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EPISODE 1.20 WAR ZONE
Written by Gary Campbell Directed by David Straiton
A Filler Episode In four of the previous five episodes - "Prodigal", "Eternity", "Five by Five" and "Sanctuary" - the writers have concentrated on issues that, for Angel, are very personal indeed. These issues included his feelings of responsibility for the crimes of Angelus, how those feelings inform his mission and what effect the demon inside him still has on his life. ANGEL, as a series cannot, however, continue to do this week after week. For one thing to do so runs the risk of being repetitive and of diminishing the effect of what we are shown. So the writers have to give us some variety in terms of different types of episodes to balance out the very heavy personal stuff. So, “Warzone” is not really about Angel himself. There is no attempt involve him in a story which speaks directly to a particular experience or concern of his. Instead the focus is very much on the “victim of the week”, although as we shall see “victim” is hardly the appropriate term for Gunn and his gang. By giving us such an episode, at this stage, the writers are providing the series with some balance, which will ultimately work to its benefit.
The Theme of Alienation This does not mean to say that the episode is one-dimensional. Like all ANGEL episodes, it has a clear theme and the story is used to explore that theme. If I were to choose one word to describe that theme it would be "alienation", the sense of being on the outside of normal society and what that means, especially for a person’s view of value of his own life and that others. Do you remember the last scene in "In the Dark" when Angel explains his decision to smash the ring of Amara? When Doyle asked him about the ordinary daytime people he could help from 9 to 5 he replies: “They have help. The whole world is designed for them, so much that they have no idea what goes on around them after dark. They don’t see the weak ones lost in the night, - or the things that prey on them. And if I join them, maybe I’d stop seeing, too.” The idea of Angel helping those lost at night in particular has always been a very attractive one. The foxes may have their holes and the birds their nests but those who exist outside society are at their most vulnerable after dark because they have no secure haven to retreat to. Angel is himself a creature of the night who is also cut off from the rest of society. In “Warzone” this is very well expressed when Lenny Edwards asks him what he wants. The reply is: “What do I want? Good question. Love, family, a place on this planet I can call my own. But you know what… I’m never gonna have any of those things.” For both reasons Angel is, therefore, ideally placed to look out for people in danger from the night. The writers of the series have in fact been a little slow to follow up on this idea but here we have it. For this purpose, they could not have picked a better subject than homeless youth in LA. First of all we do get an authentic sense of the geography of the place - a very real late 20th century inner city urban environment. This is very different from the bland anonymity of Sunnydale. This is bound to make things more real and more meaningful. But secondly, can anything more brutally illustrate the fracturing of society into the safe and comfortable on the one hand and everyone else on the other than the abandonment of children (sixteen year olds at least) to such an environment. Such a scenario was almost made for the introduction of a supernatural threat in the form of vampires. As Cordelia says: “God, 20 minutes ride from billionaires and crab puffs…kids going to war”. There is no doubt about the weakness of the street kids in economic terms. They live in squalid conditions. They “forage” for food (that means they steal it). But their vulnerability goes beyond the mere economic. They are socially excluded as well. This is best illustrated by the speech of Knox, the vampire leader: “Street trash. That’s what they are. Just stupid human street trash. For seventy years we ruled this neighborhood. It was our neighborhood. It used to be decent people lived here, working people. Now, can’t even finish one without wanting to puke.” The ordinary decent working families have moved out. They were merely food sources for the vampires. These street kids are despised and rejected even by them. This hatred goes beyond the mere fact that they pose a threat to the vampires. It mirrors very closely the attitudes of the “working families” themselves, encompassing as it does a sense of superiority and contempt. There was an obvious contrast in the material differences between the multi-billionaire David Nabbit, who had all that money could buy, and the economically disadvantaged kids of downtown LA. Thjere also seems to be some attempt to draw parallels between the social isolation of the kids and that of the billionaire, although Nabbit’s problems illustrate a different type of social exclusion. He too is an outsider looking in on a world he cannot join. His problem is not economic disadvantage. Rather it is a lack of social skills. He would like to meet girls but they do not want to know him. He pays people to attend his parties but gets scant reward. It is because he is such an outsider that he went to the demon brothel and thus became vulnerable to blackmail. I suppose you could say therefore that this was the parallel that was being drawn. Those outside normal human society become vulnerable to the dark forces around it. Nabbitt himself refers somewhat obliquely to this when he talks about the existence of a whole world in LA that no-one ever sees. I am not sure however that , as it stands, either