EPISODE 3.17

FORGIVING

Written by: Jeffrey Bell

Directed by: Turi Meyer

The Struggle Within

“Forgiving” is an episode that deals with the struggle between rationality and irrationality within us.  To be more accurate it is about one form of that struggle - the battle between that part of us which wants to find something or someone to hold responsible for the things that go wrong in our lives and vent frustration on it and that part of us which tries to respond to problems more logically, more humanely and indeed more effectively.  It is how that latter allows us to retain or regain control of our lives while the former simply ensures that we are driven by forces outside our control.  And in a way that is very typical for this series, it examines the issue in the parallel responses of several different people:

But principally of course it does so through the reactions of Angel to the loss of his son.  Indeed, in a way that is very reminiscent of “Sleep Tight”, it seems to me that the behavior of these others (and especially of Justine) is intended to be compared and contrasted to Angel’s so as to help us better understand him and his reactions.

The Need for Blame

And I think we can best start by looking at the reactions of the truck driver to the accident that he became involved in.  And I use the words “became involved in” advisedly. Sahjhan had materialized in the middle of a street.  A truck was being driven along the street but the sudden and unexpected appearance of the giant demon in front of him causes the driver to have an accident.  It was clearly not his fault but he was still shocked by the results, especially the injuries.  When Angel later turns up he tries to reassure him:

“You didn't do anything wrong.”

And of course that is right.  But the truck driver cannot accept that:

“I hurt those people. It's all my fault.”

But fault implies some form of responsibility for a bad situation or event.   It means making a choice and being morally accountable for that choice and the consequences it brings.  You can be at fault even though you do not intend the consequence.  A drunk driver of a car does not intend to kill but can still be held responsible if the car does run over a pedestrian because he or she made the choice to drink and drive.  But when something happens over which a person can have no control then there can be no fault because the person in question made no choice for which he or she can be held accountable.  And that is the situation with the driver.

But he was faced with a situation in which people were hurt.  And when a tragedy happens our need for justice and our search for peace of mind in the aftermath seem to require us to find clear and definite answers, even though none actually exist.  There is nothing quite so frightening than the idea that terrible events can occur at random.  First of all to accept such a possibility denies us the hope of getting justice.  The search for justice implies that the wrong which has occurred has upset the moral balance of the universe and that something can be done to restore that balance.   But if we accept that such a tragedy can happen at random then there can be no justice because a truly random event cannot by definition upset the moral balance of the universe.  Secondly, in a tragedy, the course of our lives is taken out of our control. But if someone were to blame and if that someone were to be held accountable for their actions, then we can comfort ourselves with the thought that we do after all have some degree of control over our lives.  Conversely, if no-one were to blame we would have to accept that a similar tragedy can happen again and there is nothing we can do to guard against it. 

That is why it was actually more comfortable for the truck driver to blame himself for the injuries to the family in the station wagon than to accept that no-one was really responsible.  Of course someone did cause the accident and therefore has to bear responsibility for the injuries.  And that person was the very one who sympathized with the driver.  Who knows, when Angel tried to convince him that he wasn’t to blame he may have been reflecting on the fact that he was himself responsible.  But the driver couldn’t know anything about that.

But the driver is not the only one looking to blame someone.  Linwood isn’t very happy with what happened to Connor either although for rather different reasons to Angel. If anything illustrates his attitude it is the following little story:

“My beautiful wife and I raised two and a half million tonight in the fight against cervical cancer. Tomorrow, I'll stall F.D.A. approval of Parsonal, a very promising treatment for it. Unfortunately one of our clients has a competing drug -- not nearly as good but... they're our clients. We're in a war you can never win, Lilah, full of sticky moral quandaries. The side you choose should always be mine.”

Linwood is interested only in what benefits him or furthers his career and nothing is allowed to come in the way of that:

Linwood: “So Sahjhan opened a door to the Quor’toth and in went Holtz and baby?”

Lilah: “That's the long and short of it.”

Linwood: “And I know you made every effort to preserve that baby for us.”

Lilah: “Gun to my head.”

Linwood: “Still, big win for Holtz.”

Lilah: “If you call jumping into a cesspool hell dimension a win.”

Linwood: “Well certainly not for us.”

