And if we were in any doubt at all about this the writers of this episode provided us with the perfect illustration of why this sort of loyalty is so important.  When Fred and Gunn are ambushed by the three vampires, Gunn’s main concern is for Fred’s safety:

Gunn (to Fred): "Get out of here!"

Fred: "But..."

Gunn: "Go!"

Seemingly obedient to his words, she then runs off.  But while Gunn is fighting one of the vampires, another comes up behind him.  It was only the fact that Fred returned in time to give him a warning and stake one of the two other vampires in the back that saved him:

Gunn: "Fred - why are you still here?"

Fred: "I got your back!  Well, actually I got his back."

Gunn: "Thanks."

If she had continued to run, the vampires would first have killed Gunn and then probably caught and killed her.  Singly both she and Gunn were vulnerable. But it was that fact that Fred did not forget that she was not on her own but was a member of a team that saved the day.  As Holtz himself later noted:

"This tiny girl, outsized, outmatched, outnumbered and she survived. Why? Because she was willing not to. She was prepared to die for the cause rather than abandon her comrade. We, too, must be willing to die…but more so. Study this carefully.”

Holtz meant that Fred’s loyalty to Gunn should become an example to his own team whose training seems less than co-ordinated.  But we can also see clear signs that Holtz’s alliance with Sahjhan is coming under increasing strain:

Sahjhan: "You owe me a dead vampire."

Holtz: "Yes. Well, how shall I put this? What are you going to do about it? Nothing. That's what you'll do. That's all you can do or else you wouldn't have brought me here in the first place. You've done your part, Sahjhan. Now let me do mine."

Sahjhan: "What is your part? Recruiting a bunch of paramilitary Moonie freaks, who run around playing Candid Camera with Angel's buddies? That's crap. Admit it. You're a coward - and I bet Caroline would agree. You remember her, don't you? Your dead wife? Mother of your dead kids? How'd they die? Who swore revenge? - Any of this ringing a bell?"

Holtz: "Get out."

This odd couple have the same purpose – revenge on Angel.  But each is working to a different agenda and a different timetable.  So frustrated is Sahjhan by Holtz and his methods that he tries to recruit Lilah to help him.  Of course, she too is handicapped.  As she tells Sahjhan:

"I hate to disappoint you, but Wolfram and Hart's official policy is to let Angel live until he becomes useful.”

That does not stop her though. She may think that Wolfram and Hart “rocks” but, she still goes behind their back to help Sahjhan out.  So we have Holtz, the demon and the lawyers, each pursuing their individual paths towards different goals.  This is the precise opposite of loyalty to one another and  it’s not hard to foresee that somewhere down the line these three are going to get in each other’s way to the frustration of their own plans.

But it’s not only the practical advantages brought by the group acting together that is important.  We also see in this episode examples of the moral obligations each member of a group owes to the other.  When Aubrey is unmasked after the vampire attack on Gunn and Fred, Angel’s reaction is severe:

Angel: "You set up my friends. Let them walk right into an ambush. They could have been killed."

Aubrey: "But they weren't. Your friends are still alive. My little boy isn't."

Angel: "I'm sorry about your son."

Wesley: "Is that how Holtz found you? Because of what happened to your son?"

Angel: "You're right to protect him. Holtz is one of the good guys. He has every right to hate me. And if he ever comes close to one of my people ever again, or tries to touch a hair on my son's head I'll kill him and anyone who gets in the way. You might wanna mention that."

Angel’s remorse over what he did to Holtz is genuine.  His sympathy for Aubrey – indeed for all of Holtz’s group – is equally real.  But none of that counts for anything when compared to his loyalty to his own people.  With him, they must come first.

In the forgoing we see the importance of loyalty in any group.  And it is in our examination of what this concept means and why it is important that we see where Wesley’s attitude is found wanting.  It isn’t that Wesley is being selfish in his attitude by putting himself first.  The strain of the anxiety he has been living with is only too apparent throughout this episode.  Angel himself notes it:

Angel: "You've been on edge for days. Talk to me."

Wesley: "I just wanna make sure everything's okay."

Angel: "You mean with Connor."

