Meltzer and Angelus

In many ways the subject of a stalker and his victim was a natural for ANGEL. Stalking first of all involves some form of covert action and for that reason usually takes place at night. But it is intrusive and it does put the victim into a state of distress or fear. It is also quite likely to end in some form of violence directed at the victim. The potential for incorporating the supernatural into this type of behavior in the Whedonverse is all too obvious. I am afraid, however, that in this respect "I Fall to Pieces" promised more than it delivered.

Part of the difficulty was the way in which the basic idea for this episode was presented. Meltzer and his detachable body parts and especially what happened to him was intended to be used as a metaphor for the way stalkers and their victims related to one another. In presenting this metaphor the writers relied upon a parallel between Meltzer’s stalker activities on the one hand and Angel’s first hand knowledge and experience of stalking on the other. This parallel was intended to explore and explain Meltzer’s motivations and actions and his ultimate fate. Thus we were to be helped to understand the metaphor. The problem lay in the fact that, for me at least, the parallel between Angel and Meltzer just did not work.

Let us start with the following conversation between Cordelia and Angel.

Cordelia: "I don’t get it. This guy has a lot to lose. What is it about Melissa that got him to go all O.J. on her?"

Angel: "Nothing. It’s not about Melissa; it’s about rage. This guy is too messed up to deal with a real woman and he can’t stand that. So he creates a fantasy about a girl he barely knows. But eventually even she fails him. So he has to hurt her, because when he looks at her all he sees is how useless he is, how damaged."

Cordelia: "Uh, what a fun date you must have been in back in your bad vamp days. On the other hand, it should give you some insight into the jerks of the world."

Angel: "I know how this guy thinks, I just don’t know how he’s doing it."

I think we have to conclude from this that the writers were referring specifically to the parallels between Meltzer and Angelus rather than Angel. Textually the reference to Angel’s "bad vamp days" makes this fairly clear. There are, of course, some similarities between these two. They both share a desire to control their victims. But their motivations are fundamentally different. The quote above reveals what I think is intended to be the true nature of Meltzer’s interest in Melissa. It is born out of inadequacy and frustration. He wants all the normal things out of life like a family. But because of his own shortcomings he cannot have them. So he substitutes a fantasy relationship. This can be seen from the way in which he unhesitatingly accepts "Brian Jensen’s" description of his love for his "wife" as a picture of his own relationship with Melissa.

"Do you know what it’s like to be so much a part of someone that you don’t know where they end and you begin? Would you die for her?"

But there was never a relationship there. There was instead a control system which Meltzer fooled himself into believing was a relationship. The true nature of Meltzer’s relationship with Melissa is evidenced by the realities of his actions: the covert surveillance to ensure she follows his instructions, changing her pin number etc. It may well be that Meltzer’s difficulties with women stemmed from his feelings of inadequacy that are reflected in his need to control them. That is, of course, speculation. Nevertheless it seems quite clear that Meltzer’s behavior is the direct result of his failure in being able to have an ordinary relationship.

And here is where we come to the metaphor. Here I will quote from something Angel said to Melissa:

"You’ve survived a living hell these last few months and you’re still standing, while he’s coming unhinged at not being able to control you. He’s the weak one. You’re the strong one."

These were words that she herself took up and turned on Meltzer:

"You turned yourself into a freak, Ronald, a vile, repulsive freak. And I’m done being afraid of you. You can cut me and you can kill me, but it still won’t change what you are. Angel was right. You’re weak!"

The message we are being given is that inadequacy can turn to violence but when confronted by strength, both moral and physical, it just "falls to pieces" both literally and metaphorically. As Meltzer’s weapons in stalking Melissa literally fell apart so his true weakness was metaphorically revealed. The application of this metaphor for stalkers generally is too obvious to need laboring here. And it is a very clever one. It encapsulates a fairly sophisticated idea about the lack of moral strength in someone who is essentially a bully into a nice, easily understood image. In this context I have to say that the depiction of the actual stalking itself was well done, from the point of view of its compatibility with the metaphor. It started off with the flowers – innocuous enough and usually taken as an expression of affection. We then saw the bathroom scene and we only learned later that Meltzer had been spying on Melissa. Of course at one level, wanting to ensure that someone takes proper medication can be seen as concern for their well-being. But most people would regard covert surveillance for the purpose as going to far. Then when Meltzer changed Melissa’s pin number that was a gratuitous form of control and was a very strong sign that something wasn’t quite right and from there on the obsessiveness gradually became clearer until it culminated in very intrusive behavior and eventually violence. So, Meltzer’s actions (including the way he became unhinged by his failure) matched closely the predicted pattern of behavior that was increasingly erratic and egregious and thus added weight to the analysis.