As far as he is concerned Lilah failed him and he is going to blame her for it, whether she was actually at fault or not.  Of course it was, as even he would admit, very hard indeed to blame her for not stopping Holtz jumping into Quot’toth.  But even if he couldn’t do that, he could always find some other reason for blame.  So, he fixated on what he interpreted as her going behind his back:

“I admire initiative, you wouldn't be where you are without it. So you had some meetings with Angel and a pock-marked demon. And me, out of the loop.”

It is very difficult indeed to establish a clear cause and effect between Lilah’s meetings with Sahjhan and Angel and Holtz’s escape.  But for all his seeming rationality, Linwood is as prey to disappointment and anger as anyone else.  He is a powerful man, used to getting his way.  To fail in something so important as the “Connor” case, into which Wolfram and Hart has poured so many resources, because of circumstances beyond his control is obviously unacceptable.  That would after all suggest limits to his power.  So he is going to blame someone and he is going to do so in a way that re-affirms his power:

 “It's not like I'm going to get my feelings all bruised and yank your mother out of that very expensive clinic you had her in. Don't worry. She's safe as a baby. Well, not the baby you lost, 'cause that one's gone to hell forever…”

Linwood and the truck driver therefore lie at one end of the spectrum.  Disaster has overtaken them and they are going to find someone to blame even though, rationally speaking, no-one was. 

The Need for Understanding

On the other end of he spectrum there is Fred and Gunn.  Both are distressed about what Wesley has done.  Wesley’s actions are, to them, inexplicable.  Faced with the fact that Wesley’s actions are irreconcilable with the man they knew, they are not immune to irrationality, as witnessed by Fred’s repeated attempts to contact Wesley using her cell phone:

Gunn: “I think if he was answerin' his cell phone, he woulda' the first forty times you called.”

Or later, we see Gunn’s rejection of Lorne’s statement that Wesley had been meeting secretly with Holtz and Fred’s initial refusal to accept that Connor was gone:

“No. It can't be. The baby's not gone.”

But the latter refusal is simply shock, an indication of how deeply Fred in particular is traumatized by the news that Holtz took the baby through a portal.  And might I add in passing that it was a very nice piece of continuity to relate this event with Fred’s own traumatic memories of passing through a portal:

“There's pulling and there's noise and there's nothing to hold on to...nothing at all...”

The important thing about her words here is that they indicate how quickly she moves from denial to acceptance of the truth.  And this is true of Gunn as well.  Once Lorne states so emphatically what he knew of Wesley’s actions:

“He was not taking Connor for a stroll, Charles. When he left here with that child -- he wasn't planning on coming back. Ever.”

Gunn realizes that he has to accept the truth of the situation.  That Wesley stole Connor is clear.  But Fred and Gunn also know the man.  And nothing they know about him accounts for those actions.  So, they do the logical thing.  There is a modern caveat in any situation that truth is seldom so obvious as first appearances suggest.  They quickly conclude that there is something about the case that they are missing:

Fred: “And he wouldn't leave without saying something to me... not unless he had a hell of a big urgent reason.”

And throughout the episode their principal concern is to discover what the missing information is.  Even Fred’s obsession with the cell phone is simply a function of their willingness to try anything to get the answers they need.  And even when it looks like Fred in particular is thrashing about wildly, pulling out drawers and upturning trash cans there is method in her madness:

Gunn: “I don't think you're gonna find it in there.”

Fred: “Where are his diaries? He kept a lot of diaries.”

And it was because of this determination to do everything they could to find out why Wesley had acted ion the way he had that they eventually succeeded.  It was clever of Fred in the first place to work out that Wesley must have thrown the diaries away.  But from a symbolic point of view it was even more important that she was prepared to do whatever was necessary – including crawling through a dumpster -  to retrieve the answers.  In this genuine attempt to come to a real understanding of events, the reactions of Fred and Gunn to disaster are quite different from those of the truck driver or Linwood.  And, as we will see in due course, they are also much healthier.

But it isn’t only in their efforts to find the truth that we see Fred and Gunn as our ideals.  It is also in their refusal to heap blame on Wesley just because that makes them feel better.  They are clearly unprepared to rush to judgment until they know the facts.  So, for example, even before they find out about the “Father will kill the son” prophecy, they are concerned in case Angel finds Wesley and wreaks revenge on him:

Fred: “You don't suppose he's decided to skip right to the "dealing with those responsible part," do you?”

