EPISODE 4.21

PEACE OUT

Written by: David Fury

Directed by: Jefferson Kibbee

What's Really Important

In some ways this episode reminds me of the story about a man who goes out for a walk one evening and sees a teenager spray painting slogans on a wall.  As the man watches, the youth paints the word

“PEECE”

on the wall before standing back to admire his handiwork.  Then a frown crosses the boy’s face and he shakes his head before stepping back to the wall and crossing the word out.  He thinks for a moment and then sprays the word:

“PEESE”

on the wall.  He again looks at what he has written but is still dissatisfied so he crosses out that word and tries again.  This time he writes:

“PEASE”

before standing back and once more scrutinizing his writing.  Again he realizes the spelling is incorrect.  By now completely frustrated he shakes his head and with a barely muffled expletive he walks back up to the wall, for the third time crosses out what he has written and, in the biggest letters of all, he writes:

“WAR!”

on the wall and stalks off. 

The story amuses me so much (I am very easily pleased) because it is an all too accurate comment on the mixture of motives that people have and on the way that, no matter what principles they claim and no matter how idealistic those principles are, so often human beings are fundamentally self-centered.  And under pressure of events the idealism and principle that on the surface they claim to stand for tend to be stripped away and their real motivations stand revealed in all their nakedness.  The teenager in the story at one level no doubt genuinely believed in peace and wanted to advertise that belief to the whole world.  But perhaps even more important was a desire to draw attention to himself and what his views were.  So, under pressure to get the spelling right and fearing he was making a fool of himself, his surface idealism vanishes in the face of his need to recover some dignity.  So “Peace” for him was “Out”.  And in this he was acting no differently from at least three of the principals in this episode.

Mistress of the Universe

Once more it may be convenient to start with Jasmine.  Her first direct intervention in the episode is an act of mercy.  Connor is really anxious to kill the members of Angel Investigations in his power but she overrides his desire to do so by telling him:

“Then be a sweet boy and bring them. Intact.”

And when she meets Wesley, Fred, Gunn and Lorne face to face for the first time since they broke free of her influence she seems on the face of it quite concerned for them.  When Connor assaults Wesley she tells him:

“Connor, please. I don't want to see that.”

For good measure she also tells her captives:

“I only wish it was within my power to take you back.”

Of course, we already know that this doesn’t represent her real thinking about them.  They were a threat to her and she had already made up her mind that they were to be killed.  But that was before Angel escaped into the world where she had previously been worshiped and where there was a chance that he could discover something that might endanger her plans.  Jasmine is on the verge of achieving everything she wanted.  With access to satellite technology she is able to bring the rest of this world under her sway.  But in touching distance from her ultimate goal she now finds herself threatened as never before.  As Wesley shrewdly guesses, she knows where Angel is.  She knows he is looking for her real name and that, if he gets it, it could deprive her of her power.  She describes him as being in search of the unattainable.  But Wesley is again correct when he says:

“If you really believed that, you'd have killed us already.”

Jasmine’s pretence of caring for him and the others is simply a façade meant to hide the fact that she might need them all as a bargaining chip if Angel were to return with knowledge of her name.  Just below he surface we see once again how self-serving her agenda is. 

And throughout the episode we see the same thing. Jasmine presents an idealistic and caring face to the rest of the world.  To the “good people” gathered in her room Jasmine is unfailingly polite and pleasant:

“There's a long road before us, and there's still much to do, but we've made a wonderful start, thanks to all of you. Your devotion and sacrifice have made a difference. Now if you'll join the others in the banquet room, I'll be with you all shortly.”

They are to gather in the banquet room, of course, because she intends to eat them.  And, when she is addressing the world, she begins with the usual platitudes:

"This is a moment to cherish, and I want everyone to share it with me, heads held high. Welcome. And to all those people of this remarkable world who are meeting me for the first time. I want to thank you for allowing me to speak with you. I come to you not as a leader or divinity, but as your partner in a venture to make this the best of all possible worlds, without borders, without hunger, war, or misery. A world built on love, respect, understanding, and, well, just enjoying one another. Doesn't that sound nice?"