It would have been so much easier on Wesley to make a clean breast of things.  Furthermore we have already seen the amount of sheer hard work he has been prepared to put into his researches, leaving himself close to exhaustion.  He paid out an obviously large sum of money to find out about the Loa.  He was warned that contacting the Loa would be dangerous but he persisted in a very difficult interview in which he faced threats and warnings that would have made most people reconsider their course of action.  Finally he went directly to talk to Holtz despite realizing that this was a very dangerous and unpredictable man.  In short he demonstrated that he was prepared to pay any price  to protect Connor.  That sense of commitment must be admirable.  But it was not loyalty.  Indeed what we see here is the way that Wesley brought his commitment to Connor into conflict with his loyalty to AI.

I use these words advisedly:  Wesley created the conflict where there was none. And he did so for reasons that had more to do with his the way he saw the relationship between himself and the rest of the members of the team than with Connor’s safety.

Or we all hang separately.

First of all let us look at what Wesley did.  He concealed information about Connor’s predicted fate from Angel and the others, thus depriving them of the opportunity to help him with the problem.  From all that I have already said, the dangers of that course of action must be obvious.  But here we need only to refer to words used by Wesley himself.  In “That Old Gang of Mine” Gunn had concealed information and tried to manipulate events on his own, in the best interests of all concerned.  Wesley’s reaction was unequivocal:

"If you ever withhold information or attempt to subvert me again, I will fire you.  I can't have any one member of the team compromising the safety of the group, no matter who it is. If you do it again you will be dismissed, bag and baggage, out of a job onto the streets."

And here the sin was compounded by the fact that he kept Connor’s own father in the dark.  Wesley might care about Connor’s fate but he could not claim a father’s love or a father’s responsibility.  He could not say with Angel:

Angel: "It scares me, you know?  If anything like that ever happened to Connor, I don't know what I'd... I love my son."

Wes: "Love can be a terrible thing."

Angel: "I used to think that. I thought love was something that swallowed you whole, ripped you up inside, but, you know, what I feel for Connor, even that fear... Wes, it's… it's not terrible. It's beautiful."

Wesley’s was not only a dangerous action from a practical point of view.  It shows a basic lack of trust and respect for anyone else on the team and in particular for Angel.  His issues here are obvious and neatly summarized by Holtz:

“Angelus is in his nature. The beast will re-emerge. You've seen it. You know it. And that is why you are here. You're afraid he's going to kill the child. And you're right."

Of course, Holtz is right.  If season 2 demonstrated nothing else it demonstrated that Angelus is in Angel’s nature and that in certain circumstances he can re-awaken.  But while that is the truth, it is not the whole truth and failing to recognize that fact is perhaps Wesley’s greatest single mistake here.  While Angel can in certain circumstances turn violent and dangerous, he is ordinarily a loving father.  In fact it is perhaps one of the few weaknesses of this episode that it goes a little overboard in showing this side of Angel.  So, we have not only the scene referred to above where Angel declares his love for his son; we also have the amusing one where he happily adopts the name “Mr Dad” and the rather less amusing one where we see his purchase of the miniature ice hockey sticks.  Here the writers are emphasizing the depth of commitment that the human in Angel has to Connor.  There is no good reason why this Angel cannot be completely trusted with his son's fate. 

The truth in dreams

But Wesley cannot see that.  And in understanding why, we have a very good guide. I have already mentioned the beginning of the episode.  This is actually a dream sequence and in it we can see what is really going through Wesley’s mind.   He has been looking through his books, but not for answers, as the following exchange between Gunn and Angel shows:

Gunn: "So, Wes, you find any answers in all these stuffy books of yours?"

Angel: "He already knows the answer. He's just looking for the question."

Angel’s comment, echoed later by the Loa, indicates that Wesley already knows Connor’s fate – death at the hands of Angel.  He has not been looking in his book for confirmation of that.  For him, this has become a given.  There is no doubt that it will happen.  The question he is looking for is “when will this happen and what can he do to stop it.”

Wesley described Angel in the following terms:

“He's not Angelus anymore. He's a good man."

But as this dream demonstrates, he really doesn’t trust him at all.  He gives more weight to his interpretation of the prophecy than he does to Angel's love for his own son.  Consider what happened at the end of the episode.  After listening to Angel speak so movingly of his love for Connor, Wesley listened.  He forgot for a moment about the prophecies and what the Loa said:

Wesley: "Life is funny. Listening to stupid people talking to hamburgers is funny. Worrying about things that will never... It's all so incredibly funny and…and beautiful."

