EPISODE 3.20

NEW WORLD

Written by:  Jeffrey Bell

Directed by: Tim Minear

No Turning Back

When Holtz disappeared with Connor into the Quortoth dimension, Angel’s principal concern was to restore the status quo ante.  He wanted his son back, as he had been when Wesley had snatched him from the hotel.  But there is one lesson Angel’s whole history should have taught him by now.   When you have your old life taken from you, returning to it isn’t always an option.  In “Five by Five” and “Darla” his first reaction to getting his soul back in 1898 was to cling to the vampire ways that he was familiar with; not because he was inherently bloodthirsty but because that was the only life he then knew.  And even when he was forced to give up the vampire lifestyle, it took him decades to realize that there was a genuine alternative for him.  Indeed, we can  see that it was only in the aftermath of his “Epiphany” in season 2 that he really succeed in defining his new place in the world.  It had taken a century or so and a lot of intervention from outside forces, but it eventually dawned even on Angel that you have to move on. You cannot let yourself be defined by the past.

And the need for change – for new ways of thinking to meet changed circumstances – is the central theme of this episode. We see this especially in the case of Connor.  When he emerges from the hotel and encounters traffic for the first time he seems momentarily disorientated before he recovers himself.  His reactions here and to the other strange sights and sounds of the city remind us  how different our world – or LA which admittedly isn’t quite the same thing – is to him.  His uncertainty in the face of the bustle and noise of city life, the way he dresses, deals with the opposite sex and is so innocent about drugs all speak of someone who is in unfamiliar territory.  As Fred said

 "Connor is new to this world, alone, probably scared."

In the depiction of this state of affairs,  a few false notes are struck here and there.  For example, Sunny seems to accept his strangeness and lack of knowledge about even the basics of life a little too easily.  I was struck by her explanation of her “medicine”.  Why would she feel the need to explain drugs to another teenager in those terms?   And she displays remarkably little curiosity about where Connor comes from, why it is so different to LA or why he seems such a capable fighter.  Passing Quortoth off as somewhere in Mexico as if that was an explanation for Connor’s strangeness was more than a little lame.  But for the most part the picture we get of Connor is a believable one.  Here is someone who knows what a spoon is but not some of the more exotic uses it can be put to.  He also knows the difference between male and female but seems unaware of the social customs and restrictions governing the interaction between them.  These gaps in his education are just what you would expect from  someone who has learned about the world second hand.   More to the point, however, the  references to how awkward a fit LA is for Connor serve a larger purpose which is to point out the real problem that he has in adjusting from life in Quortoth to life here.

Hunting Evil

The following conversation between Sunny and Connor make the counterpoint between life in LA and Quortoth clear:

Sunny: “So, ah - what did you do for kicks in Quortoth?"

Connor: "Kicks?"

Sunny: "You know, like fun. Parties, movies, the mall? How do you spend your time?"

Connor: "I hunt."

Sunny: "Big surprise."

The true significance of this difference between LA and Quortoth manifested itself in Connor’s very first contact with Sunny and a man named Tyke who behaves brutally towards her.  To Connor’s mind this is a straightforward situation, demanding a straightforward solution.  As Gunn later reports, Connor reacts the only way he knows how:

Gunn: “Some guy got killed. It wasn't our boy. They caught one of the baddies. Id’ed a local as the shooter."

Fred: "So, he was here but not part of..."

Gunn: "Oh, he was part of it, lot of mayhem…including the guy's ear sliced off as a trophy."

Angel: “He was raised in a hell dimension, okay?”

Angel’s words here are more by way of excuse than explanation.  They suggest that someone brought up in a brutal environment will learn to react in the same way as the things he sees about him.  But the truth is rather more complex.  Connor’s own intervention to save Sunny suggested that he did have a moral outlook – a desire to do good, to help the helpless.  That does not suggest someone who was simply brutalized by his environment.   What marked him out, however, was his very black and white view of good and evil as well as his definition of an appropriate response to evil.  When Tyke asked him about the string of teeth and bones that he wore across his chest he simply refers to them as:

"Things I killed."

