EPISODE 4.14

RELEASE

Written by:  Steven S. DeKnight & Elizabeth Craft & Sarah Fain

Directed by:  James A. Contner

Who Really Is Faith?

At first sight “Release” seems an odd title for this episode.  After all, the main object of Angel Investigations at this stage is the release of Angel’s soul from wherever it is.  And that is no nearer happening at the end of the episode than it was at the beginning.  And the team’s main protagonist at this point is Angelus who has already been released from captivity.  Where then is the release?  The clue I think lies in the shower scene near the beginning of the episode.  Here we are made all too conscious of the battered and bloody state in which the Beast left Faith.  But through the pain and exhaustion, other feelings begin to show through – feelings of rage and confusion. She punches the wall of the shower in front of her, knocking a dent in the tiles. Then she punches the wall again and again, harder and harder, screaming all the while.  She only stops when the shattered pieces of tile fall to the floor.

This reaction is important when you remember that, in terms of her purpose in coming to LA, Faith has had a pretty good day.  Angel Investigations had tried to deal with the Beast and had failed miserably.  Now it was dead.   The sun had been blotted out over LA and the city had been invaded by swarms of demons.  Now the sun was back and dealing with them would be so much easier.   Angelus had tried to kill her but, through a combination of good luck and her own cleverness, had failed.  Now she had an opportunity to recover and, in a well state, she would be pretty confident that she was more than a match for the vampire.  On all fronts things were going her way.

Why the anger then?  Why the frustration and the violence?  The answer is pretty obvious.  She was a slayer and she had been tossed around like a rag doll.  She had been reduced to a state of powerlessness by the Beast and whatever advantage had come from the events of the day had been down to Angelus’ treachery and desperate good luck.  Hence the rage at her own feelings of helplessness.  And hence the confusion she feels over how to respond to those feelings.  Big challenges lie ahead.  Angelus is still free.  Capturing him alive so that Angel’s soul can be restored will be difficult.  Nor does she have any idea where that soul is.  And the Beastmaster is out there too.  Given the way she was handled by the Beast is she really up to those challenges?  How should she respond to them?  Should she give in to the rage and strike back as hard as she can, regardless of whom she hurt?  Or should she remain true to her new found belief in always doing the right thing?  The outbreak of violence in the shower was a release of Faith’s rage and frustration.  Of course it was a release directed harmlessly  and afterwards she was ready to get on with the job.  But the real question was: to what extent she could continue to deal with her darker feelings like this and to what extent might they be released in a more harmful way?

Of course range and confusion are not new feelings for Faith.  Just as she hated and despised her own weakness now, so in the past she hated and despised the killer she had become.  And just as she must now decide how to respond to her feelings and to the challenges that lie ahead, so in the past she had to decide how to deal with her guilt and remorse.  As Wesley reminded her, her past actions were destructive:

“I remember what you did to me, Faith. The broken glass, the shallow cuts so I would remain conscious.”

In that torture scene in “Five by Five” we had seen the worst of Faith. As she said to Wesley:

“Did you ever wonder if things would have been different - if we'd never met.  What if you'd had Buffy and Giles would have been my Watcher?  You think you'd still be here right now?  Or would Giles be sitting in that chair? Or is it just like fate?  You know, there is no choice.  You were gonna be here no matter what.  You think about that stuff - fate and destiny?  I don't.   Not that any of this is your own fault. Since this may be  the last chance we will have to unload on each other, I feel that it is kind of my duty to tell you that if you'd been a better Watcher, I might have been a more positive role model.   Face it Wesley; you really were a jerk.  Always walking around as if you had some great big stake rammed up your …English Channel. “

Here we see her anger and bitterness at what had gone wrong in her life.  But she didn’t know what to do about it.   She didn’t blame herself for anything that had gone wrong.  She blamed fate; she blamed Wesley.  So she lashed out in all directions trying even harder to resolve the confusion and pain by convincing herself she really was bad. The only thing she saw left for her was to continue to play the part that she has been playing all along – that of a homicidal monster. 

Of course that was the old Faith.  This one is different in the sense that she wants to help, especially Angel.  But what we are reminded of here is that those darker feelings remain in her.  Angelus puts it this way:

“I know how it feels—forced to be someone you're not. Hurts to the bone. You try to bury the pain, but you can't get the hole deep enough, can you? No matter how much you dig, it's still there. Broken shards stabbing every time you breathe, cutting you up inside. You know, there's only one way to make the pain stop.”