Gunn: “I think we need to find Wesley.”

But when they do find the truth they have an open and honest debate about the issue of blame:

Fred: "The father will kill the son..."

Gunn: “Wes thought Angel...”

Fred: “Was going to kill Connor .  Yes that's the prophecy. Wesley couldn't accept it, he kept trying to disprove it... but the texts and commentaries, everywhere he turned, kept bringing him back to the same place. This is great. I told you he had a reason for taking Connor.”

Gunn: “Yeah?”

Fred: “Wesley did the right thing, the only thing he could under the circumstances. We gotta find Angel and tell him right away.”

Gunn: “And he'll forgive Wesley for taking his son and giving him to his mortal enemy.”

Fred: “Well... maybe begin to forgive.  What else could Wes do? It's right here. "I have to save them both." He had to save Connor from Angel and Angel from doing something unspeakable.

Gunn: “Maybe.”

Fred: “"Maybe? What would you have done in his place?”

Gunn: “I'd have come to us first.”

Here we see two members of Angel Investigations try to come to some sort of understanding of Wesley’s actions.  But there is one person for whom such understanding in inconceivable.

The Grieving Father

The episode begins with Angel symbolically contemplating the wreckage of his life and an empty crib.  Connor is gone and with him he has taken all of Angel’s hopes.  And here we can see the crucial difference between Angel on the one hand and Gunn and Fred on the other.  No matter how distressing the latter found Connor’s kidnap, it wasn’t the same life-changing event for them as it was for Angel.  Perhaps that is why they were able to remain rational.  And perhaps that is why they remained in control of their emotions and ultimately of their actions. Between them they were able to work out what they needed to know and what they needed to do in order to try to rescue the situation and they were able to follow through on this. 

Angel too tried to plan but in contrast to his colleagues he failed.  And he failed because it was his sense of grievance and not the rational side of his nature that drove his actions.  It is hardly surprising therefore that the situation spun out of his control.

We had an early taste of this when he came into the lobby of the Hyperion and announced:

“All I care about now is getting my son back. Then I'll deal with those responsible. They'll all pay, including Wesley.”

In these words he recognizes that rescuing the child must be his priority and, as far as he is aware at this point, the only way to do so is by opening a portal.  Gunn quite reasonably points out that this is a task that needs certain specialist knowledge:

Gunn: “Right. But the last time we had to do that... I mean... well it wasn't any of us that knew how. The guy who figured it out... Angel, how are we gonna do this without...”.

Angel: “We don't need him.”

Instead Angel is going after Sahjhan.  But the gang know nothing about him.  They don’t even know his name and their research efforts are hampered by the fact that Wesley isn’t there.  And even if they knew where to find Sahjhan, they are still left with the problem of persuading him actually to return Connor when he was the one who effectively sent him to Quor’toth in the first place.  Rationally this is by far a more uncertain option than trying to find Wesley and enlisting his help.  One suspects that the reason why Angel is going down this road has less to do with his undoubted desire to rescue his son and more to do with putting the demon he holds responsible above everyone (even Wesley) in his reach.

But such is the driving anger that he cannot even persevere with the background research needed to find Sahjhan.  When Fred and the others don’t make progress fast enough for him he moves on to the next idea for tracking down Sahjhan – an even worse one.  He kidnaps and threatens to torture Linwood.  It is not only the moral implications of this move that are troubling:

Lorne: “Angel, this isn't some slimy demon you've got trussed up here -- he's a human.”

Perhaps even more serious is the catastrophic mis-judgment that it entails.  When we look at what Angel is doing here we can echo Talleyrand: it’s worse than a crime – it’s a mistake.  Angel is seeking to bend not only Linwood but the whole of Wolfram and Hart to his will to help rescue Connor.  Yet he knows how ruthless the firm is.  When Linwood tries to threaten Angel with the firm’s retaliation for kidnapping him, Angel quite correctly points out:

“They'd kill you before they'd kill me.”