When he cut off Tyke’s ear, his reason was very simple. It was 

"So he won't forget me."

He wanted a trophy; something to remind both himself and Tyke who had won their contest.  In taking the ear he was therefore equating Tyke with all the monsters he had fought and killed in Quortoth.  Now, I don’t think we are being asked to find much sympathy in our hearts for Tyke.  His treatment of Sunny was contemptuous and it seems pretty clear that if Connor hadn’t intervened he would have raped her.  But as Sunny herself said killing him would be wrong:

“I know Tyke’s a bastard.  But the cops are even worse.”

He was a human being, with a capacity for both good and evil.  We do not know why he became what he was or whether at any stage he might change.  More importantly, however, Sunny was trying to dispel the idea that society in LA could be as neatly compartmentalized as Connor might wish: the good and the bad, each clearly identified as such. Ironically her own death proved how right she was about this.  She was the one who went looking for drugs from Tyke.  When presented with the opportunity she stole them (and his money and jacket) from him.  She was then the one who gave herself an overdose in the bathroom.  Tyke fed off the inadequacies of people like Sunny and we may be sure that he certainly didn’t beg her to get help.  But in the end, Sunny’s death was largely of her own making.  It’s a complicated world and bad things don’t happen just because some bad people cause them to happen.  But that was not the way Connor saw things.   As far as he was concerned Sunny wasn’t weak and foolish.   She wasn’t the author of her own death.  She was good and the victim of evil.  That evil was Tyke, even though it was only because of Connor that Sunny got the drugs from him in the first place. And Angel very quickly realized what Connor was going to do when he caught up with Tyke:

Angel: “Right. I get it. You're going after they guy that gave her the junk."

Connor: "His medicine killed her."

Angel: "And you're going to do what about it?"

Connor: "Punish."

Angel: "You mean, kill."

The sort of black and white value system exhibited by Connor here is clearly the product of the Quortoth which, we may be sure, was inhabited by plenty of evil evil things.  But this value system isn’t appropriate to our world and just as Connor’s background in Quortoth left him ill-equipped to deal with the different physical and social environment on earth, it equally left him ill-equipped to deal with the moral environment. 

My Two Dads

Now all this would be interesting enough but what gives it a real sting in the tail is the relevance of this scenario to Angel.  Connor’s attitude to what he perceived as evil in this world was paralleled by his attitude to Angel.  When talking to Sunny the subject of fathers came up:

Sunny: “Heh. I came here to get away from mine. Parents should have to take like a test or something, before they can have kids. And if they're…drunks or idiots or evil, they should be sterilized."

Connor: "If they're evil they should be killed."

It doesn’t take a genius to work out which “evil parent” Connor is referring to here.  As Lorne said, Connor’s first words to Angel might very well have been “You’re dead”.

And in exploring the parallel between Connor’s attitude to evil evil things on the one hand and to Angel on the other, the importance of Holtz cannot be overlooked.  In his attitude to his two fathers, just as in his attitude to the world in general, we see Connor’s black and white view of things.  The difference for him between Angel and Holtz is encapsulated in the following exchange:

Connor: "My father told me everything."

Angel: "Your father?  Holtz isn't your father. He's..."

Connor: "You don't get to say that name! You don't even get to think it!"

Here we see the way Connor's attitude reflects Holtz’s own view of himself and the vampire with a soul.  For him, the fact that Angel was now no longer the creature that destroyed his family and that he had done a great deal of good did not in any way lessen his culpability for what Angelus had done.  Equally the fact that Holtz was driven by revenge and that, in the name of that revenge, he was himself capable of murder, kidnapping and condemning a child to a hell dimension means nothing more than that extreme measures are justified in the cause of righteousness. 

So here we see the black and white views and attitudes inculcated by Holtz and fostered by Quortoth crystallize in the confrontation between father and son:

Connor: "I know everything. He told me all about you. That you're a…a *thing* that kills and drinks blood. You're a vampire."

Angel: "What do you know about vampires?"

