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EPISODE 3.09 LULLABY
Written by: Tim Minear Directed by: Tim Minear
A Tale of Three ParentsIt seems to me
that both dramatically and thematically “Offspring”, “Quickening" and
"Lullaby” make a true trilogy – a single story in three parts.
The first episode in this trilogy began with Holtz pondering on the
nature of a vampire: “My
only desire is to discover if a thing such as yourself can be made to pay for
it’s sins. You’re a demon.
It is your nature to maim and kill.
But you were also once a man. If
we beat and burn the demon out of your living flesh will there be anything left?
Anything at all? I doubt
it?” For such a
creature there could be no choice between doing good and doing evil. The latter was in its nature.
But Holtz here was talking to and about Angelus.
Angel on the other hand had a dual nature.
He was a vampire but he also had a soul.
He was not predestined to do evil; because he had a soul he also had a
choice between the different directions in which the good and the evil within
him pulled him. Of course Angel isn’t the only one to have that choice. As I
said in my review of “Offspring” good and evil exist in us all and the
dividing line between them can be as thin for a human as it can be for Angel.
The way in which we too must chose between our different impulses and
what leads a human soul, with its instinct to do good, nevertheless to chose
evil is the theme running right through the three episodes. And in “Lullaby” we see this theme examined through the
actions and attitudes of three individuals:
These are very different people in many ways but they have one thing in common: they are parents. And it is this fact that provides us with the key to understanding them and their motives. The contrasting ways in which they react to the responsibilities and challenges of parenthood show us the essential differences between them.
The Power of ChoiceIronically it is the through the two vampires in this piece that we learn the difference between a soulless and an ensouled creature. The first significant moment in this context comes after Angel has been captured by Holtz: Holtz: "You haven't changed." Angel: "Actually, I have. While you were sleeping, a lot changed." Holtz: "Really? Somehow things seem the same to me." Angel: "You're wrong." Holtz: "I will have justice." Angel: "No. I don't think you will. There is no justice for the things I did to you." There are some
very interesting contrasts between this exchange and the one that took place in
Rome over 200 years previously. There,
Angelus had simply been conscious of the pleasure he had derived from the
suffering of Holtz’s wife. A
chilling reminder of what this pleasure actually meant to him came when Darla
reflects on the reasons why Holtz was now trying to kill them: “That's
why this is happening. His family, his children... what that must have been like
for him. Doesn't seem so funny now, does it?" Killing his
family and turning his daughter into a vampire was for Angelus and Darla a big joke. For creatures like them the idea of sin and therefore of
punishment for sin was meaningless. Angel
on the other hand does understand sin and punishment – perhaps no-one
understands it better. When he says
that there is no justice for what he did, he was showing an acute appreciation
of how terrible were the crimes that, as Angelus, he had committed. We
know that Angel still feels the pull of the vampire, that when he recalls
incidents like the murder of the Holtz family he feels the thrill of pleasure.