 Even here though she reveals the true nature of her agenda when asked what she herself wanted.  Her reply was:

“A temple would be nice. Something massive and awe-inspiring, yet warm and nurturing, celebrating the gentle pleasures of a peaceful, precious coexistence.”

This is not the reply one would have expected from someone who was concerned with world peace for its own sake.  This was the reply of someone whose real interest was in taking credit for world peace.  There is a difference.  The fact that the temple was to be massive and awe-inspiring has nothing to do with the promotion of world peace. Rather these qualities reflect Jasmine’s need to see herself as a superior being.  And we get more than a hint of the same attitude in the way she refers to the demons from the other world where she had been worshipped:

“A sentient, living being wanting what's best for his own. Is that so wrong?”

On the face of it this does show a genuine compassion for the demons.  But then almost in her next breath she mocks them.  When Gunn asks whether she made their world a paradise, she answers:

“Well, as much of a paradise as one could with a bunch of insects to work with. I helped them along. Kicked their evolution up a few ticks.”

She cannot surely have a higher opinion of humans.  And indeed time and time again she betrays her real  attitude towards others. Take the way she expresses some concern for the members of Angel Investigations:

Jasmine: “So much pain, suffering...must hurt so terribly.”

Gunn: “Don't get all gloaty. Not the worst beating we've ever taken.”

Jasmine: “I meant the pain you've caused yourselves—letting go of me.”

On the surface, the sentiments are generous.  But if you think about them they are not really about what is good for Gunn and the others.  They are about how wonderful Jasmine is.

Of course once Angel reappears her mask slips and she tells the crowd to kill him.  But it is when she looses her powers that we see the real Jasmine emerge.  At first all she is interested in is self-justification:

“I could've stopped it, Angel. All of it. War, disease, poverty. How many precious, beautiful lives would've been saved in a handful of years? Yes, I murdered thousands to save billions. This world is doomed to drown in its own blood now.”

Again on the surface this suggests genuine sorrow that she has been prevented from conferring a great benefit on the world.  It is doomed to destruction because of its own failings and she cannot now prevent that.  But once we look more closely at her words we see that they are capable of having a different meaning.  And Jasmine herself shows us what this deeper meaning is when she says:

“Maybe I can still make this world a better place. One body at a time.”

The world will drown in its own blood because Jasmine will destroy it.  Here, as in all the examples quoted above, the image that Jasmine projects is merely a front. As with the teenage peace protestor of the story, Jasmine’s  adherence to ideals of world peace are in the end pretty shallow.  Like the boy, it was her own self-centered concerns that really drove her and when those concerns came under real pressure they were revealed as her true motivation.  And because of this, all she is interested in now is revenge – for her lost powers, for her ruined scheme and for the ungrateful failure of the world to show a proper appreciation of her.

Father, Dear Father

But interestingly, and in a very odd way, the revelation of how much Jasmine’s actions were driven by narrow, selfish concerns rather than considerations of the public good had its parallel in the revelation of what Angel’s principal motivation was in defeating her.

From the beginning we are left in no doubt about how difficult Angel’s task in learning Jasmine’s real name would be and how much it cost him to accomplish. 

That Angel was prepared to go through all of this is proof of just how important his mission was.  But, what wasthe purpose of  his mission?  He articulates it in the following terms to the High Priest of the demons' world:

High Priest: “What is it you think you fight for, dead thing? Valor? What you call justice? Your friends are dead... most likely. Or so you believe, so it's not for them you fight.”

Angel: “I'm trying to save my world.”

High Priest: “Your world?! A world that doesn't care for you? Doesn't want you. “

Angel: “It needs me.”

High Priest: “So your Powers That Be tell you, and maybe they're right, but it's not why you're here.”

