learnt other things from him before coming to Sunnydale on his own. Similarly Doyle had a definite message for Angel about the part he was to play. From “City of...” – "It’s not all about fighting and gadgets and stuff. It’s about reaching out to people, showing them that there’s love and hope still left in the world." This is a message about more than the need to help others. It is a message about the nature and effect of that help. When a character articulates a theme for the series and defines the role of the leading character in it the obvious implication is that he is possessed of certain knowledge denied to Angel or to us. In other words that Doyle was some sort of messenger. A role like this was certainly consistent with the creation of an overarching mythology where Angel was closely connected to TPTB and acted as their agent in the war between light and dark. In that scenario Doyle would be the principal link between Angel and TPTB. But there were two problems with this idea. The first was the limited role that TPTB actually played in ANGEL. With the exception of IWRY, they stayed pretty much in the background. Yes, they described in broad terms what Angel had to do and why. But otherwise they confined themselves to identifying individual humans who needed to be saved. I think that this was the right approach. Too active involvement from TPTB would not only have been cheating in terms of plot development (literally providing dues ex machine answers to knotty problems). More seriously still it would have undermined the importance of Angel’s own actions and decision. He had to earn redemption; so the focus had to be on his successes and failures and how he used or squandered his opportunities for the purpose. But a link to TPTB is diminished in importance when they stay in the background. The second problem lay in the character of Doyle himself. It was one thing to bring in a character like Whistler to set Angel on the right path and then drop out of the picture altogether. It is another for Doyle to act as Angel’s mentor in a larger sense as the person, for example, to whom he turned for advice in charting his way through difficult moral choices. Indeed Doyle (as conceived) was ill equipped to provide the necessary guidance. He certainly had “street smarts” enabling him to come to some shrewd judgments (as with the need to charge clients). But giving him the role of moral guardian for the series would not have sat very well with what we later discovered were his own wrong turnings in life. For example, as we discovered in “Bachelor Party” he only discovered he was half-demon when he sneezed and sprouted a demon face. Previously he had no idea: "I never met my dad. He was the demon. And my mom, well, she figured she'd wait to see if I'd got his genes before she got all confessional." Everything he had been, everything he had wanted out of life, had been based on a false assumption about who he was. And the effect on his life was devastating. It destroyed both his marriage - to a woman improbably named Harry - and his career. Doyle described the end of his marriage in the following terms: “And when things go wrong and you're young like that, you don't just say 'Hey, thanks for the blender, I wish you well'. You fight. You tear each other apart until one of you can't take it. She did the walking. But she had reason. I wasn't exactly the man she married. I changed.” The ironic thing is that when Doyle said that he changed he was referring to the fact that he discovered his demon heritage. He assumed that this was what drove his wife away. We only get the truth about that from Harry later: Harry: "That when he first went through his change I freaked. Which is true. But after I adjusted, I realized here is this whole, rich, interesting world just waiting to be explored." Angel: "But you didn't tell him that." Harry: "Of course I did! I even tried to get him to go out - meet other demons. At least go to one mixer, you know? But he couldn't accept himself, - or them. So then he was just angry, and pretty much a bitch to live with.” And part of his being difficult to live with was the drinking. It was only when he found out he was half demon that Doyle started to consume alcohol seriously. So, while Doyle blamed his demon heritage for the loss of his marriage and every other part of the fulfilling life he had, it was his changed attitude to himself and to others that was responsible. The turning point in "Bachelor Party" for Doyle comes in his realization of the real reason why Harry left him. And once he discovers that her new fiance Richard is himself a demon there is really no denying