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EPISODE 3.12 PROVIDER
Written by: Scott Murphy Directed by: Bill Norton
Money Makes the World Go AroundThe appearance of baby Connor on the scene meant that, for Angel in particular, things could no longer continue as they had before. A father has responsibilities to a son that are difficult if not impossible to reconcile with the mission that Angel now has. Connor’s personal safety is always an issue. Leaving aside Holtz and his desire for revenge and the interest that Wolfram and Hart has in the boy, he is a source of vulnerability for anyone whose role is to fight evil. What better way to strike at the father than through the son? Moreover, can Angel now afford to take risks with his own life now that he has a son? What happens to Connor if one day he doesn’t come home from work? Then there is always the question of how is Angel to devote enough care and attention to Connor when he is supposed to be saving others. All of these questions can be resolved into one central one: does Connor take priority over all the other calls on Angel? There are a lot of interesting and difficult sides to this question. Is morality a branch of mathematics? Do the needs of the many really outweigh the needs of the few? Or is the bond between father and child something that imposes unique obligations? And are these obligations absolute? So many of the most poignant tales from myth and legend concern cases where fathers are faced with hard choices about their sons. One indeed comes from Angel’s own city of Galway where a son of one of the local magistrates killed a friend in a quarrel over a girl. The young man was so popular that no-one in the city could be found to hang him - so the father did it with his own hands. Duty over love: is that noble or inhuman. Put it another way - is it wrong to care about one’s own children and put their welfare over that of others? And does Angel’s own unique past – the foundation of his whole mission – make any difference to this equation? And here in a nutshell we have the first reason for my disappointment with “Provider”. In a field rich with possibilities it goes for the banal. From the beginning Angel’s agenda is clear – making money. Angel Investigations has radically changed direction:
And the reason for this change is equally obvious: “Because someone's got to clothe and feed and educate this little guy, yeah?” It is naturally Cordelia who sees the obvious conflict between the mission and this prioritization of financial considerations: Cordelia: "Angel - I'm glad you wanna take care of your son. I am. I just wanna make sure we don't lose sight of the mission." Angel: "Well, we have to earn a living. I mean, not just for Connor, but for all of us." Cordelia: "I agree. But first and foremost we work for the Powers, help the helpless. Promise me we won't neglect that." But that hope is soon disappointed as the only criteria for the selection of cases now are financial ones. The Nahdrahls offer $50,000 for help with a puzzle:
This is of course quite a venial task, hardly one suited for a team dedicated to helping the helpless. But $50,000 is $50,000. Then there is Ally. She does have a genuine cause for concern (at fist sight anyway). But more importantly she is “solvent”. And finally there is the case that demands Angel’s personal attention. And what interests him about this case can be fairly easily deduced from the way he takes his instructions over the phone:
So, what counts about a case is whether it pays or not; not how great the need might be. The set up here was never intended to show us Angel having to make difficult choices between his responsibilities to his son and his responsibilities to others. Still less was it about the different moral values that might inform such a choice. What we have in “Provider” instead is a classic morality tale – like one of Aesop’s fables. The central message is that money isn’t everything. Angel behaves as if it is and he – or those close to him – almost pay the price for that mistake. But this is such a straw man. As a straightforward moral proposition it is a cliche. Just how much of a cliche can be seen from the expectations created by the set up and how well those expectations were fulfilled. When we saw the way that Angel was pandering to clients for money did anyone not expect it to end in disaster or near disaster? And how did it actually end? This fact alone shows how little capacity the proposition had to make us think. Worse still, the more you look at the way the proposition is handled the less satisfactory it becomes. The conflict between Angel’s apparent materialism and the really important values of friendship and family is, I think, intended to be explored by the counterpoint between Angel’s concern for compensation for wiping out the nest of vampires and Sam’s motivation in hiring him. When Angel finds that the far from solvent Sam cannot pay what he has been promised his reaction is: "You take on a job in good faith, you expect to be compensated. You provide the best service you can offer - a quality service. But you know, there's overheads. There's rent, three phone lines, advertising, it adds up." This is a concept of Angel Investigations as a business, not as an organization intended to help people. Sam, on the other hand, was someone for whom material considerations were irrelevant. The only treasure in the vampire nest that he was concerned with was his dead friend’s watch and Angel (not understanding it’s true value) assumed that it’s only importance