That is the darkness that remains within him. But his reaction to Holtz shows that has turned away from
that. As Lilah so mockingly put it,
he was a: “Vampire,
cursed by gypsies who restored his soul. Destined to atone for centuries of
evil…” Except he
wasn’t destined to do anything. It
was his choice. It is not a choice
that a vampire has but it is a choice that comes with having a soul. And this
was a point reinforced for us in the course of the conversation that Angel and
Darla had about their son on the roof of the hotel: Darla: "Look at it. Listen to it. Can you smell it? This world. This horrible world. Why would anyone want to bring a baby into it?" Angel: "To make it better, maybe?" Darla: "Or to destroy it finally." Angel: "Why is it everyone insists on planning my son's future before he's even born?" The question of his destiny has been a constant theme of this trilogy. Although he was born of two vampires the baby was still human. And here again the writers emphasize that, as someone born with a soul, it had no destiny in the sense that it was born to fulfill a predetermined purpose. The same thing applies to everyone else. But equally, such is the complexity of life, that we have no control over the consequences of the choices that we make. When Angel and Gunn discuss whether Holtz wanted to kill the child, Fred points out that he could make choices which do a lot of harm and not even know about it: Fred:
"That's the tragic beauty of a cosmic convergence. I…I mean, he just
plays his own small part. He…he comes here looking for Angel and Darla, and in
the process ends up finding Angel's unborn child, who, as it turns out, wasn't
evil at all as we feared, but was actually meant to be some sort of Messianic
figure. But Holtz kills it before it's even born and his vengeance somehow
triggers the end of the world.” We can none of us know the consequences of our actions. And what we intend to achieve by them is no guide to those consequences. As I pointed out in my review of “Offspring” the idea that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions illustrates an inherent contradiction not only for Angel but for us all. As good and evil exist in all of us how do we decide which choices to take and which to reject – where does the good lie and where the evil? So, when we cannot predict what the consequence of any particular action is, how do we make a choice from all of the possibilities that lie before us? That is the question to which we must now turn.
Only ConnectIt is not only
in their contrasting moral sense that we see the difference between Angel and
Angelus. It is in the former’s
concern for others. When he was
facing death at Holtz’s hands he could have tried to convince him that he had
changed, that he was now making a difference in the fight against evil and that
it was therefore wrong for Holtz to try to kill him.
He didn’t. Instead he
tried to point out the Holtz the peril he was placing himself in.
Hence Holtz’s mocking question: "Are you still concerned about my soul, Angelus? My vampire priest?" But clearly
Angel's main concern throughout this episode is for his child.
It is why he risked his life to go back to the Hyperion in the first
place. It is why he would not
accept that the baby will be a danger to humanity.
When Darla’s contractions stop and the child starts to die within the
womb he and Gunn draw very different conclusions: Angel: "This doesn't make any sense. I mean, this whole thing has been a miracle, right? You don't just get half a miracle, do you? I mean, the Powers - they brought her this far, they protected the baby all this time..." Gunn: "We don't know that. We don't know that it's the Powers that's been protecting it. Angel, I'm sorry, but what if what Darla's carrying is the thing in the prophecies? That scourge of mankind that's supposed to plunge the world into ultimate darkness? What if what if what's happening to Darla now what if that's the Powers? Finally stepping up to the plate and doing something for once!" Angel: "How? By killing my kid?" Gunn’s
attitude is perfectly logical. The
difficulties the child got into are more easily explained by his analysis than
Angel’s. Angel has no rational
answer to his argument – only an emotional one.
And Gunn’s views are at least implicitly endorsed by Cordelia when she
accuses him not of being wrong but simply of being too honest (if you can get
your mind round the concept of Cordelia accusing someone else of being
tactless). Indeed throughout this
episode Angel leaves reason to one side and follows his emotions.
That is why in spite of all evidence to the contrary he believes in
Darla’s maternal instincts: "What I do know is that you love this baby, our baby. You've bonded with it. You've spent nine months carrying it, nourishing it..." He even
believes in the possibility of the two of them raising the child together.
Hopelessly naïve this attitude may be but it also expresses Angel’s
state of mind. He knows vampire
nature as well as anyone. He warned Cordelia that in spite of their friendship Harmony
would turn on her. But such is the
paternal love he feels for the child that her thinks that Darla has to feel the
same way, even though she never loved anything else in her life.
And ultimately that is why he refused to leave Darla in the alley.
As far as he knew the child was dying and Darla should die at Holtz’s
hands. He was doing neither of them
any favors by staying. But he could
not leave them because he cared so much. And this time
he wasn’t the only one, as we see by the change that we see come over Darla in
this episode. Here we see her for
the first time display true maternal love: “I
love it completely. I…I…I don't think I've ever loved anything as much as
this life that's inside of me." And eventually
of course she gives her own life for the love of her son.