it. “You know all that time Harry would go on about what an amazing thing my demon half could be, the worlds that it opened up to us, I thought she was just trying to make me feel better. I thought that she was pitying me. But it was true. I just wasn't listening. You know, Harry didn't leave because of the demon in me. She left because of me." What went wrong in Doyle’s life was not that he was born a half-demon or that those whom he loved couldn’t cope with the fact. No, what went wrong was that Doyle didn’t trust either himself or his wife to be able to cope with whom he was. Or take he picture that we are given of Doyle at the start of “Hero”. There the writers make every effort to present Angel as the hero and Doyle as not the hero. Doyle himself doesn’t even try to disguise his admiration for Angel as “the real deal in the hero department”. Doyle: "Come on, you lived and loved and lost and fought and vanquished inside a day, and I'm still trying to work up the courage to ask Cordy out for dinner, not to mention the part about telling her that I'm half demon.” In fighting the Scourge, Angel takes charge, organizes everything and is mistaken (as it turns out) for “the promised one”. He is the one who infiltrates the Scourge, finds out about the bomb and rushed back to the docks where he promptly sends Doyle and the others out of the way while he faces the storm troopers alone. Doyle on the other hand starts off the episode as “everyman” and is quickly relegated by Cordelia to “weasel”. He is self-deprecating about his own courage (“if they want a fight can’t someone else give it to them?”) and then reveals his secret. He had previously refused to help refugees from the Scourge. In this context it is in fact very noticeable that in the major decisions that Angel had to face in the first eight episodes of the series Doyle was either ignored completely (IWRY) or acted merely as sounding board (“In the Dark”). In the latter episode Angel is the one who explains to Doyle how the ring of Amarra is incompatible with this purpose when he reveals to him his decision to destroy it: Doyle: “Care to explain? - I mean this ring is your redemption. It’s what you’ve been waiting for.” Angel: “Nah, it just looks like it.’ Doyle: “Angel, man, think what you’re saying.” Angel: “I have. I’ve thought of it from every angle, and what I figure is I did a lot of damage in my day, more than you can imagine." Doyle: “So what, you don’t get the ring because your period of self-flagellation isn’t over yet? I mean think of all the daytime people you could help between 9 and 5.” Angel: “They have help. The whole world is designed for them, so much that they have no idea what goes on around them after dark. They don’t see the weak ones lost in the night, or the things that prey on them. And if I join them, maybe I’d stop seeing, too.” On the other hand as a “guide and mentor” type figure Doyle should have been the one pointing out Angel’s path for him. So what was left for him? He had his visions and street contacts but they are plot devices rather than a “role” in the series. In order to make the most of a character he or she really should make some particular contribution to a series rather than just being generic sidekick. These are the guys who are useful because they need things explained to them (for the benefit of the audience) or because they can perform errands for the hero. Every series needs these guys but in the best ones the role a character plays is more significant than that. The type of person he is should then fit the role the character has to play.
A Friend Indeed What was left for Doyle – and the roles he actually filled – was to be Angel’s friend and Cordelia’s sparring partner and, in that capacity in particular, to provide some very necessary comic relief. In these roles he was markedly successful. At first sight it is hard to see on what basis Angel could have developed such a close relationship with Doyle. I had always thought myself that Angel and Giles were a well suited pair. But Angel and Doyle were such opposites – the reserved, reflective, solitary vampire and the outgoing, spontaneous and gregarious half demon. But such was Doyle’s easy going charm that I actually had little difficulty in believing in Angel responding to it. And as for Doyle, it is very telling that the major theme of “Hero” was the need to have faith in someone or something. During that episode Doyle catches up with a young demon called Reiff, when he is trying to run away. Doyle then contrasts the option of “losing yourself” against that of having faith. By implication he had lost faith when his demon ancestry