But this very metaphor reveals pretty clearly the fallacy of the method chosen to reveal it. There is no real parallel between Angelus and Meltzer. Neither Angel nor the viewer can claim to understand the latter through the actions or motivations of the former. Angelus did not want to be loved. He didn’t want a relationship. He just enjoyed inflicting pain. Even by vampire standards, Angelus was a "particularly brutal bastard". We have not yet got an especially clear idea of his activities in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. But there are enough hints that he set out to torture and kill simply for pleasure. As the First Evil in the guise of Margaret said in "Amends" -

"But you see, that's what makes you different than other beasts. They kill to feed, but you took more kinds of pleasure in it than any creature that walks or crawls."

His stalking of victims represented a collection of refined techniques for inflicting the pain – killing loved ones, nailing puppies for Valentine’s Day etc. Just compare the roses he sent Buffy in BBB (complete with the message "soon") to Meltzer’s gift of flowers to Melissa. The former was a threat; the latter really was a misconceived gesture intended to show affection. In fact love repelled and sickened Angelus. The only occasion when his stalking of someone could be said to be as a result of more personal motives was when he went after Buffy. Even there it was not because he wanted love. Rather he wanted revenge. In "Innocence", Drusilla guessed fairly easily what Angelus had in mind for Buffy

"You don't want to kill her, do you? You want to hurt her. Just like you hurt me."

So on this most basic level the similarities between Angel(us) and Meltzer just did not work for me. Remember Meltzer only became violent when his efforts at showing affection were frustrated. Violence was Angelus’ whole life. I could not believe in Angel looking into the dark, soulless evil of the demon and finding these human inadequacies there that allowed him to diagnose both the problem and the solution. It is one thing to take back control of your life in the face of an inadequate who "falls to pieces" at the first sign of serious opposition. I wouldn’t give very much for your chances of pulling off the same trick if the stalker was Angelus (unless of course your name happened to be Buffy Summers).

The Plot

As I have already suggested, one of the great strengths of the plot was the way that it started out in a fairly low key way with Meltzer being intrusive but not actually threatening. It was only bit by bit that the extent of that intrusiveness and its threatening character were revealed. This works not only thematically but from the dramatic point of view as well. It first of all created a mystery. We are aware from early on that Meltzer knew things about Melissa he should not have, such as the fact that she hadn’t been taking her pills. This raised the question how. More than that it added to the sense of suspense. If he knows things about her what else can he do? This immediately makes him more threatening and adds to the suspense. The solution to the mystery was provided when we saw his eye floating in Melissa’s bedroom. It was important that the reality did not come as an anti-climax, that our imagination about the way in which Meltzer stalked his victim did not prove more scary than the actuality. And here I think that the truth of Meltzer’s special abilities was certainly creepy enough for me. To see him talking to her outside her bank was one thing. To see his eye watching her undress is something entirely different.

So, I very much liked the way the writers held back for a while before revealing Meltzer’s "special abilities". And I also thought that the detective work that went into identifying the nature of the threat was handled very well. Admittedly this was one of the simpler problems for Angel to solve in that Melissa had given him the name of the perpetrator and described what he was doing to her. All he had to do is figure out how he was doing it. Nevertheless, he went about like actual detectives. Collectively Angel Investigations went and talked to Kate, got police protection for Melissa, searched Meltzer’s office, made covert contact with him and interviewed colleagues. All were logical moves and each contributed towards solving the final puzzle. What I liked most, however, was the way in which the results of these moves were brought together to set up the final confrontation. Meltzer had already met "Brian Jensen". Angel getting police protection for Melissa led to Meltzer’s first kill and to him seeing Angel and Melissa together. This not only confirmed he was out of control but helped him identify who his enemy was, thus leading to the attempt to kill "Brian Jensen" and so to the final confrontation in Angel’s apartment. All very neat and tidy.

I can’t help feeling, though, that the writers could have waited even longer before revealing the truth about Meltzer. The ideal would have been to structure the episode so that the revelation about the detachable body parts came immediately after Angel’s visit to Vinpur Natpudan. The conversation between them could have been left open ended with a cut away scene in which Meltzer revealed his stalking techniques by demonstration. That would have maximized the surprise and the final revelation would have had a more coherent feel to it. The explanation as to how Meltzer got his special gifts would have been linked directly to the disclosure of what they were. The way it was structured we knew what Meltzer’s secret was long before Angel went to see Vinpur Natpudan. Because of this the only purpose served by that visit for us the viewer was to reveal the method used and by this time I certainly had little interest in that sort of exposition. Worse than that, the explanation that was given made so little sense that we would actually have been better off without one. As best I can make out the suggestion was that Meltzer had managed to tap into the unused potential of the brain (one of the great cliché’s of SF) in some unspecified way. Yogis may be able to shut down their "somatic system" (no, I don’t know what that is) by doing so but how the brain allows the physical separation of a hand from an arm is beyond me. The writers might just as well have shown Angel putting down the telephone and telling Cordelia he had just found out from Vinpur Natpudan what Meltzer’s special abilities were.