At that moment he trusted his feeling about Angel and believed he could not harm the child.  Then came the earthquake, the fire and the blood and he again abandoned what his heart told him and listened instead to what his head said.  So, we see Angel’s final words through his eyes.  What was really only a lame joke about the cut on his own head, becomes for Wesley an ominous threat aimed at Connor, one which echoes the picture of Angel that we see in Wesley’s nightmare at the beginning. 

And here we see the problem with Wesley.  He  was described to Holtz as the man who:

“specializes in reference and research.”

It was in that capacity that he stumbled across the danger to Connor.  As we have already seen from the teaser, because this was his field and he was master of it, he decided that he knew what the prophecy means.  Once he made up his mind about that he ceased to examine critically his own findings but instead started looking for the questions I mentioned above.  But all the while he was simply interpreting the evidence to suit his own prejudices.  In his conversation with the Loa he ignored an obvious ambiguity.  Wesley asks for confirmation of the prophecy:

"Is it true? Will Angel really kill his son as it says in the prophecies?"

But what he gets is very different:

"That the vampire will devour his child is certain. “

“Devour” is very different from “kill.”  It is by no means clear what the word means here but it is certainly enough to put us on notice that Wesley’s fears are not to be taken at face value.  And yet such was his conviction that his interpretation of the prophecy was right that it did not dawn on Wesley to question the discrepancy or ask what would really happen after the portents appeared.  He was also very pointedly warned that he was on the path to betrayal and he ignore that as well.

Moreover he seems to have taken a singularly lax approach to the interpretation of the portents themselves.  The Loa’s words are:

"The first portent will shake the earth. The second will burn the air. The last will turn the sky to  blood."

Whether the gas fire in the hotel really did “burn the air” is a nice question.  But it was a stretch to see in the staining of the child's blanket with blood as turning "the sky to blood”.  Again, however, Wesley seems to have read into the events of the last scene, evidence in support of his fears simply because they conform to his view of Angel as being untrustworthy with his son.

But this is not the only problem that Wesley has with personal relationships.  Just as he trusted the prophecies rather than the man he knew when they seemed to predict ill of Angel, he was also prepared to believe the worst of Gunn and Fred.  When Fred in all innocence approaches Wesley about dating Aubrey, we can tell a lot from his reaction:

Fred: "And working so hard, staring at all those books. And as a book-starer myself I know how crazy making that can be. You should get out of here for a while. Go for a walk. You deserve it. I was thinking: maybe you could call Aubrey. She is real attractive and her paperwork says she's single. She probably needs a friend."

Wesley: "Fred, we're not here to date. We're here to do a job. Now why don't you go to the pier and do your job."

Wesley has taken Gunn’s romance with Fred very personally.  When he tells Fred that they are not here to date he isn’t thinking of himself or Aubrey – he is expressing disapproval of her relationship with Gunn. Whether office romances are fundamentally incompatible with the job is really beside the point.  The fact is that the relationship has led to a fundamental breakdown in trust between the three of them.  This is demonstrated by Gunn’s reaction to being sent on the reconnaissance mission.  When the former starts acting as though he was on a date, his real feelings emerge:

Fred: "We're supposed to be working."

Gunn: "No, we're supposed to be doing some bogus, half-assed recon. That's different then working."

Fred: "Still. It's our job."

Gunn: "Actually, this was my job. Wes never said to bring you along. Probably wanted me out and about so he could chat up my girl."

Gunn doesn’t trust Wesley’s motives one little bit.  If there is any clearer example of the damage that a breakdown in trust can do to a team, this is it.

And what does a man who sees himself as leader of a group do when he feels he cannot  trust the others in the group?  Here we must return to Wesley’s dream.  As we have already seen,  Gunn refers to him as “logging serious alone time.” When Fred tries to inspect his books he fends her off with a brusque:

"Don't touch that."

In his frantic search for answers, though, he is acutely aware of time passing.  Hence the mocking:

"Tick-tock, Wes. Running out of time. Running out of time."

from Gunn, as Angel teaches his son how to die.  This is a dream all about being alone and needing to control things.  Wesley alone can find the questions he needs.  His dream is about the importance of him finding them and keeping everyone else at a distance.  It is also about the fear that some things like time and the actions of the vampire cannot be controlled. What we see through Wesley’s eyes is not a team but people he needs to control.  That is why the man who, in “That Old Gang of Mine”, lectured Gunn on the need to be honest with the other members of the group, now ignores his own strictures.  The rules that applied to everyone else don’t apply to him because he knows what he is doing, he is the only one who can be trusted and he has to be on control of events. But interestingly enough Wesley himself confuses this with “loyalty”.  As we have seen earlier it was in his own mind that he was congratulated by Gunn for his loyalty because of the effort he put in to saving Connor; not bothering to question whether his actions really were loyal.