the contrast or the parallel is a particularly successful one. The question that you ask is why is it being drawn? The economic contrasts work well. The social parallels don't. The reasons for Nabbit's social exclusion is very different to the reasons for Gunn's gang in terms the impact it has on those concerned and how they react to it. I have difficult,y therefore, seeing how Nabbit’s situation tells us very much about Gunn or his. It seems therefore that there is no other purpose to the parallel than the parallel itself. If so that seems to me to be a waste of an idea. In spite of their economic weakness and social isolation the street kids are never presented just as a problem or even just as victims. They are independent and self-reliant. As witnessed by the tactics they used against both Angel and the vampire gang they are clever and sophisticated. They seem united; they turn no one away and share what they have. They have a code of behavior that means that when Angel saves Alonna’s life they stop attacking him. In short they seem to have formed an alternative society of their own. But there is no sense here of the writers romanticizing this sense of isolation. The kids have nothing to look forward to and they are under constant threat. This is why they have become suspicious of outsiders. Indeed they have a very hostile attitude to the world in general and not just to those from whom they were under threat. When they first identified Angel as a vampire they could be forgiven for thinking the worst and acting accordingly. But when he had saved Alonna’s life and then came to warn them of their danger and offer them help their reaction wasn’t exactly enthusiastic: Gunn: "I don't think we're interested." Angel: "Yeah. You should be. Who do you think that would have killed? We are fighting on the same side." Chain: "The same side of what?" Angel: "I didn't come here to kill you." Gunn: "It don't matter why you're here, or what you are. If you ever show your face down here again, don't count on any long good-byes." They simply didn’t care why he might be different from any other vampire they had ever known. The explanation for this is that it didn’t matter. He was not part of their little society so regardless of whom he was or what he wanted they would have nothing to do with him. This is an attitude that persists even to the end when Gunn says: “I don’t need no help.” But they do. They fight well but they do seem to be loosing. The members of their little group are dying. Angel himself seems certain of it and he says it several times. “Some of you will die, maybe all of you”. The interesting thing is that no one contradicts him. None of the gang members, least of all Gunn seem to harbor any illusions. And it is Gunn that is the important one here. We do not get to know the gang members individually; but we do not need to. Gunn is not so much their leader as the dominant personality within the gang. Indeed in this episode he is the personification of the gang. In his basic attitudes we are, I think, intended to see a reflection of the mindset of everyone else. So when we say that Gunn seems to be quite fatalistic about their future, that goes for the others too. Angel says he can help them: “unless of course death is what your after. Then you’re on your own.” Gunn’s only reply is that he is always on his own. It is better to die than to accept help from a “some middle class white dude that’s dead”. The gang's isolation in the main stems from the attitude of others. They are despised and rejected. They have to live with that as best they can. But even when help is offered by an outsider it is rejected. Why? It seems that the kids are imbued with a spirit of fatalism, a sense that their lives only have meaning in the integrity of their little band, free from outside interference, and in the fight to survive in the face of the enemy. That struggle is more important even than death. At one point there was a very interesting exchange between brother and sister over Gunn’s attitude to the fight: Alonna: "We're dying here, Gunn." Gunn: "Everybody dies. I'm just trying to make sure that when we die, we stay dead." Alonna: "It shouldn't have gone down the way it did. You're getting reckless." Gunn: "I do what I got to do." Alonna: "No, you do more than you got to do. Three weeks, G. Three weeks and no teeth and you had to ring the dinner bell like that? You just couldn't go another day without getting a little death in, could you?" Gunn: "You think I like this?" Alonna: "No, I think you love it. And you won't quit until you get as close to death as you possibly can." Gunn: "You're wrong." Alonna: "I hope so. - Because I don't want to lose you, too." The implication is that the fight was the only thing Gunn was interested in and he was getting reckless about the consequences. In this respect I found Bobby’s death very interesting. Usually something like that is used as a piece of cheap sentimentality - an opportunity to show how decent and caring everyone one else is. Not here. Gunn seem really very unmoved watching a friend die. And when Alonna said that he needed to go to hospital I thought for a second that he was going to refuse, until Bobby saved everyone the trouble by dying. It certainly seems to me that Alonna was right and that death was what Gunn was after because there really was nothing else. And it is an attitude that is shared by others. It is not that they didn’t understand what they were getting into. They just didn’t care because they did not fear death. In spite of their resilience and their ingenuity they literally are hopeless. They have nothing to hang onto except the fight against the vampires, as Vampire Alonna later describes it – the rage and the grief.