This isn’t simply a matter of sentimentality. The important point is not that she loved the baby but rather
why she loved it. The writers do
not toy with the idea of a soulless killer suddenly forming maternal feelings.
If anything they emphasized just how evil Darla really was.
They as good as said that, as a vampire, she would kill the child without
hesitation or remorse: Darla: "What do I have to offer a child, a human child, besides ugly death?" Angel: "Darla." Darla: "You know it's true." Indeed she later has to ask Angel: "You won't let me hurt it, will you? You'll protect it, right? From me, I mean." Darla’s
feelings of love for the child are not really her own.
When Angel says she has been nourishing the child she denies it: "No. No, I haven't been nourishing it. I haven't given this baby a thing. I'm dead. It's been nourishing me. These feelings that I'm having, they're not mine. They're coming from it." And as if to
reinforce the point she tells the child’s father: “Angel,
I don't have a soul. It does. And right now that soul is inside of me, but soon,
it won't be and then..." Here we see a
very powerful counterpoint between the reality of a soulless vampire and a human
with a soul. The message of the
writers is conveyed in the very starkness of the contrast. It is that the concept of a choice between good and evil for
a demon is meaningless because they do not and cannot love.
They do not and cannot care about human beings.
That is why, when Darla ceases to be influenced by the human soul within
her, she would revert to the merciless killer she always was.
She would simply have no choice because that was her nature.
But having a soul gives you the ability to love and to care and with that
comes the ability to chose to help others. It was in particular because of the influence of a human soul
that Darla saw the death of Holtz family from Holtz’s point of view.
She was no longer conscious just of her own pleasure at the killing but
at the pain that it caused him. And
this awareness of others is what makes humans different.
So, Darla chose to sacrifice her life not because she was a mother but
because she was a mother with a human soul for whom the life of her child was
more important than her own. And in
making this choice she expressly contrasted the new born human life with what
she had spent her entire vampire existence doing: Darla:
“We did so many terrible things together. So much destruction, so much pain.
We can't make up for any of it. You know that, don't you." Angel: "Yeah." Darla: "This child - Angel, it's the one good thing we ever did together. The only good thing." The writers therefore seem to me to be saying that the human soul’s moral sense is inextricably linked to its ability to empathize with others and to develop bonds of affection with some others that are stronger than life itself. It follows therefore that we can really only judge a person's choices not by their actual consequences but rather by what the choices tell us about that person's attitude towards others, especially with those affected by the choices to be made.
Losing A FamilyWe need not
doubt but that Holtz truly loved his own family.
We can see this by the way he dashed back to his house in a futile
attempt to save them, in his anguished reaction to the sight of his wife’s
body and his initial tenderness with the daughter he thought for one fleeting
moment had been spared the carnage. But
the moment that broke him was the sight of those two puncture marks on Sarah’s
neck, showing that she was a human child no more.
That was when all hope for his family died and with it all interest in
life. And here in a piece of very
powerful symbolism we see him leave the child and slowly back towards the wall
– as far away from his own daughter as he could get.
This not only symbolized the breaking of his ties with his family, but
also the breaking of his connection with the rest of the world.
For, when two of his men appear at the door he forbids them to enter the
house. And so he is left alone with
his grief until the morning light cuts across the floor of the room separating
him from Sarah. The one of his men
asks: "What are we going to do?" Holtz reply shows the change that has come over him in the course of a few hours: "Whatever we have to." And with that
he picks up the child, coldly ignores her piteous cries and throws her from the
cottage and into the morning sunlight. Again
this is a moment of great symbolic importance.
There are many ways he could have killed the vampire but choosing to
exclude her from his family home and his brutally cold manner with her indicates
to me not that there was anything wrong in the relations between Holtz the
family man and those he loved but that he now saw his family as dead.
This creature was simply a demon and had to be dealt with as such.