Connor: "Decapitation, stake in the heart, daylight, fire - did I forget anything? - You have a second face. A face for killing. Show it to me. I wanna see it.  Come on, show me! Show me the face you used to kill my father's family. Show me! Come on! Show me!"

Angel isn’t Connor’s father.  He is monster and that and the fact that he must be killed is the only thing about Angel that Connor is interested in.

What we se here is a coherent, consistent and entirely believable picture of Connor’s state of mind.  There is of course nothing very original in it.  Connor’s attitude to Angel reflects Holtz’s own very familiar one.   But in this context it has two great strengths.  First of all I think that the parallels really work here.  The way that Connor’s attitude to Sunny and Tyke developed helps us see that, in his attitude to Angel, he is motivated by a desire to do the right thing but that his understanding of what that means is simplistic and dangerous.  Secondly we see that Connor’s hatred of Angel isn’t based on anything venial like: “why did you abandon me.”  Angel unsurprisingly beats himself up over this but Connor shows no interest in it whatsoever.  So, there is a gulf of understanding between them.  Not only does this give more depth to the characterization of Connor, it makes the dynamic between the two of them much more powerful.  There isn’t anything easy that Angel can say to his son to exculpate himself.  But the whole focus of the set up is to force that challenge upon him.

Listen to Daddy

As I have tried to point out, the structure of this whole episode makes it clear that if Angel and Connor are to reform any sort of relationship – indeed if they are both going to continue to live – Connor is going to have to change his mindset.  This is because we see from early on that it is Connor who has the wrong attitude.   This is partly due to his clear admiration for Holtz whom we know is no hero.  It is partly due to his vilification of Angel.  He is by no means a hero either but we also know his heart – unlike Holtz – is in the right place.  Not only is his basic decency established but more importantly his attitude to his son is unquestioned.  He has always put Connor first.  Witness his willingness to let Holtz have him rather than see him killed in “Sleep Tight”.  Even here we can imagine the hurt Connor’s rejection of his given name would cause.   But we also see Angel accept the name his son felt more comfortable with:

"Okay.  Steven.  It's a good name. Not Irish, but...”

But mainly we accept Connor is wrong through the parallels between his behavior here and that exhibited by Angel earlier.  Connor's black and white view of things and his desire for vigilante justice at any price attitude are obvious echoes of Angel’s beige period in season 2.   We can therefore see the events of this episode through the prism of that story arc.  We can judge his attitude and Angel's very different one by reference to the lessons that the latter has already learned.  When Angel pursues and finally catches up with Connor he is concerned to stop him wreaking violent revenge on Tyke.  That desire for revenge was based, as we have seen, on a very simplistic view of why Sunny died.  But it was also based on a very simplistic attitude towards the ability of violence to achieve justice.  As Angel warned Connor:

"I'm sorry. You just don't understand how this world works."

Certainly cutting off Tyke’s ear and stealing from him only gave the latter a motive for seeking out and killing Connor.  So violence begets more violence and no-one wins.  When, despite all Angel’s efforts to the contrary, the situation does spiral out of control, the end result was simply people getting killed.  And that number could so very easily have included Connor himself.  

Just as his view of Tyke’s responsibility for Sunny’s death is a very black and white one, so too Connor’s view of Angel very simplistic.  When he demanded to see and was shown  Angel’s vampire face: he said:

"That's what you are."

Angel’s answer was much closer to the mark:

"It's part of what I am. A part I hope you will be able to accept one day."

Angel’s game face represented the violence within him.  But there was far more to him than that and because of that even the violent part of his nature could be controlled and put to a good used.  Indeed the confrontation in the hotel should have told Connor as much.  In the heat of battle Angel almost seemed about to kill his own son when he realized what he was doing and pulled back in horror.  Would a vampire have done that?