So they would.  If they help at all it would only be because it suits their agenda to do so.  And anything that suits Wolfram and Hart is not something that Angel wants to be a part of.  The question is what makes Angel think that threatening Linwood would make Wolfram and Hart help him?  The answer is his own state of desperation.  Just as he cannot see – or doesn’t care about – the moral problems of kidnap and torture of a human neither does he see or care about the advisability of trying to use Wolfram and Hart.  So he allows Wolfram and Hart to take control of his agenda.  When Angel arrives in the White room, the little girl doesn’t even disguise her real interest in his mission, namely revenge.  As she says:

“I know, it's so much more fun than forgiveness.”

Angel’s purpose was to get Wolfram and Hart to help get his son back.  As we later discover this was not possible.  When Angel later tries to get Sahjhan to take him to Quor’toth, Sahjhan explains:

Sahjhan: “Couldn't even if I wanted to.”

Angel: “You're lying.”

Sahjhan: “No, that, I'm telling the truth about. Whole universe could go kaplooie. Bad for me, bad for America.”

But the Senior Partners already knew this.  That is why the little girl in the White Room (who clearly speaks for them) says to Angel:

“Baby's gone. You want Sahjhan.”

Wolfram and Hart were therefore only helping out because they wanted to hijack Angel’s actions and use them for their own ends.  And those ends involved engineering a confrontation between the himself and the demon.  For what purpose isn’t entirely spelt out and I think that this aspect of the episode would have been more coherent if it had been.  We can, however, surmise that they didn’t want Angel killed so it may well be that they were trying to see if, by encouraging  his pursuit of revenge, they could persuade him to tilt a little towards the dark side.   In any event we can see just how far Angel was running out of control by the way that he was prepared to kill Lilah just to get Wolfram and Hart’s co-operation and the way he seized on the spell that they offered him despite Lorne’s warnings:

“Angel, you're messing with primordial powers of darkness here.”

And this lack of control and its consequences were well illustrated by what happened next.  Instead of materializing Sahjhan under controlled circumstances in the lobby of the Hyperion, all Angel succeeded in doing was to make him appear in a busy street where he seriously injured some innocent passers by.  This wasn’t what Angel wanted but this was what he got.  And when he finally was able to confront Sahjhan, it did him no good at all.  As we have already seen, he never had any hope of getting Connor back.  And he couldn’t even get revenge on Sahjhan because the latter was obviously far more powerful then he was.  So Angel’s fury in the end simply ends up threatening to make a bad situation worse.  Sahjhan was the prime mover in his tragedy yet far from foiling his plans or even just getting revenge upon him, Angel almost hands him an unlooked for bonus, one that he could never have achieved on his own.  He gives Sahjhan back the material form with which to wreak havoc.  Demons of his type:

“were all about torture and death.”

So, the harm he could have caused to the innocent citizens of LA if he had escaped would have been catastrophic.  And Angel would have had that on his conscience.

The Example of Justine

And it is in this context that we must turn to Justine.  As I have already said Linwood and the truck driver help us to understand Angel’s need to blame someone.  And from Gunn and Fred we can understand how much more healthy it would have been for him to have reacted rationally like them.  But the true parallel the writers seem to wants to draw is between Angel and Justine.  Both had emerged from a tragic past.  For Justine the tragedy lay in the murder of her sister.  For Angel it lay in the burden of his personal history and the way that history seemed to continue to blight his life even now.  But both were then given hope for the future.  Angel had a son and could now begin to hope that he might after all forge with the boy a new life for himself.  For Justine too Connor promised a break with a dark past.  She had clearly been promised by Holtz that, once she had killed Wesley and stolen the child, the three of them would escape and become a new family.  But he lied to her.  It seems clear that he had never any intention of starting a life afresh with her.  As Sahjhan shrewdly observed:

“Wanted to raise your kid as his own. I'm living' with a knife over my heart for eleven hundred years and he's into petty revenge.”

This betrayal obviously leaves her as devastated as it left Angel.  There is indeed a nice symbolism linking them.  The devastation of Connor’s room at the Hyperion is closely matched by the squalor of Justine’ hideout.

Fred: “Oh. There is no happy for you. Y'all livin' here together, sharin'  everything except takin' out the trash, I guess. I imagine losin' Holtz was like losin' a father... or worse.”