lay in its material value: Angel: “What is it? Rolex?" Sam: "Timex." Angel: "Oh. What is it, really? Considering all the trouble you went through to get it, we both know it's not just a watch." Sam: "That's true. It's not." Angel: "Probably worth more than ten grand, too." Sam: "A lot more." Angel: "What's it do? Open a portal? Raise an army?" Sam: "It glows in the dark. Probably about all of them do now. Looks like they cracked it when they took it off him. I told him to let them have it, but he wasn't about to give it up. It was the first thing I ever bought him." For Angel, all that was important was the price of the watch. He couldn’t understand that something of purely sentimental value could be worth all the time and trouble Sam went to. For Sam the value of the watch was beyond price because of the connection between himself and his friend that it represented. That was why he was prepared to give up his job, pester (and eventually assault) his boss indeed give up all his material possessions, as Angel found out: Angel: “You own a car?" Sam: "The bank owns it." Angel: "House?" Sam: "I rent." Angel: "How's your credit. Can you borrow?" Sam: "I'm kind of out of a job. Spent all I had tracking these guys." Surely if there was any real moral in here for Angel this was it. Angel’s motive in seeking funds was to care for his son. But the material benefits that you can bestow on someone you love is not the measure of their worth to you. The fact that Angel is able to pay for Connor to have
means nothing compared to what he feels about him. So, what was wrong with Angel's attitude in “Provider” was the value he put on getting money in the first place. That was both a distortion of his mission and of his own love for his son. Sam’s experience in losing someone he loved and in what he was prepared to sacrifice materially to recover a small reminder of that person should have been the important lesson for Angel. But that was never the message brought home to him. Indeed, even as Angel was angrily walking out on Sam after having helped him get the watch he was entirely unconscious of the implications of Sam’s story for him. As Sam tried to express his gratitude, Angel’s only response is a disinterested: "Yeah, whatever. “ It was only the voice mail message that Sam presumably helped deliver that led to a change in Angel’s heart. Now it would be nice to see some symbolism in the fact that it was Sam who helped set Angel on the right path. But in truth there is none. Angel was being summoned to help Fred. She had been put at risk because Wesley, Gunn and Angel were all out chasing a buck. So, we are invited to conclude that because Angel had put the pursuit of money first his friends nearly died. And not only his friends. What Connor’s fate would have been had not Angel and the others turned up in time is anyone’s guess. This led Angel to later admit to Cordelia: "I should never have left you and the baby alone like that." But this is actually a very superficial approach to the question. True, the lure of the $50,000 meant that Angel Investigations accepted the jobs not only from the Nahdrahs but from Ally and Sam without asking too many questions. Indeed Angel was suckered in to helping Sam in spite of the fact that he smelt a rat. He was told that the nest of vampires was demanding $5,000 in protection money: FakeHarlan: "Now, I'm prepared to pay you ten to make this problem go away. Five thousand now (rips out the check) the remainder when the jobs finished." Angel: "That'll make ten - which is more than they're asking you for." It is equally true that the reason why there was no-one on hand to help Cordelia was that they were all out on jobs and the motivating factor in seeking those jobs out was money. But they could just as easily have adopted the same uncritical attitude even if they hadn’t been so greedy. They may have done so because they were genuinely motivated by cries for help. Alternatively, Angel could have adopted just as mercenary an attitude towards helping others and at the same time been more cautious in evaluating those he helped and what reserves were kept back. Indeed the more idealistic the approach to helping others the more likely it is that Angel Investigations and its operatives will be exposed to risk. When you put a premium on helping the helpless you cannot worry too much about the risk you yourself are running. On the other hand if your motivation is to help yourself and protect your own personal interests it is easier to be cautious. So, while using Fred's danger to draw attention to Angel's fault looks good it is really devoid of any meaning. On the other hand the real problem raised by this episode lies in the fact that Angel’s attitude towards those he is helping is wrong in and of itself and not because of any supposed consequences that it might have on his friends. And this is something that is just left hanging. And looming over all of this is the most problematic part of this whole scenario: the believability of the characterization. Angel is in many ways a deeply flawed individual. He is prone to obsessive behavior and in such a frame of mind he can certainly have a distorted sense of priorities. And certainly it has long been established that he is “careful” with money. The way he collected small change from the hotel furniture was actually an amusing way of exploiting this foible. But the fault here was the elevation of his concern for money over his responsibilities to others. It is certainly possible to believe that, in his enthusiasm to take care