The Priest then tells Angel the real reason why he has gone though so much to get Jasmine's name:

“The boy. The woman you've already lost. The boy is what you're fighting for. But you're going to fail. You're going to lose him, too.”

And significantly Angel doesn’t deny the truth of what the Priest says:

High Priest: “So much effort, always struggling, trying to make things right for the boy, for Connor, but it's never enough. Why do you bother?”

Angel: “I can see you never had kids.”

High Priest: “The boy should not even exist. He was only a device to bring forth the blessed she—a means to an end.”

Angel: “Yeah, well, people get born for all sorts of reasons.”

The Priest here is minimizing Connor’s importance – he is worth nothing in himself.  The only important thing about him was why he was born.  Angel in contrast maintains that why he was brought into the world is irrelevant.  It is Connor himself as a person who is important.  And from all of this we discover that Angel is fighting not so much to free the world of Jasmine’s influence as Connor.  For Angel too, under the cloak of restoring free will to the world, deep down it is this deeply personal agenda that drives him on.

Who Am I?

But in many ways Angel and Jasmine merely provide the background against which we can best understand the way in which Connor’s real feelings and motives are laid bare in this episode.  At the beginning of the episode he taunts the members of Angel Investigations:

“All your talk about saving the world. Well... now somebody's gone and done it. Made everything right... and good. And you can't stand it because you're all so full of yourselves.”

And he also refers to their hate poisoning the city.  This is of course right out of the Jasmine handbook.  And certainly he expresses his love for his daughter and belief and pride in what she is doing.  When told she is enslaving people he says:

“She'll bring them together.”

But really for Connor this isn’t about everyone else.  He actually doesn’t care about them, as witness the fact that he is perfectly willing to see a room full of innocent people eaten.  Under the surface his concerns are with his own problems.  And it is to Cordelia that he finally confesses the truth:

“Not harsh and cruel—the way that Angel likes it so he has a reason to fight. 'Cause you know that's what he's about, him and the others. Finding reasons to fight. Like that's what gives their lives any meaning. The only damn thing! I'm not like them. I just... I want to stop. Stop fighting. I just want to rest. God, I want to rest. But I can't. It's not working, Cordy. I tried. I tried to believe. I wanted it. Went along with the... the flow. Jasmine, she's...she's bringing peace to everyone, purging all of their hate and anger. But not me. Not me! I know she's a lie. Jasmine. My whole life's been built on them. I just... I guess I thought this one was better than the others.”

As Jasmine once said the only thing that has been a constant in his life is pain. And here she was not really thinking about the struggle to survive in Quor’toth which Connor seems to have taken in his stride, at least judging by the matter of fact way he dealt with Holtz’s training methods.  No, here she is referring to Connors internal agonizing over the question of his identity.  As I pointed out in “The Magic Bullet”, throughout the season Connor had been trying to figure out who he was.  He was, for example, concerned at suggestions that he was connected to the Beast. He was having problems over the fact that his father was both Angel and Angelus and that his mother had abandoned him.  And “Soulless” seemed to suggest that for Connor this was a problem because it deprived him of the chance to define his own identity as part of a family.  The importance of family to him was illustrated by his reaction to the slaughter of the Svear Priestesses’ family.  And with the revelation that Cordelia was pregnant, we see the way he began to define himself and what was important to him in terms of this new family unit – himself, Cordelia and their child.  The crucial point here came when he disowned his father and mother in “Inside Out” and chose the part of Cordelia and their child.

He seemed to believe that finding a sense of identity would be an end of the pain for him.  And he also believed that this sense of identity would come from belonging to Jasmine and her “family”. That is why to Angel at the start of “Sacrifice” he insisted that he now had something he belonged to.  That was why, at the start of this episode, he repeated this to Wesley:

“Don't you get it? You're all alone now. All of you. You're the ones left out in the cold. You... don't... belong.”

Telling him and the other members of Angel Investigations that they are the ones who don’t belong is clearly intended to emphasize the contrast to himself and the feeling that he did indeed belong.

