EPISODE 5.21

Powerplay

Written by:  David Fury

Directed by: James A. Contner

In the Belly of the Beast

Just before they are so rudely interrupted by Hamilton, we see Drogyn and Illyria playing “Crash Bandicoot”:

Drogyn: “It is a test, a task of some sort. You must collect those crystals. And the fruit.”

Illyria: “Why?”

Significantly, Illyria never gets a direct answer to her question and Drogyn seems to change the subject:

Drogyn: “Old one... you have no right to walk this Earth. Your time is past. You belong to the well.”

Illyria: “Truly. I wish now I had never been brought out of it.”

Drogyn: “Do you?”

Illyria: “I don't know. I play this game... it's pointless and annoys me... and yet, I'm compelled to play on. Does that not…”

On the face of it this odd pairing are at cross purposes here.  When one is talking about Illyria’s future, the other is talking about the video game and vice versa.  In reality, though, they were both expressing the same idea in different ways.  In the game the collection of the crystals and the fruit serves no purpose other than to tempt the player to play on, to collect more crystals and fruits and then more and then still more.  There is no winning, just continuous, endless play.  So, although the game players think they are in control and they are actually achieving something it is in fact the designers of the game who, in reality, control them through their addiction to the gathering of the crystals and the fruits.  The players are not happy about this but they are powerless to do anything about it because their reactions have been anticipated and the game designed with those reactions in mind.

That is why Drogyn cannot provide and answer to Illyria’s question about why they must collect the crystals and fruit.  But equally, his questioning of Illyria’s continued presence on Earth reflects her own lack of control over her destiny.  He disputes her right to be where she is – she belongs to the Well.  And Illyria herself almost admits as much when she first of all expresses regret at her escape and then draws an analogy between her situation and the game.  She feels compelled to play on in the sense of exploring what it is to be human but as she says herself:

“I've grown wary of this world since my powers were depleted. Strange... though I've been made more human, this place remains disconcerting.”

It is no wonder that she thinks that this is a pointless and annoying pastime.

But the real comparison being made here is not between “Crash Bandicoot” and Illyria’s new life.  It is between the game and Angel’s predicament.

Angel has always been reactive:

All along he has been playing someone else’s game.  It is no wonder that the faux Roger Wyndam-Pryce referred to him in these hardly flattering terms:

“He's a puppet. He always has been. To the Powers That Be, to Wolfram & Hart. Now he's ours.”

And it is in this context that “Powerplay” adapts but essentially continues the metaphor of the game.  In the final pivotal confrontation between himself and his little team, Angel pictures them all as trapped in a mechanism:

“We're in a machine. That machine's gonna be here long after our bodies are dust.”

As he later points out this mechanism is controlled by the Senior Partners through their agents – the Black Thorn.  And by extension he and everyone else in it are doomed to play the part that the Senior Partners have designed for them and unable to control their own destiny.  The comparison between his situation and the players in “Crash Bandicoot” is all too apparent.  Instead of collecting crystals and fruit, Angel has been running around trying to do good.  But the opportunities to do so are simply the bait with which the Senior Partners have tempted him to play on in the game they have designed.  This is a game in which there is no winning for him, only continuous, endless play.  To say that Angel finds this pointless and annoying is an understatement akin to describing Jack the Ripper as being a little naughty.

The End Justifies The Means

The whole thrust of the second half of season 5, however slowly and spasmodically developed, has been towards Angel trying to change all of this.  And indeed at the end of “Time Bomb” it was fairly clear that he had finally reached a decision about what to do.  And the first stage of implementing that decision was a surprising one – handing over an infant to be a ritual sacrifice for the Fell Bretheren.  There was a clever reference to this in “Powerplay”:

Red Devil: “You know the Fells. All they can talk about is the baby. The baby's doing this now. The baby's doing that. What a wonderful ritual sacrifice he'll make. Yak, yak, yak. Anyway, couldn't say enough nice things about you.”

Angel: “Great.”

Red Devil: “You're really comin' through, big guy. There's a real buzz about you. 

At first sight Angel’s action in serving the interests of the Fell demons is simply a way of getting power for himself.  He no longer wants to be a participant in the game, trying to do the good deeds the Senior Partners will permit as a means of controlling him.  Instead he seems to be aiming at something higher.  Certainly that is how he represents his goals to Wesley and the others:

Angel: “Do I really have to explain this to you people? We're in the business of business. Oil, software, worldwide wickets. The product doesn't matter. It's the game that matters. Get to the top, be the best, have the most, win.”

Wesley: “Win what?”

Angel: “You’re still missing the point.”