The cruelty of his actions were therefore a simple fulfillment of his
words to his men – that he would now do whatever it took to destroy the demons
responsible for his loss. And if
that included callous brutality of the sort he displayed to Sarah, then so be
it. And this single
minded revenge at all costs attitude is what characterized Holtz ever since his
appearance in the 21st century.
I have already commented in my review of “Quickening” on his
willingness to make a pact with Sahjhan, to use dark magic, to associate himself
with the Grapplar demons and to utterly disregard the lives of the Wolfram and
Hart SWAT team. In this episode
Angel commented on the former. But
more interestingly Holtz himself
revealed his attitude in relation to the latter: Holtz: “Those men you sent to kill Angelus, they were each of them brave." Lilah: "Oh, good." Holtz: "They fought to the last." Lilah: "Yeah, I get that." Holtz: "But send more, and I'll
do the same. No one will have him but me." Holtz had no reason to believe that the men he killed were agents of evil. As far as he knew they were on the same side. And yet he still showed no remorse for killing them and even threatened to do more of the same. And the only reason was that he himself wanted the personal satisfaction of extracting revenge for his family. But the nature
of Holtz’s thirst for vengeance can best be seen from the way he regards Angel
who is after all his prime target. On
three separate occasions he is given the opportunity to re-evaluate his attitude
to revenge. The first comes in the
Hotel when Lilah tells him of the curse and what it means. That he believes implicitly what Lilah tells him is
shown by the way he protests to Sahjhan about being kept in ignorance: Holtz:
“He's changed. He's....different." Sahjhan: "Look. I don't know what kind of moral mind games you've been torturing yourself with, but can't let this soul thing get in the way of what you swore to do." Holtz: "Get in the way?" Sahjhan: "That's what this is about, right? You find out Angel has a soul, now you're wondering if things are a little murkier ethically speaking." Holtz: "Things have never been clearer. Releasing his soul to suffer for all eternity only makes his destruction more just, more fitting." Sahjhan: "Oh. Well, then what's the problem?" Holtz: "You've had me hunting the wrong prey." Sahjhan: "Ah! Right. Because an Angel with a soul is going to be a slightly different challenge from an Angel without a soul." This is the
second occasion when the significance of Angel’s soul is put before Holtz as
an issue. We have already seen the
difference between a soulless vampire and a being with a human soul. This is a difference encapsulated in the two contrasting
interviews between Holtz and Angelus in Rome in the 18th century and
Angel in LA in the 21st century.
The one was a demon whose nature is to maim and kill.
The essence of the other is a human soul with the power of choice to do
good or bad. Intellectually Holtz
clearly understand this. And yet on
both occasions he is confronted by the fact he dismisses the implications almost
without thought. For him the moral
complexities posed by issues of responsibility and justice when dealing with a
being who is different from the one who killed his family are not important.
Everything is reduced to a simple proposition – revenge.
In other words he had no concern for others, what their rights were or
what they really deserved. All he
was concerned about was himself. He
might dress this up in language of seeking justice or doing God’s will.
People like this normally do and heaven knows we see echoes of this now.
But it comes down to the same thing – people like Angel or like the
SWAT team don’t count for anything when compared to what Holtz himself wants.
And it is in this truth that we see the whole thrust of this episode.
In choosing his path, Holtz considers himself as acting for the best.
But because he lost his family and is therefore cut off from ordinary
human feeling and because he simply does not care about anyone else, his path is
one that is destructive both of human life and human values.
His is a path to evil. That
he treads that path with a (presumably soulless) demon tells us something.
That his intent is even more demonic than Sahjhan tells us more. The third
moment of choice that Holtz faces is when he spares Angel in the alley. There we saw the latter cradle his son to his chest just as
Holtz had cradled his own daughter. Family
man looked at family man and just as Darla had understood the pain that loss had
caused Holtz so too must Holtz have understood the love of a father for a child.
When he lowered the crossbow to Sahjhan’s disgust it looked as though
finally Holtz had made that human connection once again.