Going All the Way

Wesley is not reminding her of what she did to him just to taunt her.  He is using her past to challenge her.  He is suggesting that it is in that past that we find the real Faith:

“Because you're sick. You've always been sick. It goes right down to the roots rotting your soul. That's why your friends turned on you in Sunnydale, why the Watchers' Council tried to kill you. No one trusts you, Faith. You're a rabid dog who should've been put down years ago! “

And when in response to this, she pushes him violently against a fence he is pleased:

“See, that wasn't so hard, was it? It's what you'll need to beat him.”

Later he elaborates his thinking by saying:

“Angelus is an animal. The only way to defeat him is to be just as vicious as he is.”

And his language here is picked up by Angelus himself when he tells her:

“Not enough to punish yourself in prison? Is that it? Still looking for someone to help beat the bad out of you? You know what the funny part is, darling? I could beat you death, and it wouldn't make a difference. Nothing will ever change who you are, Faith. You're a murderer, an animal, and you enjoy it. Just like me.”

Angelus is intrigued and excited by the possibility of a slayer gone to the bad.  He wants to transform her into someone in his image.  That is why killing her isn’t enough for him.  That is why he tries to turn her at the end.  As for Wesley, at the beginning of the episode he tells Faith:

“I need to know you're in the game, Faith. All the way.”

Wesley is only concerned about winning and he believes that, in order to defeat Angelus Faith has to be prepared to do whatever it takes for the purpose.  This reflects his own approach.  When Angelus seizes Wesley and threatens to break his neck in Faith attacks him, Wesley encourages her to do it even if it cost him his life.  Later he takes a shotgun to hunt the vampire, saying he doesn’t want to kill him (a shotgun isn’t going to do that anyway):

“but if we get another chance, I want slow him down long enough to tranq him.”

Fred’s incredulous reply says it all:

“By blowing his legs off?”

And most telling of all is Wesley’s treatment of the drug addict.  He stabs her in the shoulder and twists the knife to get information out of her. 

When Angelus was face to face with Faith and holding Wesley helpless in his grasp, he tells her:

“Take your shot, and save the world. Come on. What're you waiting for? It's all about choices, Faith. The ones we make, and the ones we don't. Oh, and the consequences. Those are always fun.”

For Angelus himself there is no real choice.  As Cordelia tells Connor:

“Angelus cannot fight his true nature. It's who he is.”

But for the humans in ANGEL, there are choices.  Both Wesley and Angelus for entirely different reasons want Faith to resolve the confusion within her by releasing her anger and channeling it into violence not against some inoffensive wall tiles but against others – any others. The story of this season has been of good and decent people who want to do the right thing, making the wrong choices and acting destructively because of the flaws in their character.  And those choices have brought consequences not only for others but for  themselves.  While Angel, Wesley, Gunn and the others may have contributed to the Beastmaster’s agenda, helping the enemy and hurting others is only part of the price.  We are reminded of this by the following exchange between Fred and Gunn:

Fred: “Whatever Wes was feeling, whatever he thought might— I should have told him it was never gonna happen. You think I don't know that?”

Gunn: “That's not what I was gonna say.”

Fred: “But it's what you think, isn't it?”

Gunn: “It's not about that anymore. You know that.”

Fred: “All I know...is I miss you. Can't we just go back before any of this. I just want to go back, Charles. I just wanna... “

Gunn: “I, uh... I should do a sweep.”

Ultimately what remains between them is not Gunn’s jealousy or insecurity over Wesley; it is the murder of Professor Seidel.  That murder changed them.  It changed the way they saw each other and it changed their relationship.  It destroyed trust and that was the origin of the jealousies and insecurities.  As for Wesley, no-one can doubt his commitment to the mission or his courage.  His willingness to sacrifice himself to see Faith capture Angelus was admirable.  Nor was he without human feeling.  At the beginning of “Release” he showed genuine concern for Faith.  And he was also anxious to ensure Fred’s safety.  But his willingness to cripple Angel and in particular his torture of the drug addict were disturbing.  This was not accepting reluctantly and with great hesitation that sometimes nasty things had to be done to avoid even nastier outcomes.  He inflicted pain and suffering on a woman who was stupid and selfish but far from evil and he did so casually and without any sign of remorse.  His comment at the end that:

“I avoided the main arteries.”

showed his complete lack of concern for her otherwise.  The common thread to his behavior was that nothing gets in the way of the mission.  In  his planning of the attack on the Castle in Pylea in “No Place Like Plrtz Glrb”, in his kidnapping of Connor and in much of his behavior in season 4, we have seen his willingness to take things all the way without regard to consequences.  We can guess that this attitude derives from his desire to prove those who doubted him wrong.  And in this episode we also see the mark that these choices have left on him: the lack of empathy bordering on callousness, the grim determination and the lack of moral restraints.  For him, as for Gunn and Fred, an earlier part of the exchange between the latter is telling:

Gunn: “Look, if you really think you did something wrong, don't do it again. That simple.”