And what is this point that Wesley and the others were missing?:

“You didn't judge. You didn't spend your life obsessed with good and evil. You do that, you get swallowed, lost in the minutia. Good, bad, Angel, Angelus — none of it makes a difference. I wish it did, but, you know, an ant with the best intentions or the most diabolical schemes is just exactly an ant. There is one thing in this business, in this apocalypse that we call a world that matters: power. Power tips the scale, power sets the course, and until I have real power, global power, I have nothing. I accomplish nothing.”

This is a classic statement about the means justifying the ends.  What good Angel has been doing until now doesn’t really harm the Senior Partners; indeed by his actions he has actually been serving their wider agenda.  What Angel appears to be saying here is that it follows, therefore, that in order to achieve any real good at all he has get real power, using the tools that the Senior Partners have themselves provided.  So, any steps he has to take to get that power are ultimately justified by what he can achieve with it.  Conversely, to deny himself power because of moral scruples, is to doom himself to futility and to sacrifice the morally good outcomes that could have been achieved.  This is in fact the very point on which Illyria challenged him in “Time Bomb”.

There is a famous quote from Machiavelli’s “The Prince”:

“Anyone who would act up to a perfect standard of goodness in everything must be ruined among so many who are not good. It is essential therefore for a prince to have learnt how to be other than good and to use, or not to use, his goodness as necessity requires.”

In this quote we find expressed what is inherent in the argument Angel seems to be making here, namely the idea that there is a final end which is so important that it necessarily outweighs the evils that must be committed in achieving it and that he is in a position to make that judgment.  So, when he is about to go into conference with the Senator and Wesley brings him news about a Boritz demon attack he seems unimpressed:

Wesley: “This last victim was a teenage girl. A runaway. She was ripped apart.”

Angel: “Well, there's not much we can do about it now, huh?”

Wesley: “Angel, we need to find this demon and destroy it before…”

Angel: “Somebody else dies? Yeah. I know, Wes. People are dying every day all over. This girl is just one more statistic.”

Wesley: “Stacey. The statistic's name was Stacey Bluth.”

Angel: “Well, you know, we can't save everybody, and we can't sweat the small stuff.”

So, there it is.  He judges the worth of Stacey Bluth and her ilk and finds it small when compared to what he feels he can achieve.  She is the crystal or the piece of fruit in the game he is playing and as such is ultimately insignificant.  What counts is his judgment about what is worth fighting for and what isn’t.  Here we seem to find the classic consequence of the “end justify the means” mentality: a profound disdain for the great mass of human suffering and a profound conviction of his own superiority.

In “Time Bomb” Wesley describes Illyria’s attitude towards humans in the following terms:

“what comes out of her mouth, pure unadulterated vertigo. We look so tiny to her.”

And this is a metaphor that is sustained here.  As we have seen Angel refers to those without power as ants, things that also look tiny and unimportant to us.  As Lorne says:

“I mean, not to play an old saw, but power does traditionally corrupt. You get high up enough, and, well, the people, they do start to look like ants.”

And this is the fear that Wesley and the others entertain – that the search for power has corrupted Angel.  Conceiving of himself as a part of the elite has warped his sense of values.  The point is well illustrated by the following exchange between Illyria and Spike:

Illyria: “I've seen this before with many rulers. Your leader has been corrupted.”

Spike: “Hey, hang on. In the first place, Angel's not my leader. In the second, what the bloody hell do you mean corrupted?”

Illyria: “It always begins the same. A ruler turns a blind eye to the dealings of battles from which he cannot gain... and a deaf ear to the counsel of those closest to him. As his strength increases, so does the separation between he and his follow…”

And indeed throughout this episode we see evidence to this effect, not only from Angel’s own mouth but also from his actions including giving the baby to the Fell demons, his lack of interest in the Boritz demon and its victims, the way he pandered to the demon Senator and her aide and most striking of all the suspicion that he engineered Illyria’s escape and tried to kill Drogyn to cover his tracks.  The revelation about the Black Thorn is simply the thing that draws all of these strands together in a way that makes sense.  As Lindsey says, in order to join them and to become one of the true power elite there are things he must do:

“Quit saving girls in alleys. Probably wouldn't even make it on the circle's radar until he killed one of his lieutenants.”

In setting up this scenario, the writers were serving two purposes.  First of all they were injecting tension into an otherwise slow build up to the final denouement of the series in the next episode.  We were intended to wonder whether Wolfram and Hart really had succeeded in corrupting Angel after all.  And here I don’t think they were terribly successful.  First of all idea of Angel sacrificing Fred for power is itself pretty implausible.  But even leaving this to one side, what the writers were asking us to accept made no sense in terms of the story they were trying to tell.  Angel justified his pursuit of power on the grounds that with it he could do good but without it he couldn’t.  It isn’t that much of a stretch to believe that Angel could start thinking like that:

Wesley: “It doesn't make any sense. Angel never cared about power.”