It seemed that he understood the point of view of another father and in
compassion or in empathy had put aside his hatred.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The only difference between Sahjhan and Holtz was that the
former was so limited in his ambition. He
just wanted Angel dead. It is
implied that he knew about the child but he didn’t tell Holtz. This suggests first of all that he thought it would make a
difference to Holtz desire for revenge and that secondly it didn’t even occur
to Sahjhan to use the child to strike at Angel. In both respects Holtz proved himself a more terrible enemy
than the soulless demon. As he
watched Angel and his son get into the car and drive away, Holtz put his desire
for revenge in the following terms: “I
swore that I would show no mercy. And I won't." The translation
is that killing is too good for Angel. Holtz
wants something more and it isn’t hard to guess what that might be.
Would there be anything more appropriate
than killing Angel’s family and leaving him with an eternity of torment
over that fact? And what does that
now say about Holtz? It says that
even a new born child counts for nothing except a pawn in his game and that he
has now become exactly like the thing he hated, right down to his willingness to
destroy an innocent family to send someone a message.
Here Angel’s warning earlier seems almost prophetic: Holtz: "What do you know of a soul." Angel: "I know yours will be destroyed if you allow yourself to be used in the service of evil. You're a good man, Holtz. A righteous man and you're being used for some purpose other than justice." The meaning of
the counterpoint between Angel and Darla on the one hand and Holtz on the other
is so clear that I hardly need mention Lilah here.
But in her complete lack of concern over the fate of the SWAT team and
her willingness to blackmail the translator over the fate of his family she is a
worthy counterpart to Holtz. For
her what counts is her own job and her own safety.
She doesn’t care about anyone else.
Her inclusion therefore in the episode helps reinforce the basic threads
we see running through the treatment of Holtz as a character.
And it is in this treatment that we find the promise of this season’s
arc.
Fighting A WarAs I said in my
overview of season 2, I think that the writers sold themselves short in the way
they handled the difference between “fighting the good fight” and
“fighting a war” in the episodes from “Reunion” to “Epiphany”.
Angel’s single minded determination to pursue his revenge upon Wolfram
and Hart without regard to consequences is clearly a legacy of the vampire mindset which craves the certainties
and simplicities of an “anything goes” attitude that is very different from
the experience of humanity with its messy connections between individuals and
the consequences they involve. And
we are, I think, supposed to understand that Angel had fallen prey to the
instincts of the vampire and abandoned his connection with humanity because he
stopped helping people and instead sought to destroy the enemy no matter who got
hurt in the process. But if
that is the case then Angel himself would necessarily become a major problem for
Wesley, Cordelia and Gunn. If we
are to take seriously the idea that Angel’s actions were the result of “real
darkness” then wouldn’t he be a danger to the world? Wasn’t that the lesson of the vigilante cops scenario
in “Thin Dead Line”? There
we had the guardians of the civil populace go from fighting the good fight to
punishing evil out of a sense of anger and frustration at their failure to
control evil within the established rules. And in their attempts to punish evil
they became more and more indiscriminate until they ended up harming those they
were sworn to protect. But
there was no attempt to relate that scenario to Angel’s situation.
And there was no attempt to relate the mission of the new Angel
Investigations to the actions of its former boss. But here we have every promise that the writers will redeem
the failure of season 2 to address the full implications of the mindset we are
now talking about. Just like Angel
in season 2 Holtz has now (a) abandoned his mission to help people and instead is preoccupied with revenge; (b) shown his willingness to embrace any methods, no matter how questionable, in the pursuit of his goal; (c) severed the connection he once had with the world, not only in the form of his friends and followers but in his deliberate suppression of his own humanity, his capacity for empathy with others. Moreover,
although Angel could and should have gone a lot darker in his beige period there
were always going to be limits beyond which he would not go.