But Justine can’t yet admit the truth of Holtz’s betrayal.  Instead she praises him and insists on his good faith

“He escaped with the vampire's child. As he and I had planned.”

And she settles on what seems to be the one thing left to her to do – kill Angel.  Here she too is looking for someone to blame for all her sorrows and really Angel is the only one left who fits the bill.  He is a vampire and so should die out of principle.  And he was the one who drove Holtz to kidnap the child and disappear with him.  Of course by thinking like this she is only deluding herself.  She is simply continuing the fantasy that Holtz is essentially Angel’s blameless victim.  And she is therefore allowing him to continue to manipulate her.  So again we are I think intended to see, in the way that Justine’s lack of forgiveness allows Holtz’s desire for revenge to drive her actions, a metaphor for the way that a lack of forgiveness also allows the more destructive passions of our nature to take control of our actions out of our hands.

But unlike Angel, Justine has a change of heart.  She was already very uneasy about her attack on Wesley.  That is why she lets Gunn and Fred go.  But when Angel has a stake to her throat and lets her go, the contrast to her own lack of mercy for Wesley is clear.  The contrast between him and Holtz is also made apparent when he says:

“I'm not your boyfriend. Find somebody else to smack you around.”

Then in the confrontation between herself and Gunn she is forced to confront reality even more starkly.  She herself contrasts her victim, Wesley, with the man who got her to try to murder him.  In Holtz’s case:

“It was all lies. Every bit of it. All he wanted was that kid. To punish Angel. He never cared about anything else.”

As for Wesley:

“His side's kinda funny: he sacrificed everything he believed in to save that kid.”

As she herself very simply put it:

            “I trusted the wrong man.

And once she realizes this she can no longer follow Holtz’s agenda.  She can no longer hate and want to destroy Angel.  Her life is still a ruin.  She has still her sister to mourn for as well as the loss of any hope of a family life with Holtz.  But she has control of her life back.  And as if to symbolize this she is the one who takes control of Sahjhan.  Angel by contrast does not change.  Instead, deprived of an outlet for his frustration when Sahjhan disappears he returns to vent it on Wesley.  And here the interesting thing is that the writers go to some lengths to make it clear that this is the human side of Angel’s nature that is expressing itself and not the demonic.  So it is all the more meaningful when symbolically he totally loses control at the end.  This is an example of the way in which a human being can lose control of himself without forgiveness; it is not something that only a half demon hybrid is subject to.

Forgiveness

Essentially this episode deals with grief from the point of view of the victim.  Wesley features very little and is entirely passive.  Holtz is seen not at all.  Justine herself is depicted more as a victim of Holtz’s machinations rather than an active participant in Connor’s kidnap and Wesley’s would be murder.  And clearly we are not expected to see things from Sahjhan’s perspective. But that is the nature of the subject matter.  Forgiveness is about the attitude of the victim, not the actions of the wrongdoer.  The episode explores why it is healthy for the victim to forgive and move on with his or her own life and why this has nothing to do with condoning the wrong.  It has everything to do with being able to control the direction of your own life in spite of what fate or the hand of others has done. 

We all experience grief at some loss or other.  Forgiveness or its opposite – “unforgiveness” - is the way we react to this grief.  The latter is the creation of a sense of grievance.  As I have already said, when we suffer a betrayal or a loss we need to hold someone accountable.  By infusing our grief with a blameful resentment we prolong it and keep it raw.  Forgiveness is the release of the sense of blame which allows the completion of the grieving process.  In effect it transforms that process into sorrow.  And understanding is the key to forgiveness.  We can begin by accepting that humans are not perfect.  If we acknowledge this fallibility, we can put the actions of the person we hold accountable into a perspective which allows us to recognize both the fault and the common bond between us. This will allow us to acknowledge the good in others as well as the bad.  And even in relation to the bad it will allow other feelings such as compassion to replace the resentments. And this will in turn allow grief to run its natural course.

In short forgiveness puts us back in control of our lives.  Unforgiveness keeps the sense of loss in control because it is driven by a sense of grievance which refuses to recognize the humanity and fallibility of others and excludes any sense of perspective or compassion.  It is the worst in us that controls our actions rather than the rational side of our natures.  And herein lies the irony.  As I have already said, our desire to blame someone is derived from our need to take control over the things that have hurt us so much.  And yet it is our attachment to blame that destroys our ability to control our own lives.  And this is what we see in Angel. This is both an interesting and valuable insight.  But it is seriously undermined by the way in which the episode fudges issues of moral responsibility.