To him the peace that Jasmine promised everyone had a very personal and deeply felt resonance. When he finally finds Cordelia he tells her:

“It's started, Cordy. The new beginning. Just wish you'd wake up and see it. Just what you wanted. I mean... it is what you wanted, right? Why you came to me? You know...what this was all about? Protecting our baby—Jasmine—so she can...be, and make this world the... the kind of place you wanted.”

His words here echo the words he used at the beginning of the episode to taunt the members of Angel Investigations:

“All your talk about saving the world. Well... now somebody's gone and done it. Made everything right... and good. And you can't stand it because you're all so full of yourselves.”

To him it seemed that all they wanted was continuous conflict when all he wanted was peace.  And this was exactly the same allegation he levelled against Angel whom he believed was only happy when the world was harsh and cruel and he had a reason to fight.  But while all Connor wanted was to find peace from the eternal conflict raging inside him about who he was, this peace continued to elude him.  In my review of “The Magic Bullet” I pointed out that it was logical that Connor would be unaffected by Jasmine’s influence because he, just like Cordelia, had a blood link to her.  And he confirmed as much here:

Lorne: “I just gotta know one thing. The reason our little blood ritual didn't raise any veils for you. You've always seen Jasmine's true appearance, haven't you?”

Gunn: “You gotta be kidding me. You know what maggot-face looks like, and you're still big with the worship?”

Connor: “I grew up in Quor'Toth—a hell dimension full of all sorts of things you can't even imagine. So, you know, appearance? Not that important to me.”

But the other side of the coin is that Jasmine’s spell cannot give him the same certainties as it gives others.  Even as she is about to be sacrificed, a girl called Susan shows us the sort of peace that Jasmine can create for a person:

Susan: “Thank you. Thank you so much. Before you came, my life was a mess. I had no job, I was being evicted...”

Jasmine: “It's all right, Susan. You'll never be burdened with those worries again.”

Susan: “The emptiness, the weight I've been carrying all my life…it's gone. All I feel now…”.

This is a peace that Connor cannot know.  Nor did he find a peace from forging a sense of family with Jasmine. Certainly she (and others) know and refer to him as her father:

“I could never hurt Cordelia Chase any more than I could you. You're my parents, my tether to this world. It was your love that brought me here.”

But he doesn’t really trust her.  In the basement of the Hyperion there is a very interesting exchange between Wesley and Connor:

Wesley: “Connor, what does Jasmine eat?

Connor: “What?

Wesley: “The creature in the sewer. It called her the "devourer." Devourer of what?”

 Connor: “I don't know.”

He lied.  Why did he lie if he didn’t believe that what Jasmine was doing was wrong?  Not only that, he clearly suspects Jasmine of eating Cordelia too:

Jasmine: “Cordelia.”

Connor: “Yeah. What did you do with her...exactly?”

Jasmine: “I told you. She's exactly where I need her to be, out of harm's way.”

Connor: “Yeah. I think I should know.”

 Jasmine: “But there's no reason for you to know. Just take comfort in my words. She's safe, and... You think I ate her.”

Then he disregards all her assurances and goes looking for Cordelia on his own and behind Jasmine’s back.  These are not the actions of someone who really believes in Jasmine or in what she is doing to bring world peace. After all Jasmine is about to achieve the sort of total world domination she had been after from the very start.  Connor was meant to watch over the members of Angel Investigations in order to safeguard her plans.  But he leaves them without giving a second thought to the danger they may pose. 

More to the point they are not the actions of someone who genuinely believes that Jasmine is part of his family.  He doesn’t trust her and he cannot confide in her how he feels.  He obviously doesn’t feel the same connection to her as he feels with Cordelia.  And that is why he focuses all his energies on finding her.

As with Jasmine and as with Angel the pressure of events strips away the layers of self-justification and self-deception with which Connor has hidden his true feelings.  He doesn’t believe in Jasmine and her promise of world peace. He doesn’t feel that he really belongs with her.  So, she cannot bring him what he really wanted.  And that was peace.  For him too "Peace" was truly “Out”.