We might have seen him realistically kill Lilah or Lindsey but not
innocent bystanders (at least not intentionally). With Holtz
there are no such limitations, as his attitude to Angel’s son shows only too
clearly. The idea of a good man who
betrays his own ideals and through the evil he does ends up as the very thing he
fought is itself the highest form of tragedy. But there is more to it than that here. After all it was Angelus who helped create the circumstances
in which Holtz began his descent into darkness.
Holtz must take responsibility for the choices he makes but nevertheless
Angel must feel he too owns some of that responsibility and with it an
obligation to try to save Holtz from himself.
And as he and now his son are Holtz’s main targets, that should create
some powerful dilemmas for Angel.
PlotThe episode
begins with the resolution of the cliff-hanger we were left with at the end of
“Quickening” with Angel confronting Holtz across the floor of the
“Hyperion”. This is in fact the
least satisfactory part of the entire episode.
First of all Angel is quickly overpowered and in contrast to the chase
needed to capture him in Rome this is accomplished with the minimum of effort.
Then Holtz essentially does nothing.
At least in Rome there was a purpose to keeping Angelus alive.
Here we get no impression of any purpose at work.
For example, when he asks whether killing Angel would bring Darla
running, he is thinking out loud. He
clearly hasn’t thought things through. And
because of this, far from sensing a serious danger to Angel now, we get the
impression of drift, of waiting for something to turn up.
First of all this makes his rush in "Quickening" to confront Angel in the
Hyperion all the more odd. But even more seriously it undermines his
threat as an antagonist here. Like all to many villains Holtz talks a good game but when the time comes
to act he still just talks. When he
said: "When I'm finished, he'll be dead." my thought was:
he’ll have to wait a long time for that.
Even when invited by Lilah to get on with killing Angel while she went
outside, Holtz was more concerned to stop her from leaving than he was to hurt
the person he was here to kill. The other thing
that didn’t work here was the way Angel made his escape.
It was certainly ingenious but I have difficulty in believing that a
grenade (which was probably an anti-personnel weapon anyway) had enough
explosives to blow him free of the metal restraints holding him and through some
elevator doors. Having said
that, I think we have also to accept that this confrontation between Angel and
Holtz was absolutely necessary, both dramatically and thematically.
By this stage Wolfram and Hart and the Vampire cult have effectively
ceased to be a threat to the child. The
vampire cult doesn’t even appear and the lawyers have gone into damage
limitation mode. For Angel,
therefore, the visible enemy for this episode was now Holtz. He was the one to fear.
So, he had to find out about Holtz before the rest of the plot could
develop properly. And Holtz for his
part had also to find about Angel having a soul and being more than the demon he
had chased so long ago. Otherwise the
episode simply wouldn't work properly from a thematic point of view. Clearly the
most economical and dramatically satisfactory way for both developments to be
handled was in a face to face confrontation in which we can see most clearly the
reaction of each of the parties to
the other. So, from that point of
view this scene is really little more than set up. The real heart
of the story actually begins elsewhere as Darla and the others wait for
Angel’s return. And here and for
the rest of the episode the focus is on the welfare of the child.
Dramatically speaking therefore the success or otherwise of the episode
depends on two considerations: (a) do we care about the safety of the child; and (b)
in any event do we believe that it’s safety is really under threat. Normally the
writers inclination in a case like this is simply to play the “aw poor little
baby” card for all it was worth. But
in “Lullaby” I think they have been cleverer than that.
For two episodes now Angel’s son has been a trophy or a threat.
Some people have written him off as an impossibility, an unnatural event
that shouldn’t be allowed to come to term.
Others have been planning to capture him, dissect him or just hit him on the
head with a large heavy object. He
is in effect the underdog with really only one person wholly on its side – and
that is Angel. And rather than
looking for sympathy for his son based on sentimental feelings about a
helpless little child he has been complaining about the unfairness of a fate
that uses human beings as pawns or of people (including his friends) who jump to
conclusions about the child without giving it a chance.