of his son, he re-launches Angel Investigations as a more profit-oriented business. But to see him actually make payment a condition of helping people is frankly unbelievable. And especially when the person seeking the help is the victim of vampires. Are his memories of what he himself had done as a vampire now so suppressed that he can look with equanimity upon someone like Sam? Did his tale trigger no recollection of those Angel himself had robbed and murdered? This is a classic example of a character being crudely and artificially distorted to make it fit in with a preconceived plot line as opposed to a plotline growing naturally and believably from his established psychology. Nor is Angel the only one who suffers in terms of characterization. At least in his case there was a semblance of a reason for his change of attitude. But everyone else is complicit. Cordelia very mildly reminds Angel of where his priorities lie but then she does absolutely nothing. In fact she is the one who carries out the credit check on Ally, without even being asked to do so. She doesn’t even question the decision to help the Nahdrahs even though there is no conceivable justification for it. And Wesley and Gunn actually seem quite happy to go along with Angel’s approach. Wesley is still supposed to be the boss. We know that because there is a picture of Winston Churchill in his office. It was hardly to be expected that Angel would keep on deferring to him but you might at least have expected some argument from someone. But while the depiction of Wesley's attitude is bad enough it is frankly bizarre for Gunn to be without a conscience about the new direction of the firm. Would the Gunn who railed against social inequity in “First Impression” really be happy about prioritizing middle class white women’s problems simply because of their ability to pay. After all it wasn’t as though there was any shortage of poor people in LA under threat from the supernatural. PlotUnhappily it is not only in terms of theme and characterization that this episode proved to be such a disappointment. The plotting was sub-standard as well. Essentially “Provider” consists of three separate storylines which are brought together very loosely at the very end of the episode. Fred’s danger at the hands of the Nahdrahs requires interventions from Angel, Wesley and Gunn. But they are pursuing cases of their own and the question is whether they can be contacted in time to help. Ironically enough the one plot I did warm towards was the one involving Angel. This might seem odd given what I have had to say about it thematically and in terms of its characterization. Nor would I say that in terms of plot it was without problem. Indeed the whole storyline hinges on a highly improbable piece of impersonation. I think we are supposed to conclude that Sam arranged to meet Angel in Harlan Elster’s office when he knew he wasn’t going to be there. But if he no longer worked for the company how did he know? More to the point how did both he and Angel get there without anyone else being suspicious of the two strangers meeting in the boss’ office? And how did Sam expect to be able to get away with his deception? But I don’t mind this so much because this was the one plot that did surprise and puzzle me. More importantly it was the one plot that engaged my sympathies. From the moment Angel pointed out that he was being paid twice what the vampires were asking for it became obvious that there was some sort of twist in the offing. But I couldn’t guess what it was. It turned out that there were two. The first concerned the reason why Sam involved Angel in the destruction of the nest. And yet when Sam turned up at the vampire nest and started to explain what it was he wanted everything fell into place. The scenario made perfect sense. More to the point it made me look at Sam Ryan in a completely different light. When, on his introduction, a character proves to be an accomplished liar, a fraud and someone who assaults his former employer my reaction isn’t usually one of sympathy. Yet here it was. And one of the things that worked about this scenario was that it was light on detail. I found myself wanting to know more about the relationship between Sam and his late friend. Were they a gay couple or just lifelong friends? At one point Sam says he begged his friend to give the vampires the watch. When was that? Was his friend a victim of a protection racket and did he try to fight back? Did Sam try to help or not? Is there guilt as well as grief? Certainly the scheme he devised to get Angel involved was harebrained and this together with his history of pestering his boss and the financial sacrifice involved gives us a clear indication of his desperation and indeed the depth of his feelings. And all for a watch. At first I thought that Sam’s interest lay in a simple act of revenge. But by the time Angel had killed six of the seven vampires it seemed clear that all he ever wanted back was the watch. Indeed it is noticeable how pathetically grateful he was to Angel for the help even though it was given very unwillingly and ungraciously. It is hard not to feel sympathy for someone like that. The second twist lay in the discovery that there were seven vampires to be dealt with rather than three. I like this partly because it hadn’t occurred to me either to wonder if Angel had dealt with all the Vampires in the nest the first time around. I just assumed he had. But like Angel there are assumptions you shouldn’t make. So I too was taken by surprise. Of course the effect