was revealed. It was this loss of faith which led to the break up of his marriage and the end of his career. It was this loss of faith which led him to reject the other Bracken half-demons who had come to him for help from the scourge. But now he had found it again - in Angel. He spoke to Reiff of his parents’ faith in Angel: “They put their faith in something, Reiff. You don't have to if you don't want to. Maybe Angel doesn't know what he's doing. It's possible. But the other option: losing yourself somewhere, hoping it all goes away, I *know* that never works. How about we go find your family?" And indeed it is very obvious that Doyle himself has tremendous faith in Angel. Early on in the episode he tells him: Doyle: “I would have chosen the pleasures of the flesh over duty and honor any day of the week. I just don't have that strength.” implying his admiration for Angel’s willingness to do what he himself doubts he can. Doyle’s relationship with Cordelia was more complex. It obviously took a big step forward in “Bachelor Party” when Cordelia realized she wanted someone with substance in her life and admitted that was something Doyle did have. But Cordelia was never someone to let her heart rule her head. That fact alone kept any relationship she might have had with Doyle within certain limits. Indeed the contrast between Cordelia’s relentless practicality, over running the business no less than in responding to Doyle’s hints, was a source of much of the conflict (and humor) between them. But herein lies another problem. Doyle effectively acted as interface between Angel and Cordelia. The latter had scenes together but they were never used to develop a personal relationship between them. Because of this I did not really get the same sense of a close-knit team in the early episodes of the series as developed later between Angel, Wesley and Cordelia. And it was the friendship that we saw growing between Cordelia and Angel in “Parting Gifts”, “Somnambulist” and “Expecting” in particular that made the single biggest contribution to her development as a character. So, you could say that Doyle actually held back her development. And it is here you find the paradox. When ME killed off Doyle they created an awful lot of ill feeling over the loss of an undeniably popular figure. But in the end it seems to me that the change worked to the advantage of ANGEL as a series, at least in terms of the structure and development of the series. Nothing major was lost with Cordelia effectively replacing Doyle as Angel’s closest friend and intermediary to TPTB (by that time a pretty limited role indeed). Arguably the gain was in a more balanced and coherent Angel Investigations. Indeed I think the writers made better use of Doyle after his death than they did in the course of his involvement in the series. “Parting Gifts” was all about Doyle and how each surviving members of the team coped with his loss. Angel started out by pushing Cordelia away because closeness leaves you open to pain (a very Angel approach to take). The he set out what he intended to be his new approach to fighting evil – “I work alone”. Implicit in this was his guilt at not being able to save Doyle and the blame he attached to himself over it. Both reactions could not survive the shock of Cordelia’s kidnapping. That brought Angel face to face with the reality that he could not loose Cordelia as well and that he needed Wesley’s help to rescue her. The effort to save Cordelia was, therefore, as much an expiation of his guilt over Doyle as about Cordelia herself. As for Cordelia, she started out genuinely concerned for Angel and genuinely sad about Doyle. But beneath this there was still the same old “me first” Cordelia. She was so annoyed at Doyle inflicting the visions on her that it needed Barney to point out to her the significance of that gift and later to bring to the surface her own feelings of regret and guilt. Her self-centredness and her refusal to let Doyle close to her were now troubling her. In this we may perhaps see the genesis of her increasing closeness to Angel. Finally in the rescue of Cordelia, her trust in Angel (“I never doubted for a minute that you would find me”), Angel’s working relationship with Wesley and the little breakfast scene at the end we see a deliberate effort to rebuilt what had been shattered – the “family” unit. The message clearly was therefore that Doyle’s presence in Angel and Cordelia’s lives had left a lasting legacy (hence the title) which affected how they saw and treated each other and Wesley for that matter. Keeping the drawing of the ugly, grey, blobby thing was a symbol of this effect.