More to Life But ultimately the point about "Warzone" is that there is more to life than that. The turning point comes when Alonna is made into a vampire and tries to tempt Gunn to cross over as well. She does so by portraying the vampire clan as the mirror image of the street kids:
Here Gunn was being confronted with the logic of his own life. If the fight really was all that mattered, then why not become a vampire? He and his gang would be faster, stronger and less vulnerable - altogether more powerful. And as Alonna also pointed out - no more being cold and hungry and no more running and hiding. On the other hand what would they have to lose? But here is where Vampire Alonna overplayed her hand because when she delved into their past as children, she unwittingly reminded Gunn of what he did have to lose:
No doubt we are intended to see in this younger Charles Gunn the same lack of hope and the same fatalism that characterized his older self. That is why he took such needless risks, not just with his own life but with the lives of those whom he dared to follow suit. But, for Alonna at least, he did care. He wasn't prepared to see her sacrifice her life. As he later said of her: "She was the reason, man." There must therefore have been in Gunn some sense of the importance of human life and some hope that his sister may be able to enjoy that life. Because when she did he was obviously left with a sense of having lost something precious and irreplaceable. That is why for him Vampire Alonna was not his sister. When Chain later asks him if was going to kill any vampires, he replied: "I already did." That was all the thing he killed was - a vampire. And it was because he realized that, he also realized the importance of protecting human life where it still existed. That is why ultimately he supported Angel's call for a ceasefire. Of course he is realistic about it. As he said himself:
But it's no longer just about the fight. If it were, then there would have been no ceasefire. That Gunn agreed to it showed that he now believed that the lives of his gang were important. Fighting was necessary only to protect them, not as an end in itself. So we were not being told that the vampires didn’t need to be killed. That would have been unrealistic. They were obviously still a threat and sooner or later they would have to be dealt with. Right from the beginning the writers mixed admiration for what the human spirit is capable of in terms of effort and ingenuity with disapproval of the lack of value placed on human life. We have already seen the way in which Angel’s crtique of Gunn is echoes and reinforced by Alonna. When the same point is being made both by the hero of the series and a member of the gang itself we can, I think, be fairly certain what the writers’ attitude is. Indeed the implication behind the very real warnings given is that unless the gang changes its members will all die. In giving us the contrast between the Gunn that ignored these warnings and the Gunn who acted on them, he writers were showing us the evolution in his attitude as he finally realized that saving his one people’s lives was more important than killing vampires. So, instead of reaffirming the basic hopelessness of the kids’ plight Gunn's change of heart is actually making a statement about the value of human life and the possibilities for it. It gives the ending a hopeful feel. And that is what I like most about the episode.
The PlotA story can proceed at a simple action adventure level. It would have been easy the show us a leaderless rabble being picked off until a hero arrives to organize them and ultimately save them by defeating the bad guys. But this was a far more complex and interesting treatment of the subject. The purpose was not to show the defeat of the bad guys but to show change and development in the attitude of the good guys. At the start Gunn and the others may not care what happens to them, but Angel certainly does. His attitude is, if you like, the counterpoint to the attitude not only of the vampires but also of the gang itself. The story is, then focused on his attempts to persuade the teenage gang that killing vampires is not worth their own deaths. This is a far more challenging task because it is more difficult to pull it off convincingly without being trite. For my money, however, the writers succeeded. And they did so through the medium of the relationship between Gunn and Alonna. Like “Eternity” before it but unlike, say, “I Fall to Pieces” this episode treats Gunn and Alonna, in particular, as real human beings. We get to know them a little, what makes them tick, why they act and react the way they do. Their relationship was never sentimentalized; indeed there was as we have seen plenty of conflict between them. But the nature of the conflict together with the history of past hardships itself showed the affection between them. This helps engage our sympathies in the situation they find themselves in. More than that it makes the actions of the street kids towards both the vampires and Angel believable. And in the context of the plot of “Warzone” this is very important because it is what happens to her that forms the nexus around which this episode turns. She isn’t just a random victim of the vampires. She is deliberately targeted by them because of the feud between them and the street kids. Worse still, instead of simply being killed she is turned, again presumably directly because if her power to influence her brother. And because we know and sympathize with Alonna we feel the pain and pathos of this confrontation. More than that, however, we can understand what the loss meant to Gunn. And of course the conventional expectation would be that he would seek revenge for the deliberate cruelty that the vampires had been responsible for. But in fact, instead of more of the same – a continuation or an escalation of the feud with more death for the gang members - Gunn made a different choice. When confronted by the prospect of a pitched battle he drew back: Angel: “So - do we have a truce? Or do you wanna die?" Gang Member: "Truce? We can take them." Angel: "Not without them taking a couple of you." Gang Member: "Gunn, you came all this way, you're not gonna kill any vamps?" Gunn: "I already did." And it was whether Gunn and his gang would ever reach this point that was the main dramatic focus of “Warzone” as well as being its thematic heart. The tension derives from the question - can the gang be saved. And here is where we see the success of the very fine line trod in depicting the gang. In