was somewhat ruined by the fact that Angel took the threat of the four vampires so seriously and then disposed of three of them so easily that you could not help wondering why. However the problems of this plotline were negligible when compared to those of the Zombie boyfriend plot involving Gunn and Wesley. I hated this. The reason is not so much the obvious plotting deficiencies. I can run through a few of these quickly enough. First of all how was Brian raised as a Zombie? A restless spirit can apparently come back as a ghost but everything we have seen about Zombies so far suggests that to reanimate a corpse there has to be outside intervention. See for example tghe BtVS episodes “Some Assembly Required”and “Dead Man’s Party” as well as “Thin Dead Line”. Then, as Wesley and Gunn went to Ally’s apartment specifically to protect her from a stalker, why was their only way of reacting to Brian to shut themselves in the apartment? Didn’t they bring anything with them to hurt a zombie? And why can’t they even lock him out competently? Then there was that awful cringe-making piece of dialogue where what was supposed to be a threatening supernatural creature turned into a big child who pouts and sulks when talked to sternly. If that was all there was too him why did Ally need any help to get rid of him in the first place? But what I really disliked about this part of the episode was the so-called twist. Not that it was much of a twist. The clue came when Ally asked why he was still hanging around and Wesley answered: "Perhaps there is something he left unfinished, something he wants to tell you." It was clear from that that there was something about the relationship between these two that we hadn’t been told and really it wasn’t hard to guess what that was. Yes, Ally murdered Brian because he was too clingy. This is not of course an entirely rational action. You might think that someone who resorted to poison for such a reason might be capable of anything else. What might her reaction be to a dispute with the neighbors or colleagues at work? Then there was the fact that Brian was actually dead, presumably to the distress of his family as well as the destruction of his own hopes for a future. It doesn't actually seemed to have occurred to Wesley or Gunn that murder is just the tiniest bit naughty. How can a series which is predicated on the overriding need to fight evil treat murder this casually? Then there is the implausibility of Ally getting back together with Brian - the thing that is supposed to absolve her from her guilt. I can just see Ally introducing her family and friends to her husband to be – the corpse she buried a few months ago. I did not like the teaser one little bit because of the way it treated the plight of victims as something to laugh at. But at least you can say that it is not certain that the young man who sought help from Angel Investigations died. And it is far from clear that even if he had made contact by telephone that anyone would have been able to do anything about it. Wesley's flip “Will that be cash or charge” here is so much worse. And this brings me to the “Fred in Peril” plot. And here I will admit the writers did surprise me. The set up seemed too obvious. Eccentric genius is brought to strange ship by alien creatures to solve a seemingly impossible problem before a major ceremony. Is this a test to see if she is worthy to donate her brain for a cause? Of course not. That would be far too obvious, especially since at one stage Lorne translates the Nahrdah’s request as being to buy Wesley’s head. I quite confidently expected there to be some major twist. And there was one. It was that there was no twist at all. Instead we went from one cliché to another. Lorne was even dragged along to that he could accidentally stumble on the Nahrdahs telling their prince: "She is solving the puzzle, sire. We have found a head worthy to rest upon your noble shoulders." and
then be hit on the head only to wake up with both himself and Fred as prisoners.
After all you just can't have too many clichés in a plot. Of course one of the biggest clichés of all is the last minute arrival of the cavalry to save the situation. And with Angel trapped in the vampire nest and Gunn and Wesley trapped in Ally’s apartment it became obvious from very early on where the episode was headed. The only question was how Fred's three co-workers would free themselves in time to save Fred. And as we have seen there really wasn’t much tension to be had there as Angel dusted three vampires without breaking sweat and had Sam on hand to help him with his messages while Brian and Ally made up, thus freeing Wesley and Gunn As it was almost too obvious to need stating that Angel. Wesley and Gunn were going to arrive to save the day, Cordelia's appearance was pointless. Worse than that, it was bizarre. I never thought that Cordelia would really walk into a potentially dangerous situation with a baby in her arms. Not only would it be too much of a risk for the child but it would hamper her greatly. Surely she would for example give Connor to Dennis to look after instead. And of course she was far too smart to think for a moment that offering to hand back the Nahrdah’s money would persuade them to hand over Fred. After all they willingly gave Angel the $50,000 to get Fred in the first place. So, if she did turn up she would take some sort of weapon instead. I was totally wrong on both counts so I suppose that also counts as some sort of a surprise. Overview
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