In terms of plot, however, the most significant problems only came with the final confrontation itself. Not the least of these problems was trying to decide how the conflict was to be resolved. This may sound a strange thing to say but in many ways the real point of the story was to implement the advice Kate gave to Angel when she said:

"I’ve put a few of these creeps away and the hardest thing is to know that he is still winning. She’s still afraid. He took her power away and no one can get it back for her but her."

So, after some prompting from Angel, Melissa did stand up to Meltzer and dared him to kill her. That, I assume, was intended to be the moment when she got back power over her own life. But Meltzer still had physical power over her. He could have killed her and her demonstration of independence wouldn’t have been very much help to her then. It needed Angel to come and kill Meltzer for her to be truly free. But once Angel had killed Meltzer her willingness to strand up to him became largely superfluous. There does seem to be some conflict here between the old fashioned "hero to the rescue" approach and the "saving souls" agenda. The two involved quite different solutions to the problem and do not easily co-exist.

The second problem is that, in the physical sense at least, the central confrontation was between Meltzer and Angel. In order for this to have any dramatic impact Meltzer, therefore, had to be a credible opponent. I really didn’t think he was. I accept that shooting Angel full of drugs almost allowed him to make an end run around him and kill Melissa. And I have to say that sequence of Meltzer paralyzing Angel and then trying to break into the apartment were well done. It created a classic “race against time” scenario. We knew Angel would not die from the drugs but he was clearly incapacitated by them and Meltzer was laying siege to the basement apartment. The question was whether Angel would recover before he managed to penetrate the defenses Doyle and Cordelia had created. But this scenario depended for its effectiveness on how much we cared about him succeeding in his attack. Once in the apartment Meltzer showed no real interest in either Doyle or Cordelia. He simply knocked them out. And quite frankly I could not get particularly worked up about Melissa or her fate. I think this is one of the fundamental problems of having a "victim of the week". It is very difficult to make them a living, breathing individual as opposed to a plot device. So, in the end, there was no real suspense attached to the sequence. And once Angel appeared on the scene the danger was, in any event, as good as over. Meltzer had apparently no more physical strength than an ordinary human. I think that this was demonstrated when the most dangerous way he could take on Angel was to shoot out his teeth at him. So, what was supposed to be the climax of the whole episode ends very quickly and very tamely in anticlimax.

One final problem lay in the special effects. The idea of detachable body parts was very creepy and, for obvious reasons, fitted metaphor perfectly. To see Melissa in very private moments (such as getting undressed for bed) being stalked by eye and hands was very disturbing indeed. I thought the special effects here worked very well; especially the scenes where the hands reattached themselves to Meltzer’s arms. But the weaknesses in the special effects were shown up very clearly by the action sequences at the end. They simply could not convey the necessary fluidity and ease of movement that were necessary to hold their own in inter-reaction with the live action participants. In the end they seemed slightly…. ridiculous.

Overview (C-)

This was the first ANGEL episode to really disappoint. It wasn’t actually that bad but it did seem to me to fail in a number of crucial respects. The metaphor of a stalker falling to pieces was a good one and the actual depiction of Meltzer was both convincing and entirely consistent with the metaphor for the stalker. But the parallel between Angelus and Meltzer, which was intended to illustrate it, was basically misconceived and I usually regard that as a more serious matter than a well conceived parallel which fails in its execution. Equally while the execution of the plot (the stalking, detective work and engineering of final confrontation) was thoroughly professional, it suffered from some key weaknesses. First I think that there was a degree of confusion over how the doctor was to be defeated - by Melissa standing up to him or by Angel physically. Then there was no real explanation as to how Meltzer’s limbs became detached. And finally, as an opponent, he just didn’t carry a sufficient threat. The detachable body parts was a suitably creepy idea which unfortunately worked badly in the final fight scene. In mitigation, however, the dialogue was of a very high standard and provided a lot of amusing and entertaining moments and some of the characterization was spot on. I have already mentioned Doyle and Cordelia. In addition the episode also included a very interesting take about the way Angel related to his clients. He actually scared Melissa. Not only did we get some nice self-deprecating humor but made a serious point by emphasizing his separation from people as well as his usual modus operandi. In the end, however, nothing can quite rescue this episode.