This episode therefore represents the start of a struggle -  the struggle for Connor’s soul.  In this struggle we see the opposing influence of two fathers – one representing Connor’s past life in Quortoth the other his new life on Earth.  Connor clings to Holtz’s view and rejects Angel’s because of the way he has been taught to view Angel.  Angel can only reach him and persuade him to embrace the new ways of LA if Connor accepts Angel as someone other than a malevolent monster.  That is why, when they first meet up at the abandoned motel, there is a confrontation.  Angel attempts to dictate matters but because his attitude conforms to Connor’s prejudices about him he only succeeds in provoking a violent response.  Connor knows Angel to be his biological father but believes him incapable of being the sort of father Holtz has been to him.  But suddenly when Angel takes a bullet for him, things aren’t quite as simple.  Now we see for the first time a hint of concern as an obviously hurt Angel escapes with his son:

Connor: "Do you need to stop?"

And when Angel continues to show more concern for Connor than he does for himself, the latter hardly seems to know where to look.  So, when Connoe runs off it’s almost as if he is looking for reassurance from Holtz that what he has been taught wasn’t after all a lie.  We may be sure that Holtz is only too willing to provide that reassurance.  But the message seems clear.  Angel’s very paternal concern for and patience with Connor – his unwillingness to give up on him – is what made the difference here.  It is there, if at all, that Connor’s salvation lies.  There is of course an irony in that: the creature that Connor most despises is the only thing that can save him from himself and from the man he most admires and respects.  And irony is always something I find very, very appealing.  But I find more than that attractive.   This is a series that has in the past traded on the harm that family relationships can cause.  But we have seen in the present season an effort to paint family relationships in a much more positive light, concentrating on the strength of natural love and affection and the way that it can bring out the best in people.  For someone like Angel who needs to stop dwelling on his past, his sin and his guilt can there be anything more healthy than fatherhood,  with the demands it places on our own character and the premium it places on teaching through personal example, characteristics we see amply demonstrated here?   Perhaps we see here evidence of his own salvation.

Hell on Earth

Someone else in need of salvation at the moment is of course Wesley.  He also finds himself banished from the world he thought was his own.  And in his case too there is someone trying to convince him that he needs to adjust his way of thinking to cope with the new reality he finds himself in.  Only this time it’s not someone who cares about him and wants to help him by telling him the truth about himself and his future.  It’s someone who seeks to serve her own selfish ends through deceit.  It may not be the Devil quoting from scripture but Lilah quoting from Dante is the next best thing. The significance of “Inferno” for present purposes can be gathered from the following exchange between Lilah and Wesley:

Lilah: "Then you know it's a guided tour of the underworld, the nine levels of hell."

Wes: "Yes. Descending, concentric rings based on severity of the sin."

So, we proceed from the lustful to the gluttonous to the hoarders and spendthrifts.  In each case their sin is justly punished by a process either resembling or contrasting with the sin itself.  So, gluttons are punished by being sunk in slime – the image of their excesses.  The important point here is that the punishment is determined by the sin itself and the sin alone.  No account at all is taken of the individual circumstances of the sinner, of his motivation.  This is a major theme of the work.  The description over the door to Hell states

Justice it was that moved my great creator;
divine omnipotence created me,
and highest wisdom joined with primal love.
Before me nothing but eternal things
were made, and I shall last eternally.
Abandon every hope, all you who enter.

Sin is opposition to God’s will and nothing can justify such an offence. Hell was the creation of divine justice intended to punish transgressors.  So,  the appropriateness of each punishment to the sin and the fact that only the sin was taken into account testifies to the perfection of that justice.

God wills that we treat each other with care and respect.  But there are some relationships which involve special bonds of trust and confidence.  These impose special obligations over and above the common bonds of humanity which tie us all.   So, those who benefit from such a special relationship and deceive others into relying on it  in order to bring them harm are guilty of the most serious of sins:

Lilah: "You know, I always forget - the very bottom of hell, in the ninth circle, the devil is frozen in ice, right? He got three heads, three mouths and those mouths are reserved for the worst sinners. Now, I can't remember… who is in the center mouth? What was his name? The one person in all of human history deemed the greatest sinner? Who is it?"

Wes: "Judas Iscariot."

Lilah: "Right. The worst spot in hell is reserved for those who betray."