Fred: “Is it?

Gunn: “Sometimes.”

No, it isn’t.  Not in this world and not for these choices.  When you do something wrong it leaves a mark on you and the consequences of that mark remain.  This was after all the message that both Gunn and Angel tried to give to Fred in “Supersymmetry”

Gunn: "We help people. Fred, if you do this, the demons you'll be living with won't be the horned, fangy kind, they'll be the kind you can't get rid of."

Fred: "You're wrong."

Angel: "He's right. Whatever you do now, is nothing compared to how it'll be afterward."

As we saw in “Salvage” Faith simply wanted to help – especially Angel – and was willing put that above her own personal interests.  But what if, in trying to help, she goes too far?  What if in her desire to help Angel she sacrifices others?  At that point isn’t her desire to do something good compromised – especially if her actions in the end are influenced by rage at her weakness, a desire to prove that she really is the slayer of old?  Doesn’t that same desire to help start to blend into a desire to achieve something that will make up for her humiliation.  Doesn’t she then prove that she is, in Wesley’s words, sick or that, as Angelus claims, she is trying to be someone she isn’t?

Finding Out Who You Are

That is why Faith's reaction to Wesley, in particular, is so important.  She is clearly a different person to the slayer who became an accomplice  of the Mayor in Sunnydale.  She is clearly different to the person who refused to take responsibility for her actions as she tortured Wesley and different from the person who begged for death at Angel’s hands.  Her decision voluntarily to surrender herself to the police and remain in prison shows that she understands that she did something wrong and that she has to accept responsibility for it.  As we have seen, this is a state of mind that Angelus cannot even begin to comprehend.  There are no reference points for a proper comparison between the two.  But she and Wesley each have a soul, each share a bond of common humanity and more importantly each share a common objective – to help Angel.  But both also have a dark past.  Wesley’s continues to reach into his present to his great cost.  The question this episode asks is whether her own will do the same when faced with the challenges and temptations of the struggle to help Angel and the encouragement of Wesley.  Will that rage and frustration too be released?  That was the possibility raised in the shower scene.  But each step of the way in this episode she makes the right choices and in the end Faith clearly rejects the influence of her past.  She probably still has no great love for Wesley but still puts saving his life over capturing Angelus.  More telling still is the moment when their roles from “Five by Five” are reversed and it is Wesley who tortures a helpless victim.  Instead of accepting Wesley’s view of such torture as a litmus test of her commitment, she regards it as a line not to be crossed on moral grounds.  And ultimately, when Angelus tries to convince her that she was a vicious killer just like him, she replies firmly:

“You're wrong. I'm different now. I'm not like you.”

And in a very real sense, Faith seems here to have found her release.  By reaffirming that this was now who she was, she liberated herself from the feelings of rage and confusion that had dogged her throughout the episode.

In many ways what we see in the conflict within Faith and between her on the one hand and Wesley and Angelus on the other is a struggle for identity.  As we have seen Faith was desperately trying to hang on to her new found sense of identity as someone who helped others, as someone who refused to cross certain lines because to do so was wrong.  But all the while she was faced with the temptation to lash out in anger whenever she was hurt in a vain attempt to make the pain go away; thus reverting to the person she had once been.  By contrast Angelus, as Cordelia pointed out, is a killer by nature.  But the Beastmaster reminds him of what he endured when he was buried in Angel’s subconscious:

“Because you're the voice in there, aren't you? Just beneath the surface, buried under all that goodness, fully conscious, fully aware, but trapped. Unable to move or speak, powerless to act on your desires. So thirsty, so helpless...it must be agony.”

In that state he was denied the ability to be who and what he was.  He was denied his identity.  Now he had regained it and was desperate to hang on to it.  That was why he co-operated with the Beastmaster.  But that was also why he was so intent on seeing Faith too become a monster, either through her own choice of because he turned her into a vampire.  After all what better way to reaffirm his identity than to see his values and his ideals triumph over those that Faith espoused. 