The Path to Redemption Up until now I have focussed on the role that Doyle played as a character in ANGEL. This is for two reasons. It is partly because the series was still finding its feet and working out what it was about. And it seems to me that looking back at Doyle and his role helps highlight how ANGEL did change. The central character himself was, at this stage, clearly cast in a much more conventionally heroic mould. The comparison between Doyle’s admiration for him and his own incisive understanding of what he was supposed to be doing (in “In the Dark” for example) on the one hand and his moral confusion in later seasons in almost shocking. Or again there was the emphasis on Angel’s solitary existence, which Doyle if anything highlighted because he was the only one who got close to him. Even Cordelia at that stage could not be described as his friend. This is again an interesting contrast to the self-conscious development of a family dynamic between Angel, Cordelia, Wesley, Gunn and Fred in later years. And, as we have seen, this dynamic can be traced directly back to the aftermath of Doyle’s death in “Parting Gifts”. Or there was the role of TPTB Doyle in “City Of…” was clearly intended to be some sort of link to them but the idea of Higher Powers intervening directly in Angel’s struggles was something the writers never pursued with great interest. But my concentration on Doyle’s relationship with Angel and Cordelia is also because his own character arc was so limited. Indeed it is noticeable that his backstory really only played a key role in two episodes – the less than sparkling “Bachelor Party” and the flawed “Hero”. Interestingly enough, however, even though it began and ended quite early on in the life of ANGEL it reflected the same themes we see time and again in the other character arcs in the series. Before he discovered the truth about his heritage, Doyle was a happy and successful man. He had a fulflling career that he apparently lived a contented home life with the woman he loved. But when he discovered the truth about himself everything fell apart. To borrow the language that he himself used when talking to Reiff in “Heroes” instead of trusting in the person who he was (and indeed who Harry was) to work things out he tried to loose himself, hoping that all his woes would just go away. But instead he started to drink, he lost his job and his marriage broke up. He left home sunk into what can only be described as a low life and even arrived at the point when he refused to help refugees from the Scourge.
Here indeed was a man who had lost control of his life. He had allowed what he saw as the shadow of his heritage dominate him and make his choices for him. And yet, as Cordelia came to recognize, this was a man of some substance - a man who was better than the choices he made. In "City of..." he is reluctant to help rescue Cordelia:
And later, waiting outside Russell's mansion when he hears shots he takes off, leaving Angel and Cordelia stranded. But as he drives away he realizes he can't abandon them and goes back for them. Then in "Bachelor Party" he rescues Cordelia from a vampire and gets a rather shocked: "That was...so brave" in return. Doyle had never been a coward; nor had he ever been indifferent to the sufferings of others. It was simply that trust in himself had been destroyed first by his discovery of who he was and then by his own inadequacies - the descent into a low life and the unwillingness to help others who needed it. He couldn't make much of his own life, so how could he help others? But as he had done in "Bachelor Party" he showed in "Hero" that he was much stronger than he thought. What he needed was to forget about him and his problems and instead concentrate on those who needed help - and in "Hero" that was Angel who was about to sacrifice himself. Making the jump to the genetic bomb and hanging on there while he disarmed it was no small thing. Even Angel was not certain that he could shut if off. But implicit in Doyle’s actions was that he had faith in his ability to save his friend simply because he had to. Thus he redeems his earlier failure to help victims of the Scourge in both senses. Firstly, by actually saving the later refugees but more particularly by finding his faith in himself once more. Just like Angel Doyle was haunted by his past to the extent that his choices seemed driven by his fears and insecurities. He handed control of his life over to this dead hand. But again just like Angel when it was almost too late he took back control over his own life by concentrating not on his own obsession with this weaknesses but rather on what was the right thing to do to help a friend. When he stopped thinking about himself and instead thought of others first he regained control of his own life. In this sense, even so early in the series we see laid out its major themes of the importance of free will set against the preoccupation with ourselves which allows our own flaws and weaknesses to gain control over our lives as well as the importance of a connection with others in allowing us to reassert that control by choosing to do the right thing. It, therefore, seems to me very fitting that in the pivotal episode of the fifth season, "You're Welcome" Cordelia used him as the example for Angel to follow:
Angel himself had choose whether to reassert his own will or to allow Wolfram and Hart to control him and in choosing the former he, like Doyle, faced down his own past and his own insecurities by concentrating on what was the right thing to do to help others. While Doyle was therefore "the first soldier down" he also foreshadowed the path that Angel himself was to follow and it is in this example rather than in any of the other roles he played during his brief stint on the show that we see his true importance to ANGEL. In "You're Welcome" Cordelia replays the video that she and Doyle made at the beginning of "Hero"
This seems to me to sum up the character perfectly - slightly shambling, containing some wry humor but with a serious message. It is an entirely fitting epitaph.
|