So, when Jasmine called to him for help he didn’t bring her what she wanted.  When he first approaches Jasmine and Angel she turns to him and asks:

“Connor, I still have you. Angel's ruined everything. But he can't defeat both of us. You still believe in me, don't you? You still love me?”

Connor’s reply is a simple “yes” but then he punches Jasmine in the head so hard that his fist goes right through her skull and kills her.  Later Angel describes his reaction upon doing so:

“I've never seen him like this. He wasn't hurt or angry, he just... killed her. And his face, it…it was just blank, like he had nothing left.”

Jasmine was still Connor’s daughter and I think he was sincere when he said he still loved her.  And certainly he had no strong attachment to Angel’s vision of a world in which there was free will.  If anything he suffered because he wasn’t able to benefit from the suspension of free will along with everyone else.  And from his reaction to the intended victims of Jasmine gathered in the banqueting hall, he was hardly motivated to kill Jasmine by the desire to save human life.  No, ultimately Connor just like the teenager in the story with which I started this review, rejected “peese” for very personal reasons of his own.  However those reasons had nothing to do with pride or embarrassment.  They had everything to do with the mood of nihilism that has clearly now overtaken him.

Nietzsche Revisited

In my review of “Inside Out” I explored the Nietzschean arguments advanced by Cordelia to justify the sacrifice of an innocent girl.  Well, the philosopher most associated with nihilism nowadays is, of course, Frederick Nietzsche.  As will be recalled, he argued that there was no natural moral order

"Every belief, every considering something true is necessarily false because there is simply no true world"

God does not exist.  Traditional morality is false and secular ethics are impossible.  And from this basic proposition he derived two central tenets of nihilism:

1. Have faith in nothing that cannot be objectively proven; and
2. There is no such thing as a final purpose towards which everything is structured to progress.

Not only could Nietzsche be described as a nihilist to the extent that he believed that there was no longer any real substance to traditional social, political, moral, and religious values. He could also be taken, in his views, to be accurately describing the world he saw around him. Nietzsche saw that for most people at the end of the 19^th century the old values and old morality simply didn't have the same power that they once did. It is here that he announced the "death of God" arguing that this traditional source of ultimate and transcendental value no longer mattered in modern culture and was effectively dead to us.

We can actually see reflections of this view throughout the episode from the:

“God is nowhere”

sign outside a church to Jasmine’s statement that:

“There are no absolutes. No right and wrong. Haven't you learned anything working for the Powers? "

But perhaps more importantly for present purposes, in personal terms, Connor displays all the characteristics of a nihilist.

First and foremost there is a failure to display even the most basic sense of morality.  As we have seen he walks into a banqueting hall full of people he knows are about to be killed and he doesn’t even spare them a passing thought.

Secondly he appears to have concluded that there really is no meaning or purpose in life.  In “Inside Out” he rejects what Darla told him when Cordelia calls her a lie.  And at the start of this episode he accuses Wesley of lying. Clearly Connor here is opposing Darla and Wesley on the one hand to Cordelia’s hopes for her child and Jasmine’s achievements on the other.  One side is false and the other is true, or so he tried to believe.  But now he calls Jasmine too a lie.  Indeed he goes further and says his whole life has been built on a lie.  In other words it has no meaning or purpose.

And if you conceive of life as having no moral or ethical framework and no meaning or purpose, then human life itself has no value.  Hence he decision to kill Jasmine was not out of anger at her deception or manipulation.  It was simply the logical result of his nihilism.  Because nothing is true, everything can be destroyed, or negated.  As Nietzsche point pointed out if, under the withering challenge of nihilism all cherished beliefs and sacrosanct truths will be destroyed, there would be a collapse of meaning, relevance, and purpose that would be the most destructive force in history, constituting a total assault on reality and nothing less than the greatest crisis of humanity:

“What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism. . . . For some time now our whole European culture has been moving as toward a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end.”