First of all I find Justine’s portrayal here very jarring indeed.  In fairness to the writers they do not duck what she has done.  But inherent in their approach is that she was more sinned against than sinning – she only acted as she did because she was victim of Holtz’s abuse and manipulation.  I cannot accept this.  She knew exactly what she was doing and she chose to do it quite deliberately.  Her epiphany and her attempts to make amends by capturing Sahjhan and revealing where Wesley was were welcome.  But this is known as repentance and it is not to be confused with forgiveness.  She blamed Angel in the wrong and her actions against him, Wesley and Connor were wrong.  She was more sinner than sinned against and seeing her as an exemplar of forgiveness is disconcerting.

Which brings us on to Wesley.  Gunn and Fred understand why Wesley did what he did.  They have a difference of views.  Fred seems to be willing to exculpate him entirely.  Gunn quite rightly in my view still holds him accountable because he acted unilaterally and fell into a trap.  This argument is left unresolved but the structure of the episode itself does tend towards exonerating Wesley.  Given Wesley’s benign motives, Angel’s raving almost murderous attack at the end necessarily swings sympathy in his direction.  When in addition Angel refuses to accept he was any sort of danger to Connor (in spite of the spiked blood incident)  and when Justine (the person who tried to kill him) makes a positive declaration of Wesley’s innocence it is hard not to take this at face value.  But that is wrong.  Wesley may have acted out of the best of motives but, as I have already argued, he kidnapped Connor because he trusted very uncertain prophecies more than he trusted his friends.  And in this episode we learned just how untrustworthy those prophecies were.  But it is not only the fact that the episode seems to lean towards a vindication of Wesley that itself is problematic.  It is the way that this undermines the whole theme of forgiveness.  As I have already suggested, that whole concept depends upon there being moral blameworthiness which must be forgiven.  The merit of that approach lies in the fact that it is hard, it is counter to our human nature but it is the right thing to do both for the victim and the perpetrator. 

Shorn of this meaning, the episode simply becomes a statement that someone who has suffered a loss should not blame others irrationally.  I started this review by looking at the reactions of Linwood and the truck driver.  They sought to blame someone irrationally for the disaster that had overtaken them.  But the reality was that there was no-one to blame because no-one was at fault.  Unless we hold Wesley to have been at fault in Connor's kidnapping, Angel’s reaction would be directly comparable to theirs and deserving the same assessment.  If you cannot come to terms with someone who is blameless in your misfortune the fault is yours and the misery entirely self-inflicted and there is really nothing more to the episode than that.  I think that there is but it depends on us accepting Wesley’s culpability and I wish the episode had not fudged the issue.

Plot

The first thing to say about the plot for “Forgiving” is that it is clearly intended to form a pivot in the direction of season 3.  Connor and Holtz have both gone, apparently beyond the hope of recall.  Holtz’s little band of vigilantes has broken up and Sahjhan is, we must now assume, permanently imprisoned.  With these events we have seen the dynamic of this season's arc dissapate.  This dynamic was driven by the tension between on the one hand Angel’s discovery that he has a son and his quest to find a meaning in this fact and to protect the child and on the other arrival of Holtz and Sahjhan.  The former had a clear motive to seek revenge on the vampire while the other had some animus against him; although until this episode its precise nature was unknown.  "Forgiving" clarified the nature of Sahjhan’s agenda at the same time as revealing the extent to which he had succeeded and so brought a sense of closure to the arc.