general this isn't exactly a realistic portrayal of street life for teenagers in LA (not that I would pretend to know about that beyond what I see and read on the media). There is not much evidence of drug or alcohol abuse; no prostitution and street crime is certainly downplayed. Instead the picture is given an almost “Robin Hood” feel to it. Then you may wonder how accurately the situation is portrayed when there is only one human gang involved. You would have thought that the sort of activity undertaken by Gunn’s little group would have attracted the interest of other gangs with the potential for rivalry. Finally, of course, we have the total absence of interest from the police. Still, given the nature of a fantasy program, realism in these terms is not perhaps the highest priority and this is not something I would hold very strongly against the episode. Nevertheless what we see does give us a feel of a group existing outside the law with its own internal rules but respecting no-one outside and because there is a basic sense of justice and fair play in these rules and because we can admire their efforts to survive, that survival does become important. If it were not the entire episode would be an exercise in pointlessness. Angel’s attempt to change the collective mindset of the teenage gang initially fails, as you would expect. After all if he had changed the gang’s way of thinking in the early stages of the episode there would not have been much of a story to tell. But just as important, his failure was realistic, also because of the group dynamic that the writers so carefully built up. An outsider, especially a vampire, could not possibly change such a deep-rooted mindset as existed in the gang. And this is another good thing about this aspect of the episode. There is a recognition in it that compared with experience mere words have very little impact. As Angel himself says at the end: “What am I gonna tell you that you haven’t already learned.” It wasn’t therefore Angel who changed minds. But equally, as the hero of the series, he could hardly have been a mere observer. Another thing that worked for me, therefore, was the way in which Angel was able to use the situation that had developed. It has long been clear that vampires are both hierarchical and territorial. As far back as “In the Dark” Angel had staked a claim to LA when he says to Spike: “You think you can come to my town and pull *this* crap?” He is even more explicit here, first to Lenny Edwards and then to the vampire gang. His concern is not to kill vampires but to save life. Vampire leadership has evidently been settled by brute force. By killing Knox, and by claiming the territory of LA, Angel was behaving in a way that vampires would instantly understand and respect. This and Angel taking advantage of Gunn’s new perspective avoided the possibility of the final battle in which members of Gunn’s gang would undoubtedly have been killed. This seems to me to be another example of ANGEL as a series avoiding the quick, neat ending with a fight that settles the issue. Yes it was somewhat anti-climactic but I quite like that here because there was a point to it. The point was that the gang kids should not just throw their lives away because they could not trust outsiders or because they had no hope of a better life. So much for the ‘A’ plot. When an ANGEL episode does have a ‘B’ plot, there is usually a point to it. Here it seems to serve two purposes. I have already discussed David Nabbit's role in "Warzone" thematically. Dramatically, he is a plot device that allows the street kids to identify Angel as a vampire and then “introduce” themselves to him. But there was one jarring note to it. In the course of this sub-plot we see Cordelia, the former insider, who now finds herself on the outside and wants back in. This was very true to Cordelia and was entirely in keeping with the theme of the night. That was good use of her character and it was also fun as far as it went. I very much enjoyed the way she maneuvered David Nabbitt into throwing a party for her benefit. That was classic Cordelia. I disliked intensely, however, the scene between her and Wesley at the end. In her scene with Russell in “City of..” we have already seen Cordelia reduced to the state where she might have become in effect a prostitute. But that was when she was reduced to desperation and didn’t even have money to buy food. Now, there is nothing inherently implausible about Cordelia thinking about using her charms to get what she wants from a wealthy man. It is not even out of the question that in certain circumstances she might even sleep with a man she wasn’t attracted to for the same purpose. But I find it unbelievable that she would start talking openly about prostituting herself. It is much more likely that she would start by thinking of providing “companionship” or using some other such euphemism. Then she would start thinking about the implications about such a relationship, realize its true nature and then drop the idea. I just found the dialogue here grating and untrue to character.
Overview (C+)The theme of alienation in this episode was not particularly profound but it was intelligently handled and really quite an attractive one on a human level. The writers showed how social and economic exclusion can destroy any value that a person might put on life, whether their own or someone else’s. But the conclusion is a hopeful one. The message seemed to be that Gunn discovered, too late, that human life is still too valuable to waste. Indeed, in Gunn and, to a lesser extent, David Nabbitt the writers gave us two interesting and sympathetic characters through whom we could follow the questions posed by them as they explored their theme. So, “Warzone” is very far from a simple action adventure tale. But those elements in it are undeniably well done. The pitched battle between Vampires and the street kids at the beginning was exciting There was excellent use of the open space to give an idea of the scale of the battle and some memorable individual shots such as the vamp dusted in mid leap. But undoubtedly my favorite was the action sequence which began with Angel’s one on one fight with the demon and then continued without a break as he was chased through the streets and into the booby-trapped building. This was one of the best I have seen on either ANGEL or BtVS. The action was continually moving with dangers arising from every angle almost before the viewer could take in what was happening.
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