Connor too faces his own struggle for identity.  His hatred of Angel derives from his need to believe that he is different from Angelus.  Yet, in his preoccupation with a possible connection with the Beast ,we saw that he could not convince himself that he was.  And now in this episode something occurs that seems to suggest that his worst fears have materialized.  When he attempts to attack Angelus, in Cordelia’s words, he “got spanked by the anti-demon spell.”  Yet, in the face of this evidence that he was, in part at least, demon Connor’s reaction was far from the total denial we might have come to expect.  We see him in the bathroom in front of a mirror.  There he tries to make his nose bumpy by pressing his eyebrows together. He tries to make fangs descend by growling into the mirror. He presses the skin on his forehead to make it bumpy as he bares his teeth. He feels the tips of his teeth.  It’s almost as if he is curious about the demon within him.  And to Cordelia he confesses that he doesn’t know who he is.  But for this Cordelia has an answer and an important one:

“I do. You're a daddy.”

It was Angelus’ nature to be evil.  Faith had a choice and choose to do the right thing.  Both Angelus’ nature and Faith’s choice reflected clear moral values.  Not so being a Daddy.  Being a father and love for family are not moral choices; they are feelings or emotions.  And these can lead to evil as well as good.  A father may decide to rob and kill someone to provide his son with the best toys and his wife with the latest designer clothes.  No doubt he would do so because he loved them and wanted the best for them.  But his actions would still be evil.  Indeed the Whedonverse is peppered with examples of vampires who do care about others but are still vicious killers, from Spike and Drusilla to Gunn’s sister, Alonna.  And this is where the contrast between Faith and Connor comes in.  Faith cared about Angel.  She wanted to save him.  But there were lines she was not prepared to cross to do so.  She was not prepared to sacrifice Wesley to do so.  She was not prepared to torture the drug addict to do so.  But Connor, under Cordelia’s tutelage, is prepared to cross lines.  At one point Connor tells the latter:

“I won't ever let anything hurt you…either of you.”

And because of this he is persuaded to lie to Gunn, Fred and everyone else about Cordelia’s pregnancy.  She then persuades him to spy on them for her.  What we see here is the creation of an “us-and-them” mentality where betrayal of the trust of friends is necessary to Cordelia’s safety and that of the child.  At this stage the betrayals or comparatively minor.  But clearly, Connor is making a very different type of choice to Faith.

And it is in the examination of these choices that we see the great strength of “Release”.  In “Sanctuary” we saw only the very beginning of Faith grappling with the wrongs she had done.  At that stage she was clearly still unable to shed the guilt that she felt, accept the responsibility of what she had done and deal with that responsibility through change.   But this is what we see here in a very realistic and satisfying piece of character development.  Faith has changed because of her past and because she has learned to understand and deal with it.  She remembers too well where her past rage and confusion led her – misery and despair.  And she also knows that she only became a different and a better person by accepting certain things were wrong and by taking responsibility for her wrongdoing and not trying to justify it.  The fact that this recognizes the continued influence of her past is important for two reasons.  Firstly it is far more believable than showing us someone whose past is magically wiped away and who is thereby absolved of guilt.  Secondly it is important in the present context precisely because it focuses again on an idea that is central to the series - that our wrongdoing does have a legacy that haunts us.  We cannot commit evil and expect to escape its consequences.  It is important to acknowledge that members of Angel Investigations have done wrong and have thereby contributed to the suffering and death of others.  But in a series whose principal focus is on redemption, it is also important to acknowledge that it also changes the doer of the evil because redemption must mean dealing with the internal consequences of the evil.  Angel's path to redemption in season 2 was derailed because until "Epiphany" he didn't understand the consequences of Angelus' past actions for his own psychology.  Here too we see that Faith deciding to help someone as a way of paying for her sins isn't enough.  First she had to deal with the legacy of those sins and only then could she help. The same lessons holds good for Wesley, Gunn, Fred and even Angel.  But by her example Faith also asserts that no matter how deep seated the problem , the situation is not hopeless. 