And this is what works so beautifully about this aspect of the episode.  The writers emphasize the premium placed on Wesley’s judgment.   He is in possession of certain information denied to all others.  That information is crucial to the entire development of the arc.  He alone is in a position to make the decisive choices and importance of the choices he makes can hardly be overstated.  He could save or destroy the lives of Angel and Connor.  It is of course a given that he wants to make the right choices.   Indeed the writers, a little playfully, make this very point when Gunn addressing Wesley’s reaction to his romance with Fred makes the following point:

"Look. Lets try not to worry too much. Wesley is a good man. He'll do the right thing. He always does."

But the real significance of those words is not lost on the audience.  The real decision that Wesley has to make concerns Connor.  And while that decision is not yet clear everything points to him doing the wrong thing, not least because in this episode loyalty is the paradigm by which his actions are to be judged and his behavior is the very opposite of loyal.   He acts like this not for reasons of malice or selfishness.  But equally his motives are far from pure.    As I have already said, there was no conflict between Connor’s safety and his obligations of loyalty to Angel Investigations.  Wesley created that conflict because his own insecurities lead him to see things in a distorted way.   This is the road to Hell indeed.  This is the very essence of tragedy – a good man brought low by his weaknesses.  But in order to work properly, those weaknesses must be believable and must naturally be the father to the mistakes he made.  And here “Loyalty” just hits the target dead center.   We see not only a convincing and consistent picture but one which is unmistakably Wesley to the life.  This is a man who does distrust emotion.  This is the same man who would have sacrificed Willow in “Choices” and who did sacrifice the Pyleans in “No Place Like Plrtz Glrb”.  This is also the man who, as Angel realized, would not have been prevented by ties of sentiment from killing Angelus.  If he ever did have an idealized view of Angel, as he said himself in “Redefinition” the events of “Reunion” and its aftermath cured him of that. Perhaps more than anyone else Wesley would have understood the implications of Angel’s reaction there and the dangers that the ensouled Angel – not just Angelus – posed.  But, perhaps partly because the very sour view of parenthood he must have formed from his own childhood experiences and perhaps partly because of a lingering sense of personal betrayal from Angel’s treatment of him and the others in season 2 his view of Angel became too dominated by the dark.  Certainly in his reaction to Gunn and Fred we can I think see that he is too ready to attribute malice and betrayal when there is none.  At one point the Loa says to him:

“Perhaps what you really seek is death. The pain in your heart begs for it."

This is before he has actually done anything.  Perhaps what the Loa means is that Wesley’s view of the world is such a jaundiced one that he finds no comfort in it.

Plot

Judging the pacing for an arc can be a very difficult art at the best of times.  It is I think a good idea to give an audience some free-standing episodes in the middle of an arc.  Not only does this give a little bit of variety but properly used can actually enhance the development of the arc itself.  The writers can take the opportunity for some low-key set up and the interruption to the action can actually increase the tension.  The audience is left wondering not only what is going to happen next, but when that major development will be.  On the other hand the risk is that the arc will simply grind to a halt, leaving the audience frustrated.  This was I think a problem with the season 5 BUFFY arc which for so long had Glory posturing in the background without actually doing anything meaningful.  In managing these risks, the writers’ task is even trickier when you consider that in December and January there are generally only a couple of new ANGEL episodes.  So, the passage of time between say “Lullaby” and this episode seems even longer than it actually is. And the risk of the audience becoming restive with the lack of further developments grows correspondingly. 

On the whole I do not think that the writers did quite get the balance right.     In particular, it now seems that the developments between Wesley, Gunn and Fred in “Waiting in the Wings” and “Couplet” are crucial to Wesley’s developing sense of isolation.  So too is Cordelia’s absence, something that Wesley himself made reference to in his dream.  So, those seemingly free standing episodes were quite cleverly used to set up this episode without the audience being aware of it.  But, if anything this was being a little too clever.  The storyline for the arc was propelled forward but because we were unaware of the fact until very late on we could not appreciate what was happening and any sense of tension was lost.   The spat between Wesley on the one hand and Fred and Gunn on the other looked just that – of no greater significance.