That is why the most common responses to its basic premise come down to despair: despair over the loss of God, despair over the loss of objective and absolute values or despair over the post-modern condition of alienation and dehumanization that results from it.  As Nietzsche said:

"Nihilism is…not only the belief that everything deserves to perish; but one actually puts one shoulder to the plough; one destroys."

But describing nihilism isn't the same as advocating nihilism. And it is here that Nietzsche parts company from nihilism. Nihilists look at the death of God and conclude that, without any perfect source of absolute, universal, and transcendent values, then there can be no real values at all. Nietzsche, however, argues that the lack of such absolute values does not imply the absence of any values at all. On the contrary, by freeing himself from the chains tying him to a single perspective normally attributed to God, Nietzsche claims that men are left free to create their own independent values. Thus nihilism can be overcome by the personal creation of meaning in one's own life.  But this is something that Connor cannot now accept.

And so finally here we have a picture of Connor, and where he stands emotionally and psychologically, that makes complete sense out of his recent actions.  He has a soul.  He knows right from wrong.  But, whether because of the influence of Holtz or his upbringing in Quortoth, he lacked judgment as to what is right and what is wrong.  It was after all his twisted sense of justice that, in “Tomorrow”, led him to trap Angel at the bottom of the sea.   Initially in this season, he engaged in comparatively minor deceptions.  But gradually he has done things that were more and more objectionable. His attempt to kill Angel in “Orpheus” was understandable given his ambivalence towards him, the fact that he thought he was killing Angelus and Cordelia’s urging.  His sacrifice of the girl in “Inside Out” was the product of a desperate struggle and he clearly saw himself as doing what he absiolutely had to to protect his family.  But his serene contemplation of Jasmine eating innocent people was hard to understand, even from the point of view of a moral relativist.  But now we can follow the way in in which Connor’s whole outlook on life was undermined.  We can see how he might begin to believe that everything on which he placed any reliance was a lie and once you conclude that, then it becomes only too obvious why he adopted a nihilistc pooint of view. And from the perspective of a nihilist then everything he does here makes sense.  For a nihilist there is no right and wrong; nothing matters.  Even human life istelf has no value.  As a piece of characterization , this is very believable and satisfying.  The question is where do the writers take the character from here because now that they have literally laid waste to his moral and emotional landscape there seems little hope for any sort of redemption for him.

Sadly, with Jasmine, they have gone in the opposite direction by turning someone who was a believeable and – to an extent at least – sympathetic villain into a cartoon character.  As a “Power that Was” she felt that the bad guys were being allowed to get away with things and she itched to intervene.  But with godlike powers comes arrogance.  She would have regarded herself as superior to humans, she would have been entirely unconscious of the value of a human life or human beings’ need to take responsibility for their own paths.  So, she would have used her powers believing she was doing good and being quite unable to see or understand the evil effects  of her actions.  This was a different type of villain, almost a tragic figure because of the way her capacity to do good was twisted into something evil by weakness rather than malice.  This was what caught my interest.  But the Jasmine that stands revealed here is simply evil.  She never had any good intentions for others.  It was all about enslavement and feeding her own arrogance.  This is a character whose motivation is really no different from countless other megalomaniacs.  And that is a pity.

But perhaps most interesting of all is the perspective the episode gives us of Angel and his motivations.  At one level the episode is a vindication of free will.  Lets us remember the following exchange between Angel and Jasmine: 

Jasmine: “There are only choices. I offered paradise. You chose this!”

Angel: “Because I could. Because that's what you took away from us. Choice.”

Jasmine: “And look what free will has gotten you.”

Angel: “Hey, I didn't say we were smart. I said it's our right. It's what makes us human.”