Judas betrayed Christ, symbolizing spiritual authority.  The other two sinners with him were Brutus and Cassius who betrayed Caesar, symbol of temporal authority.  Plutarch actually gives a sympathetic account of Brutus and his motivation for killing Caesar.  He was a man concerned at a genuine threat to the Republic.  Cassius on the other hand was motivated by personal jealousy and hatred.  Yet in Hell no distinction is made between them.  Nor is any credit given to Judas’ reasons for betraying Christ.  Dante is not concerned about the causes of evil or its psychology.  The message that Lilah wants Wesley to take to heart is that the motivation for his actions is irrelevant.  Betrayal is betrayal and that sin has therefore damned him without excuse and without hope. So why not, as the saying goes, be hung for a sheep as a lamb.

But in putting the case to Wesley in these terms the serpent lies.  “Inferno” is, as Lilah admits, simply the first part of a trilogy.  It is not for nothing that the trilogy was called “the Divine Comedy”.  In my review of “Waiting in the Wings” I discussed the thematic differences between comedy and tragedy.  Comedy didn’t signify that something was funny.  Rather it signified hope for human beings.  The Divine Comedy is the journey of a man generally assumed to be Dante.  At the start of the journey he is shown Hell but he was never actually in it.  And from there he moved on to Purgatory and ultimately to Paradise.  The visit to Hell represented a necessary start to this traveler's rehabilitation from sin.  By being confronted with the pain of sin, the traveler was intended to reject all the harmful values he had seen and   through the painful process of spiritual rehabilitation commenced in Purgatory achieve true fulfillment.   “The Divine Comedy” is therefore a work about salvation rather than damnation.  That is why it is a comedy rather than a tragedy - a work in which we are shown the hopelessness of the human condition.

Now it may seem odd for a work with such an impeccable Christian pedigree to be used as a reference point in Joss Whedon’s Universe.  But not so.  One of the basic themes of BUFFY and ANGEL is that bad things happen to good people.  If, therefore, we look at the sufferings of Hell not as punishments but simply as the consequences for poor choices, the similarities between the two concepts of the Universe become obvious. Witness the following exchange about Trevor Lockley’s choices in “The Prodigal”:

Wesley:  "At the very least he [Trevor] must realize that he is in league with someone who if not criminal is most certainly unethical.  It’s his choice!"

Angel:  "Yeah, I know all about it, Wesley, believe me.  But sometimes the price we end up paying for one bad choice isn’t commensurate with the offence."

Wesley’s offence may not have merited the “betrayal and agony” that the Loa promised would lie in wait for him in “Loyalty”.  But that suffering was the price he had to pay for what he did.  The question was whether, faced with the pain of separation from and anger at his friends, he would embrace the despair and hopelessness represented by the Inferno.  This is clearly what Lilah wants.  This is what Judas did.  By killing himself he rejected God’s salvation and ended up in Hell without hope.  But if Wesley followed the example of Dante’s traveler and rejected the hopelessness Lilah was offering him, then salvation was indeed possible.  After all is this not the possibility of redemption, turning one’s back on the past and achieving forgiveness the very core value of this Series?

Plot

Dramatically as much as thematically, “A New World” turned on Connor’s reaction to finding Angel.   And this is why the events we saw in the teaser were so important.  I have to say that I am not a great fan of the matrix-style fight we were shown.  I think this technique distracts attention from the actual protagonists of the fight and what is happening to them and instead makes you concentrate on the special effects themselves.  But leaving aside my reservations on this point, the opening fight does have two great strengths.  First of all it means that the episode gets of to an exciting start.  More importantly, however, the confrontation we got established the centrality of the relationship between father and son to the rest of that episode and the way each was to approach that relationship. On the one hand we saw Connor’s hostility.  On the other, Angel’s reaction to that hostility made it clear how much he wanted to avoid a further eruption of violence.  From then on we became fully aware of where the focus of the episode would be and the stakes involved.

It was therefore obvious from the start that “A New World” was heading for some sort of confrontation between father and son but, as that would represent the climax of the episode, things had to be allowed to build towards it.  That was obviously why Connor and Angel were separated so early on.  But in separating them the writers caused a problem.