Lorne: “Well, he's never had any to care about, has he? Not real power, even as Angelus, and then just like that, he's king of the mountain. It's quite a view from up there. Tends to make people want things. Even if they start with the best intentions, Angel's seen real power, and he's not looking away. He's gonna go for it, Wes.”

And indeed Angel decision in “Time Bomb” to disregard his moral qualms to serve his own ambition can indeed be interpreted as a determination to seize power whatever the cost.  But obviously once Angel did begin to sacrifice “small people” for power – whether for its own sake or because of the good he could do with it - the Senior Partners had won, for all the reasons I had given.  And that would have been the end to any chance of a final confrontation between Angel and the Senior Partners – the very confrontation that was now to be the climax of the whole series.  The dramatic necessity of creating the pivotal confrontation ensured that we could not take at face value the scenario that the writers were trying so hard to sell to us.

But there was another purpose to this scenario.  And this purpose is best illustrated by the following exchange as Angel laid out his real ambition:

Angel: “We're in a machine. That machine's gonna be here long after our bodies are dust. But the senior partners will always exist in one form or another because mankind is weak.”

Lorne: “Uh, do you want me to point my crossbow at him, 'cause I think he's gonna start talking about ants again." 

Angel: “We are weak. The powerful control everything... except our will to choose. Look, Lindsey's a pathetic halfwit, but he was right about one thing. Heroes don't accept the way the world is. The senior partners may be eternal, but we can make their existence painful.”

A Spanner in the Works

Everything, including the title, has suggested that this episode was about getting and using power.  A power play is an aggressive attempt to compel acquiescence by the concentration and use of power.  But Angel’s plan was not about power as much as it was about getting the antidote to power - free will.  Angel doesn’t want to become a part of the machine – he wants to be free from it and at least temporarily disable it:

“We're in a machine. The Black Thorn runs it. We can bring their gears to a grinding halt, even if it's just for a moment.”

So he continues to identify himself with mankind and with the weak – one of the ants if you will.  He continues to think of himself as being inside the machine, not one of its controllers.  In that situation his life is meaningless.  By striking at that machine he not only claims back control over his life but also gives some meaning to it and indeed to much else that has now no meaning such as Fred’s death:

“Then, when Fred died, I wasn't gonna let that be another random horrible event in another random horrible world. So I decided to use it, to make her death matter.”

And from this we see that indeed Fred's death was a pivotal point in the season.  In "Unleashed" and in "Soul Purpose" we saw how Angel's sense of disconnection from his friends isolated him and made it more difficult to rediscover his true sense of purpose.  By contrast here we see evidence that it was his sense of connectedness to his friends and the way he felt the loss of one of them that helped him focus his energies.

This then is the point and counterpoint of “Powerplay”. On the one hand we have power used to control others, subordinating their will to yours and rendering their own lives meaningless because they are now merely reflections of your own will.  And on the other hand we see the ability of someone to seize control of their own life and the understanding that by doing so, they are giving that life meaning because it is independent from the control of others.

And we see the importance of this free will reflected in the fact that Angel has power available to him.  He could join the Black Thorn and refusing to do so will not destroy the Senior Partners.  It won’t even have much of a practical effect:

“We can't bring down the Senior Partners, but for one bright, shining moment, we can show them that they don't own us. You need to decide for yourselves if that's worth dying for.”

Yet he gives up this very real and tangible personal advantage to him for a consideration that has very limited practical benefit.  Free will is worth that much.   One the one hand there is the reality of power, what it can do and what it can achieve.  We see this not only in the resources available but in the fact that with those resources Angel can, for example, influence the result of a Presidential election.  An exercise of free will on the other hand will achieve so little, a very temporary setback for the Senior Partners, no more.  But for Angel it is not the actual damage to the Senior Partners that interests him; it’s the ability to control his own destiny.  That is the point in and of itself and as such is worth far more than the power that the Senior Partners offer.  Indeed it is worth so much that he is prepared to die for it:

“10-to-1, we're gone when the smoke clears. They will do everything in their power to destroy us.”

Again we come back to the metaphor of the game.  What seems real, be that the possibility of helping the helpless that Wolfram and Hart seems to offer or damaging the Senior Partners by killing the Black Thorn, counts for nothing unless you have the ability to control your own destiny.

But here is where I begin to have a problem.  The intention of the writers seems to be to contrast on the one hand a determination to win power over others and on the other a desire to free yourself from those who have power over you.  But in seeking to free himself from the Senior Partners power, Angel did exercise power over others.  Now, in fairness to him I would entirely accept that he had no intention of turning Mike Conley into a pedophile.  In fact his intention was to get rid of someone who would have stopped at nothing to destroy her competitor.  So he clearly intends to end up helping him.  I also accept that when Angel disclaimed any interest in the Boritz demon, he was pretty certain that Wesley and the others would do something about it on their own initiative.  And finally I also believe that it is no part of Angel’s plan to allow an innocent child to be sacrificed by the Fell demons.  But he was prepared to see a mother deprived of her child, as far as she knew for ever, to help further his plans.  And his willingness to embrace the Black Thorn agenda was intended to deceive not only the Senior Partners and their agents but also his friends.  He was as guilty of manipulating them as the Black Thorn were of manipulating him.  He admitted as much:

Wesley: “Why would you want us to believe you killed Fred?”