The power to choose is inherent in free will.  But the power to choose also has to include the power to make the wrong choices.  And, as I argued in “Sacrifice” it is also an inherent part of being human that the choices that person makes will reflect that person and who he or she is, including their psychological weaknesses and the emotional baggage they carry around with them.  And that is what “Peace Out” proves.  As we have seen the basic structure of the episode involved the peeling away of layers of self-justification so that the bedrock motivations of our three principles were revealed.  This process showed us that what drove Angel was not a commitment to free will or the good of those who would have been sacrificed by Jasmine in her drive for world peace.  It was his own very self-centered concern for Connor and his welfare.  At the same time Connor was driven, not by an idealistic attachment to world peace or even an honest love for his daughter.  He was driven by his own need to find an identity he could believe in for himself and ultimately by the despair that engulfed him when he failed to do so.  And it was because they were driven by these self-centered aspects of their characters that between them they “saved the day” so to speak.  Angel destroyed Jasmine’s power and Connor killed her, thus ending her threat to destroy the world.  In other words, the choice between paradise on the one hand and the real world on the other was not made out of principle, out of a high-minded view of the true mature of mankind.  Rather it was made because of the very human frailties that the destruction of Jasmine was intended to ensure survived.  And I think that this is on one level a very interesting and almost subversive message.  The juxtaposition of high minded idealism of Angel’s defense of free will and his own self-serving motives shows in a very acute way just how imperfect human beings are and what the reality of restoring free will to them involves.

The Plot

I must confess that I found the start of the episode something of a let down.  The end of “Sacrifice” saw Connor leading his troops in a savage fight against the remainder of Angel Investigations while Jasmine laughed maniacally at the evidence of the slaughter inflicted.  And at the same time Angel himself seems trapped and surrounded by dozens of the nasty looking demons.  Well the fight ends tamely enough with everyone being captured without any serious injuries and Angel sees off the menace of the demons by the simple expediency of showing them the orb which opened the portal to the world.  Why a device that one of them used to get to Earth in the first place would evoke such a reaction is something of a mystery.  In any event it appears the cliff hanger at the end of “Sacrifice” was just a cheat and that is always annoying.

Also annoying is the way that Jasmine suddenly becomes a conveniently stupid enemy.  First she falls into the “villain captures heroes, gloats and then unaccountably fails to kill them immediately” mode.  If she really wanted a bargaining chip she could have used  Connor or Cordelia.  Angel didn't know she couldn't harm them.  And if Wesley, Gunn, Fred and Lorne were themselves going to act as bargaining chips then she needed them where she could get at them as soon as Angel appeared.  As it was she put them somewhere they could not be used for the purpose and when she actually needed them she appears to have forgotten about them.  When Angel arrived from the demon world with the head of the keeper, all she could do was instruct her followers to kill him.  She didn’t even mention Wesley or any of the others.

And of course another problem in this context was that Jasmine’s followers reeled back in horror from Angel when he showed them the head.  Certainly this was an unexpected and horrible development but not one likely to stop a mind-controlled army of love in its tracks.

Finally Jasmine’s treatment of Connor was wholly irrational.  He certainly didn’t want to use Cordelia against her.  And indeed even if he were motivated against her he didn’t need Cordelia (as we shall see).  So, Jasmine needlessly roused his suspicions against herself by refusing to tell him where she was.  Then she compounded the error by only assigning two policemen to guard Cordelia.  Would they have been any match for Angel Investigations either if they had been seeking Cordelia?  Of course not.

An incompetent enemy is one of the great clichés of television because it is lazy and unimaginative writing. Instead of thinking up clever things for the protagonists to do, you make the antagonists do stupid things.  And that is what we got here for the most part.