What we have here therefore is a shift of attention away from our core group of characters and their issues.  This is I think useful because we were in danger of beginning to go over the same old ground a few times too often.  But at the same time Faith’s example is directly relevant to them.  That too is important because our focus must ultimately lie with this core group.  Like them Faith has a dark past; like them she must deal with the consequences of that past.  But what she shows us and them is that a person doesn’t have to be a slave to that past.  In the very first episode of this season “Deep Down” this was the message that Wesley gave Justine.  It was the message that Angel gave Connor.  But as the season has worn on we have seen increasingly clearly how difficult it was for Wesley and Angel to live up to those ideals.  It is therefore entirely appropriate that the principal challenge to Faith’s determination to leave the malign influence of the past behind her was Wesley.  In this neat piece of counterpoint we get a strong impression of how far from redemption Wesley is while at the same time seeing, in Faith, what is possible.  She is, in this episode, the living example of what redemption means, underlining both where Angel Investigations has gone wrong this season and at the same time reasserting that there is a way back for them.  No matter what Angel, Wesley, Gunn or any of the others have done wrong they too can change and become different and better people.  At the same time as acknowledging the contrast between Wesley and Faith, we must also recognize what they have in common.  They have the same goal – to help Angel and in their different ways they work together towards this goal.    Neither is a hero or a villain.  Wesley’s willingness to sacrifice himself fully matches his willingness to sacrifice others.  Faith  feels the pull of Wesley's argument.  And we see her battling the rage welling up within her, clinging to the belief that part of her life is in the past, buried away for good and yet wondering if she has truly distanced herself from the killer she once was. Wesley and Faith are not polar opposites.  Rather they are people who share similar problems; one is showing the other the meaning of redemption.  The real question now is whether Wesley heeds this message and, if he does not, what that means for him.  I only hope the writers do not duck this issue.

And Faith’s story is equally relevant to Connor.  He, like Faith in season 3 BtVS and like Wesley, Gunn and Fred at the start of season 4 of ANGEL, is not evil.  But like them he now is faced with a choice.  Does he protect Cordelia and their child, no matter what lines he has to cross to do so.  Or does he recognize that there are some lines you cannot cross?  Faith’s story in particular demonstrates that sometimes the choice you make brings with it consequences that affect your whole life.  Connor has not yet made such a choice but clearly, if Cordelia has anything to do with it, the moment he will do so is coming.  And the fact that we can now anticipate it, only heightens the tension.

Faith then helps us understand the situation of all our principals.  For Connor there is the warning of what the wrong choices will bring.  But for Wesley, Gunn and Fred she shows that although the choices they made will continue to affect them, there is always the possibility of redemption.  And reinforcing this message  is the way in which the writers unambiguously show that what Faith believes is correct. At some point, a line must be drawn and the battle of between good and evil won without crossing over that line. Faith understands that and at the  end, she makes it clear to Angelus that she will not cross that line, that she will never be who she once was and more importantly, she will never be like him. 

Important too is the fact that this is more than an illustration of the perils that Connor faces or the differences between Faith’s progress towards redemption and Wesley’s own situation.  The argument the writers advance here is, I think, a reminder of an important and perennial moral value.  The difference between Faith and Wesley centers on the latter’s willingness to torture a fellow human being.  Here we see the violation pain causes to the dignity of the person, a violation reinforced by the way Wesley disparages her.  Here we see the betrayal of the duty of trust imposed when someone has another person completely at their mercy.  And above all, in Wesley’s reaction, we see the dehumanizing of the torturer.  And in the end the information obtained didn’t make a whole lot of difference.  It is an important moral statement powerfully expressed.

The Plotting

At first sight the focus of this episode is on Faith and Wesley’s search for Angelus and the latter’s attempts to discover the identity and purpose of the Beastmaster.  Neither aspect of “Release” is especially successful.  We again have to start with Angelus.  We first see him in the demon bar.  Here, instead of the sinister loner stalking his victims from the shadows, we see someone who is gregarious and boastful, basking in the approval of others – generally a sign of weakness and shallowness.  And when he does start to threaten someone it’s a two dimensional comic relief character in the form of a horned demon who sounds distractingly like poor dead Merle.  What is lacking is any sort of menace. And then to compound the difficulty, the intervention of the mysterious voice in his head initially leads to the horned demon mistakenly thinking Angelus was talking to him with the following “comic” exchange:

Angelus (to Beastmaster): “Where are you?”

Horned Demon: “Wherever you want me to be buddy.”

Indeed, the whole device of that “voice in the head” is for me problematic.  No doubt it was a convenient way of allowing the Beastmaster to communicate directly with Angelus without revealing to him (and ultimately therefore Angel) that the Beastmaster was in fact Cordelia.  But it left Angelus to do little more than bluster in return.  It reinforced the impression that he was simply some sort of tool to be manipulated, a view strengthened by the futility of his efforts to find something out about the Beastmaster and the way he caved in so completely to the Beastmaster’s threat of returning Angel’s soul.  We are supposed to believe, from “Souless” for example, that Angelus was a master manipulator, full on insights into his opponents’ frailties.  But what we see is someone as much in the dark about no the Beastmaster as anyone else. And disappointingly this is entirely consistent with what we have seen almost from the moment that Angelus stepped out of his cage.  From his efforts so far he seems someone who is not particularly frightening, not particularly clever and not particularly effective.  And this is a real problem since we are supposed to believe that he is going to be such a challenge for Faith she will have to go “all the way” to defeat him.