Another problem was that Holtz disappeared.  It would I think have been so much more effective if we had a sense of the scale of his preparations before now.  We had seen him recruit Justine, it is true.   But the two of them hardly looked a credible threat.  How much better now we get a sense of him raising an army.  Better still if we had seen that army increase in competence.  Even here they seem more a rabble.  But if we had seen them start off like that a few weeks ago and progress to the stage where they themselves could take out a vampire nest, now that would have been a much more credible threat.

Finally, I am still not sure that we are getting that clear a sense of Holtz’s interest in the child.  This was something I had assumed from his actions at the end of “Lullaby”.  But on the subject he remained largely silent until Wesley came to him about it in “Loyalty”.  Even here his interest could have been faked because he saw Wesley’s concerns for the child as being the means of persuading him to betray Angel.  So, if the fate of the child is indeed integral to Holtz’s revenge, I can’t help feeling it would have been so much better if we had seen Holtz obsessing over the child before now.

But while I would have liked to have seen greater attention to the background for the developments in this episode, I do think that as a launching pad for the next stage in the arc “Loyalty” does work very well.  Chief among the virtues of the scenario the writers have created are its simplicity and the suddenness with which it was sprung on us.  At the end of “Couplet” we saw Wesley’s dilemma: to tell or not to tell Angel and the others about the prophecy.  In the teaser to this episode we saw his decision.  He was going to keep the danger to himself.  The implication behind this was that he was intending to take some unilateral action to prevent harm to Connor, an action that in all likelihood would bring him into direct conflict with Angel and perhaps the others as well.  There was only one thing missing – the trigger to precipitate action on Wesley’s part. “Loyalty” provided this too.  In the course of this episode Wesley became convinced that the danger to the child was imminent and not something that might happen in the distant future.  This sudden and unexpected turn of events creates a very strong momentum, a feeling of events moving very quickly towards some tragic turn.  This is ideal for jump starting the arc again after so long a hiatus.

More than that, however, the nature of the threat facing Angel Investigations has changed from an external to an internal one.  It became an internal threat the moment that Wesley decided that he was going to act unilaterally to save Connor.  This is always a more powerful story than the good guys fighting the bad guys.  First, the internal threat is always more difficult to guard against, especially when it comes from someone who is trusted.  But perhaps even more importantly, it means that almost by definition there can be no good outcome.  Where, as here, the “traitor” is acting out of the highest of motives and in a spirit of self-sacrifice his failure will be just as much a tragedy as his success.  And it is in this context that we see the greatest strength of the episode.  For the division within Angel Investigations and Wesley's march along the path to betrayal to work as an element in the arc, it must be understandable and believable.  And, as I have tried to show it was.  Moreover, it was I think dramatically effective.  As we see Wesley lurch from one moment of irrationality to another we get a very strong sense of him as someone who is reaching the end of his tether, someone working himself towards a desperate decision.  It wasn’t only the obvious physical signs of stress or his irrationality with colleagues.  The way he spoke to both Holtz and the Loa was interesting.  There was no fear.  Instead he was mildly humorous about them.  To the Loa he said:

"You try chatting with a cranky hamburger."

And to Holtz face he said he didn’t believe him:

“Could be the low scary voice that's giving me trouble."

This is a man who really does feel he has nothing to lose.  There is also a corresponding feeling that this is a man who could also do anything.  And that helps create a very strong sense of tension as we move towards the denouement  of the arc.

Overview (B+)

 In terms of arc development this episode is all set-up.  But because the plot set up is handled so economically, the writers have time to concentrate on exploring the really important issues they raise.  For the reasons I have already given, I do not think that “Loyalty” ever leaves us in any doubts but that Wesley is doing the wrong thing.  Indeed it seems to me that from this point of view the title of the episode was meant to be heavily ironic.  But because we see things very much from Wesley’s point of view we can understand the reasons why he is acting on his own.  These reasons make us look at Wesley anew and we are reminded that someone can seem calm and rational on the surface but underneath be a seething mass of fears and resentments.  Indeed the writers, it seems, actually wanted us to be schizophrenic about Wesley: realizing on the one hand that he was wrong but on the other admiring his spirit of self-sacrifice. In short we see someone who is not only set upon a downward path for entirely believable reasons; it’s someone whose reasons for that descent make him more interesting than say  Lilah.  And for that alone the episode deserves credit.