And certainly this was the angle that struck a chord with me.
So, yes I did find myself caring about the survival of the child. The second consideration I mentioned
though was more problematic. As we
have seen, Holtz was the nemesis stalking Angel in this episode and he was
blissfully ignorant of the child’s existence.
He was after Angel and Darla so the child was only collaterally in
harm’s way. It is therefore quite
hard to make Holtz a credible threat to him.
The writers’ solution to this problem was ingenious.
Darla’s pregnancy which had been progressing so naturally started to go
wrong. As a development this had
great advantages. First of all it
happened out of the blue; indeed just when
it seemed that all the major hurdles had been overcome – Angel had escaped from Holtz and Wesley
and the others had found a credible sanctuary.
Even if Holtz found them, so long as the double protection sanctorium
spells worked they could come to no harm in Caritas, right?
But the threat to Darla’s pregnancy
was an enemy Angel could not fight – there seemed no way to save the
child because every effort to do so would be negated by the forces protecting
it. What we were left with was the
feeling that the child’s end was an inevitability. Certainly there was no obvious way out of the situation
created. And this was a feeling
reinforced by the mixture of bravery and hopelessness we saw in the
conversations between Angel and Darla: Angel: "I guess he figured he finally got your attention. You called him a 'he.' I think that's the first time you've ever done that." But
if this created a very real sense of impending tragedy, the solution was equally
powerful because it was so unexpected and so shocking.
The first thing that works about it is the context in which it took
place. Holtz attack was itself an
enormous surprise because even when he appeared at Caritas there seemed nothing
he could do. And I especially liked
the way we had just enough time to understand what was going on before the
barrel explodes. This provided yet
a further complication to an already bad situation.
Not only was Darla crippled and the baby dying but now Angel and the
others were under attack as well. This
therefore raised the stakes so much that the gesture which resolved the danger
became that much more important and that much more powerful.
Darla’s sacrifice not only saved the baby but allowed Angel and Fred
the chance to escape – something they would not otherwise have done.
But that is not the only reason why it was so effective dramatically.
It was the very unexpectedness of it.
We had Angel and Fred left behind with Darla and refusing to move without
her. The baby was dying in the womb
and Holtz was advancing on them. There
seemed no escape and the solution Darla hit upon was far from obvious.
I certainly hadn’t thought of it.
So, when it happened I was taken completely by surprise and I thought
that was great. And equally effective was the final scene. I have already mentioned this but it is worth doing so again. When Holtz stepped out into the alley I did not doubt his intention was to kill. The attack on Caritas with the bomb was itself evidence of this. Shooting Angel or Darla with the crossbow was simply the final coup. The only question was whether the sight of a father cradling his son would persuade him to stay his hand. There was then a long pause where the audience was held in suspense waiting for an answer to this question. Then it seemed to get one with Holtz seemingly doing the right thing and staying his hand only for his final words to give an entirely different meaning to his actions. I thought that was a very nice touch. Of course the plotting is not without its problems. For example the sequence of events after the attack on the club seemed rather contrived. Even if the sanctorium spell hadn’t prevented the explosion wouldn’t it have prevented any fighting within the club. If so, then why didn't Angel and the others stay put? If not, then why did Holtz enter alone and why did the Grapplar demons suddenly appear in the alley? And in any event, how did they know it was an escape route? More problematic is why should Darla’s pregnancy hit problems now when she is so close to term. If the problem was really that she wasn’t a “life-giving vessel” as Wesley put it wouldn’t problems have manifested themselves before now. And if there was some mystical power protecting the child why would it not do something itself or even allow Wesley and the others to help? These questions may have answers. It may be that as we learn more about the nature of the pregnancy we will learn those answers. But even if we don't, we can perhaps simply put these problems down as minor inconsistencies and plot holes which are a price well worth paying for the dramatically choreographed confrontation that we were left with at the end of this episode. Overview
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