Nor was there much to keep our interest in Wesley and Faith’s hunt for him.  It only gets underway late in the episode and consists of little more than beating people up until they learned something.  This is cliché.  And what eventually led them to Angelus was a blatant plot contrivance.  I have trouble believing there was on one shop in LA that sold that obviously mass-produced trinket.

On the whole the plotting might have worked much better if Angelus had actually come after Faith.  That was, in fact, what I thought was going to happen from the way “Salvage” ended.  The only time that he looked like a worthy opponent was when he  turned up at the hotel.  Given the existence of the Sanctuary spell, that was a real plot twist.  And for a while I was in the same position as Fred, not really knowing whether Angelus did have an effective charm against the spell or not.  And I did like the discovery that he didn’t and that his visit was a clever piece of effrontery.  And the subsequent standoff between Faith and Angelus was tense because Angelus held Wesley as a hostage. All of these scenes worked well because Angelus had the initiative and the advantage lay with him.  The audience was left guessing what was coming next and the good guys had to scramble to save the situation.  That is the stuff of drama.

However, for all these weaknesses the storyline of “Release” was still compelling.  And that was because our real focus wasn’t so much on whether or how Faith would catch up with Angelus.  It lay in the way that her resolve to keep to her principles was continually tested and we were never quite sure how she would respond.  Here the shower scene was a very strong way to introduce the idea that she might loose control.  Although no harm came to anyone else Faith clearly suffered a violent breakdown and worse than that she later denied that there was anything wrong:

“Five by five, boss.”

By her denial (in the face of the evidence to the contrary) Faith was showing just how afraid she herself was of what she might do.  And this internal struggle was reflected and dramatized by Wesley testing her  at each stage.  In his willingness to sacrifice himself, to use whatever means necessary to achieve his ends and to sacrifice the most vulnerable and helpless for this purpose Wesley shows us an even grimmer face than we had seen before.  And it is largely because of that, that we understand that following his example is the wrong thing to do.  But the point is that Wesley’s purpose, like Faith's, is to help Angel and because of this he makes it almost seem respectable for her to give into the her darker impulses.  As the Devil well knows this is the best way to break down somone's resistence.  Tempt them by making them think they are doing something desirable or at least necessary to promote the good when you are ultimately helping them to fool themselves and in the event to literally sell their souls as a price for an illusory achievement.  And because this is such a dangerous trap the audience are left asking until the very end whether Faith will fall into it.

And so the suspense builds throughout the episode until it is finally resolved at the very end under the extreme pressure of that fantastic fight between Angelus and Faith on the scaffolding.  It is only there that she finally resolves the conflict within her, refusing to turn back again into what she once was.  And even then the writers have one last twist for us with Angelus seeming to get the upper hand and threatening to turn Faith into a vampire slayer in a rather different sense than the term is normally used.  The great thing about this is that, not only did I not see that coming, I find it difficult to believe that it will happen.  For surely with Faith on Angelus’ side there would be no way back for Angel and then how would the others deal with a combination of Angelus, Faith and the Beastmaster?  Yet at the same time there seems no obvious way to prevent Angelus turning Faith.  That is what you call a cliff-hanger.

 Overview (A)

This is a very strong episode.  It is dark.  We see Gunn and Fred struggling with the legacy of what they have done.  We see Cordelia setting up Connor to take sides against his friends.  We see Wesley, far from changing his attitude for the better in the aftermath of Lilah’s death, becoming an even darker character.  And we see the one hope for progress mired in an internal struggle for her own soul.  But in spite of all this, ultimately this episode shows that, no matter what the difficulties and temptations, human beings can and should make the right choices.  And refreshingly it asserts that there are moral absolutes, lines that you do not cross no matter what temporary advantage they seem to give you.  This is both a reflection on the past choices of members of Angel Investigations and a challenge to them for the future.  And although I have some reservations about the way in which the episode dealt with the hunt by Wesley and Faith for Angelus, there was more than enough drama in Faith’s internal struggle to keep my interest.