This is all especially regrettable because in terms of plotting the episode otherwise has some great strengths.  First and foremost it was a considerable surprise that here – with one full episode left – we saw Jasmine defeated.  I had anticipated that the arc which had been building since “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” would be concluded in the season finale.  There was something of a price to be paid for this surprise: the relatively simple and straightforward nature of the way Angel learned Jasmine’s name.  From the end of “Sacrifice” it was fairly predictable that Angel would come back with this name and deprive her of her powers and that this would kill her or, if it didn’t, she would be killed later.  But this could have been a long and difficult struggle full of twists and turns.  It wasn't.  The only major obstacle Angel needed to overcome on the way was the keeper and this he defeated him in the old fashioned way.  So, there were no great surprises or reversals of fortune on the way to confronting Jasmine.  But this structure also had its advantages in that things in this episode moved with great pace and purpose in contrast to the somewhat pedestrian pace of earlier episodes.  And in addition the exchanges between Angel and the Guardian of the Word were highly entertaining.  They had just the right balance of snark and menace. 

I also liked the way that the sub-plots concerning the other members of Angel Investigations on the one hand and Connor on the other played out very differently from the way I expected.  I thought that we would at some stage see Wesley and the others figure out a way to escape from their cell in time to help defeat Jasmine.  But they were largely irrelevant from that point of view. 

Instead the big twist was Connor. The first thing to say here was that the fact that he was the final solution to Jasmine was well thought out and cleverly introduced.  How does even a powerful vampire defeat a semi-divine being?  This was a problem that BtVS made a complete mess of with Glory.  The writers there had to resort to a blatant piece of dishonesty to solve the problem.  But it was a problem that the writers here faced up to honestly when they showed Angel being completely powerless against Jasmine.  Not only did they face up to it - they solved it.  There is logic and a little poetry in making Jasmine vulnerable to the people who gave her life in the first place.  And Wesley hinted at Connor’s ability to kill Jasmine in the following exchange:

Wesley: “ I was just thinking. Cordelia's blood, it had the same power as Jasmine's to break the thrall she had over us.”

 Fred: “So I figured. Mother and daughter, they share the same blood.”

 Wesley: “And now she's been moved—Cordelia. Why?”

 Gunn: “Guess so people like us don't use Cordy's blood against Jasmine.”

 Wesley: “There are no people like us. Not anymore. We're it. She had us on the run. And if Cordelia's so dangerous to her, why not kill her and be done with it?”

 Fred: “Because maybe she can't.”

 Wesley: “Exactly. I think Jasmine may be dependent on Cordelia. She can't hurt her, not without hurting herself. But maybe Cordelia can hurt Jasmine.”

As with the blood, what went for Cordelia would also go for Connor.  Only that was a piece of deduction left to us; the writers didn’t telegraph the fact.  And that was important because it preserved the twist.  As Connor had for so long been Jasmine’s protector or loyal supporter, there seemed no way that he would finally end her.  So, when he did it was a complete shock.  But, as with all the best twists, in retrospect it made perfect sense that he did.

But this of course only paved the way for a question and an even bigger twist.  The question concerns Connor.  As we have seen, Angel’s principal concern throughout this episode was for his son.  Now he, and the audience, are left wondering what is the teenager going to do now, in his present state of mind.  And then there was the arrival of Lilah.  When I saw Wesley and the others taken aback by an unexpected arrival at the door of the Hyperion I tried to guess whom it would be.  I didn’t even think of Lilah. But there she was right at the end of the episode.  How and what does she want?  The Jasmine arc might have ended but it looks as though there is still plenty going on to keep our interest.

Overview (A-)

Curiously enough for an episode in which we saw the defeat of Jasmine, the real focus of “Peace Out” was Connor.  And I think that worked to its advantage.  It’s almost as if the writers were beginning to loose interest in Jasmine.  The way she was defeated was well signposted in advance and (with one notable exception) nothing was done to surprise us.  And instead of trying to show us the pathos inherent in a well intentioned semi-divinity doing evil out of a misplaced sense of her own importance, the writers suddenly transformed her into someone who was out and out evil, thus undoing much of the interest in the arc.  What saves the episode however was the fact that we can finally understand Connor’s bleak and desperate view of the world and his position in it.  Through the parallels between him on the one hand and Angel and Jasmine on the other we see the layers of self-deception peeled away in front of out eyes leaving almost literally nothing for him to believe in or hope for.  The question is what happens next and I for one want to know.