I am bound to say that the revelation about Sahjhan’s motive was well thought out and interesting.  Having two individual’s with desire for revenge against Angel would have been repetitive.  But the fact that Sahjhan’s interest lay in Connor and not Angel and that it had more to do with what Connor was intended to do in the future was a nice twist.  However, I am disappointed about one or two things in particular.  First of all the resolution of Sahjhan’s plans leaves the Tro-Clon even more confused than before.  That is this confluence of separate events that will bring about the ruination or purification of mankind.  The birth of Connor is not the Tro-clon but it is clearly intended to be one of the constituent elements.  But unless Connor eventually returns (and that is always a possibility) how can it be?  Of more immediate concern is the fact that Sahjhan’s plan had no foreshadowing.  When a revelation like the one Sahjhan hit us with here changes so completely our understanding of previous events it is a little unfair unless some clues were given to make us suspect that things were not all they seemed.  And the only clue that I could point to is the fact that Angel had no recollection of ever having seen Sahjhan. There was, in particular, nothing to give us a clue about the role played by the prophecy in driving the demon's agenda.  Worst of all, however, is the fact that we are expected now to accept that prophecies can be rewritten at will.  Of course the whole point of a prophecy is that they are ambiguous and potentially misleading.  We have seen this again and again, including in the Shanshu prophecy.  But accepting that any given interpretation of a text may be misleading is one thing.   To accept that the text may be completely changed is quite another.  In the first case, events may not turn out as we expect them; but if they still make sense in terms of the prophecy itself then that prophecy still means something.  But once you accept that a prophecy is open to that sort of manipulation means that we can take no other prophecy at face value – including the Shanshu prophecy.

However, these reservations aside, not only did writers give us a resolution for the arc that worked pretty well, they did so in the context of a stand-lone story that also worked very well also.  At the beginning the two questions that confronted us were whether Angel could get back Connor and what would he do to Wesley.  Interestingly the story was structured so that the main action concentrated on Angel’s attempts to rescue his son while Wesley's fate was kept in our minds by Gunn and Fred’s concern for him and the occasional scenes with him lying motionless in the park.  Angel's pursuit of those who plotted against his son was conventional enough but had some great strengths as a piece of storytelling.  First there was the fact that Angel was never following a well thought out plan.  Then there was the seemingly overwhelming power of the principal opponent.  Both communicated well enough the slim chances of success and the desperate nature of the hope.  This caught the audience between hope for the child's return and anxiety that it could not.  That is always a source of dramatic tension.  But ultimately, of course, hope gave way to loss; as it had to here.  An episode that was about the darker side of human nature had to be correspondingly dark in terms of its major plot developments.

The only relief lay in the fact that, after we realized that Connor was truely gone and just as Sahjhan seemed on the verge of complete triumph, there was the unexpected twist that gave Angel some satisfaction of sorts and prevented that triumph from being complete.  That provided some small sense of justice and consolation in an otherwise bleak episode.

This concentration on Angel and what he was doing had two advantages.  First of all it kept us in suspense for the longest time possible about Wesley’s fate, although admittedly I think the writers pushed their luck too far here.  Frankly my suspension of disbelief has its limits and these are reached by asking me to believe that someone can have his throat cut and (even if his windpipe were untouched) lie on the ground for hours losing blood and still live.  But secondly the writers were able by this means to postpone the confrontation between Angel and Wesley until after the former had learned the full truth, thus posing the question: will he forgive or not.  And I liked the way that the dialogue first of all suggested that indeed Angel had come to terms with his loss and was genuinely concerned about Wesley.  It made the final murderous attack all the more shocking and effective.  Again though I do have some difficulty in believing that if Angel were serious in his attack he could be dragged off Wesley quite so easily.

Overview (B+)

This episode represented a combination of an interesting psychological insight, a moral argument and a strong plot.  The former two elements were let down somewhat by some confusion between two different cases.  The first was where someone irrationally blames another for their loss.  The second was where the other truly was blameworthy for that loss.  Arguing that understanding and forgiveness should be extended in the second case is a powerful statement of moral principle and psychological insight.  Saying that blame was wrongly placed in the first case is trite.  I remain of the view that Wesley was in the wrong and judge Angel’s reaction accordingly, albeit noting the elements in the episode that undermine this.  But if the writers were serious in suggesting that Wesley was innocent then the episode looses all value for me thematically.   Nevertheless as a piece of plotting it worked very well.  Its tone was dark as befits the theme of the episode.  It was a very powerful and comprehensive conclusion to the season’s main arc.  It moved at a fast pace with tension maintained throughout partly by the hope that Connor might against the odds be recovered and partly by a sense that Angel was always on the point of losing the plot.  And finally it delivered a shocking surprise at the end.