At this point in the episode the accent is on whether Connor himself will come to or cause any harm.  It was always unlikely that the writers would go to the trouble of bringing him back only to have something serious happen to him before he and Angel could confront their feelings for one another properly.  Moreover, both in his fight in the Hyperion and in his means of escape, Connor showed abilities that suggested he would be more than a match for any likely opponent.  So we could not really be expected to believe he was ever in serious danger himself. 

But the belligerent way he reacted not only to Angel but also Groo and Gunn and his obvious unfamiliarity with his new surroundings always made it possible that if met with any form of opposition he could cause serious harm.  The advantages of this scenario are obvious.  Making Connor some sort of hunted outlaw would have been very damaging for Angel’s prospects of resuming a normal relationship with him.  Moreover, the more dangerous he seemed the greater would be the tension when he Angel eventually caught up with him.  But, the way he reacted to meeting with Tyke and Sunny , while it worked thematically, didn’t really maximize the dramatic potential there was.  First I can’t help feel that the episode was pulling its punches in the confrontation that we got.  It started well enough.  While Angel or Groo or Gunn are big men and as such would be taken as a serious threat even by strangers, Connor is much less intimidating.  With his smaller frame and young look he would be normally dismissed as a threat.  The audience though, would be in on the secret and thrill at the prospect of the surprise that Tyke got.  But in the end we got little more than a high-octane fist fight.  I never really believed that Connor was trying to use deadly force and the one fatality that occurred was from a misdirected bullet from Tyke.  Cutting off Tyke’s ear was brutal and gratuitous but the absence of snapped necks did make it seem like Connor was only playing with his opponents. 

There is another problem.  From the moment he leaves the Hyperion there seems no deliberation in Connor’s actions.  They seem almost random.  He happened upon Sunny and Tyke and then followed Sunny for no better reason than that she seemed to know where she was going and he didn’t.  This and the benign way he reacted with Sunny diminished greatly the idea of Connor as someone who was actually dangerous.  There is therefore almost a sense of drift in the lead up to the big confrontation, a sense of things just sort of happening. 

It would certainly be unfair to describe the confrontation itself as anti-climactic.  The writing here did convey a very powerful sense of fear, frustration and regret on one side and anger and hatred on the other.  But while Angel’s reactions to seeing his son were not only understandable but well foreshadowed,  Connor’s attitude was confusing.    What was his motivation in the scene?  Had he come to Earth deliberately or by accident?  If deliberately did he do so to kill Angel or to find out more about him?  The deliberate attack he made on Angel in the Hyperion made it seem that he was hell-bent on revenge.  But the very aimlessness with which he wandered through LA suggests that Connor wanted more to get away from Angel than anything else.    And the confrontation between the two in the abandoned motel is certainly more consistent with the latter view.  Connor at the start simply treats Angel as an intrusion in his life he doesn’t want.  If anything it’s Angel who is first to turn to violence.  The difference between this scene and the teaser is understandable in the sense that the writers have to allow the two space to talk.  Showing Connor as determinedly patricidal would get in the way of that.  But there seems an inconsistency here. 

Overview (B)

In many ways this episode seems designed to act as a set-up for what is now to follow in terms of the developing relationship between Angel and Connor.  In this respect its purpose was twofold.  First of all it was to reintroduce us to Connor and give us an insight into who he now is.  Consequentially it was intended to establish the basic tension between Angel and his son for it is the resolution of that tension or otherwise that is clearly going to dominate the rest of the season.  And this is where the episode worked so well thematically.  The idea that Connor had his thinking shaped by his experiences in Quortoth and by lessons learned at the feet of Holtz, but that this thinking was no longer appropriate was very well worked out and executed.  In particular there were two pieces of counterpoint which neatly paralleled one another.  First there was the difference between the black and white environment of Quortoth and the much more ambiguous  environment in LA.  This was juxtaposed to the “Angel = evil” thinking Connor had been taught and the much more complex reality of the vampire with a soul.  Not for the first time, however, dramatically the episode just wasn’t as strong.  It had no obvious weaknesses but equally it was a little slow in places and lacking in tension. So, it can't really rate an "A".