Angel: “Because they needed to believe it.”

Gunn: “The Black Thorn.”

Angel: “They needed to believe my own people didn't trust me anymore.”

So Angel let Wesley believe that he had a hand in Fred’s death, in spite of the trauma that this would cause him and indeed in spite of the fact that on past form he might have done something very stupid indeed upon learning this.  And it’s not only Wesley.  It was only to be anticipated that his friends as a whole would try to do something rather than see Angel throw his hand in with the Black Thorn, as illustrated by Wesley’s impassioned speech on this very subject:

“Angel dedicated his life to helping others, not because he had to, but because it was a path he'd chosen. If he's been swayed from that, influenced... then maybe there's still time. We can bring him back. He'd do the same for any of us, regardless of our actions.”

Once Angel started them down this path, almost anything could have happened.  And I have not yet even touched upon the subject of Drogyn.  Now it can be said in Angel’s defense, that by killing Drogyn he put him out of his misery and saved him from what was clearly very brutal torture indeed.  That may be the explanation for the Battlebrand’s “thank you” rather than the mistaken thought that he had come to save him.  But you cannot look at this moment in isolation.  Angel deliberately manipulated Drogyn into coming to LA by sending an assassin:

“I knew Drogyn could handle himself. I told the assassin just enough to lead Drogyn to think I played a part in resurrecting Illyria. I figured he'd come here looking for allies against me.”

Well, judging by the state of Drogyn when he arrived, the assassin nearly killed him.  He certainly left him weak and unable to defend himself and he equally certainly brought him to a place where Hamilton could get at him.  So Drogyn’s peril (not to mention Illyria’s) was all Angel’s doing.  And even if we do take the last few moments of Drogyn’s life in isolation, I do not think that what Angel did can be justified.  First of all he didn’t even attempt to rescue him.  And the reason had nothing to do with the difficulty of doing so or fact that he was risking his own life.  There is nothing to show that it would have been especially difficult or dangerous.  And since when has either consideration stopped Angel?  No, the reason why he killed Drogyn was that he had to in order to carry out his plan.  Drogyn was the sacrifice that Angel needed to make to get into the Circle.

Earlier I quoted Machiavelli and said that in that quote we find expressed what is inherent in the argument Angel seemed to be making when he justified his “power play” to Wesley and the others, namely the idea that there is a final end which is so important that it necessarily outweighs the evils that must be committed in achieving it and that he is in a position to make that judgment.  So when we thought he was judging the worth of Stacey Bluth and Mike Conley and the child given to the Fell demons and finding them small people (“ants” as he called them) compared to the good that he could do with the power of Wolfram and Hart behind him, he was in fact doing something a little different.  He was judging Drogyn’s life and the fates of his friends to be a price worth paying to enable him to strike back against the machine.  The detail was different.  We can debate whether one sacrifice was as egregious as the other.  But I see little difference in principle.  In his attempt to defeat the Senior Partners, Angel had himself mirrored their methods.  Like them he was the designer and engineer of a game in which others were manipulated towards ends of his making and of which they were left entirely ignorant.  Ironic eh?

I am afraid, however, that I do not think that this was what the writers were interested in exploring..  I say this in part because there is no proper debate about the merits or otherwise of what Angel was doing.  The nearest we get to it is the very cryptic exchange between Angel and Nina at the beginning in which he explains that he is doing certain things that he doesn't like and which makes him dislike himself.  But that is really all we get on this issue and once the team understand they have been duped they accept the fact without complaint and embrace his agenda:

Wesley: “You wanna take them on.”

Angel: “We're in a machine. The Black Thorn runs it. We can bring their gears to a grinding halt, even if it's just for a moment.”

Spike: “About time we got our hands dirty.”

But that is only part of the problem and there is an even more important difficulty. As we have seen, ultimately this episode emphasizes that it is free will that gives meaning to life.  It does so by contrasting its exercise to someone going through the motions in a game designed by someone else.  Its thesis is that such a fate is so meaningless that it is worth the sacrifice of one’s life to regain the power to control your own destiny.  But what then are we to make of the fact that Wesley and all the others were used in a way that we are intended to see as meaningful.  Does this not argue that meaning can be derived from someone’s life even if they are being manipulated?  And if that is the case than what becomes of the central idea of the episode?