I've tried to make the script for this video entirely self-contained.
However it's viewing is enhanced greatly by having watched two previous videos of mine.
The Buffy episode guides for Lie to Me & Amends
Respectively.
Both are linked, in the description
During Angel's run, the series experienced two reinventions where the very skeleton of
the show itself was changed.
I mentioned in the last episode guide that there had already been a shift away from the
case of the week with Angel as the protective guardian, to a greater focus on our trio of
do-gooders.
But Five By Five cauterizes that change and uses the Ragin Slayer to reintroduce Angel's
mission statement.
This is a terrific episode, and a fan favorite for good reason.
I have a couple issues with it here and there but it reminds me of the Buffy episode Passion.
Like Passion the final act leaves me holding my breath, and elevates 5by5 to one of my
favorite episodes of the series.
In this video I also want to have a discussion about Faith's arc, and since Faith is a
former psychological symbol of Buffy's and works as a direct analogy to Angel, there
is a lot to talk about.
Pay close attention to this one and Sanctuary.
These are linchpins for both shows in what they have to say about love, redemption, Sunnydale,
LA, Buffy, and Angel.
Five by Five begins with a rather long and epic previously-on covering a full season
plus two episodes of Buffy.
A street criminal is being chased by three demon assassins when Angel and Wesley roll
up and save him.
Again, I'm always pleasantly surprised by the show's willingness to "go there"
with demon gore.
It's definitely something unique to Angel the Series.
At the bus station Faith appears in a reveal that always gives me a little chill, and mugs
a low life for his jacket and abode.
Faith already looks "Angel'd up" from the hyper saturated Buffy Season 4.
Her time since the church is wearing heavily on her.
In flashback we see Angel killing the Romani girl that would eventually lead to his reensoulment.
Then follows a bit of an odd sequence.
While Angel tries to save the soul of the ruffian, Cordy says all men are nothing but
surface.
Cut to where Faith dances up on a girl's boyfriend and he doesn't care.
Faith decks the girlfriend.
The guy tries to hit her her and she takes him out.
This begins a melee in the bar which Faith dances her way through as though it isn't
there.
There are a few things going on here.
One of which I'll save until the end of the video.
First the bit with the couple works as a sort of a pantomime callback to what happened with
Riley and Buffy in Sunnydale, where Riley slept with someone who wasn't his girlfriend
(skipping over the consent issue here - you can go watch the episode guide for that discussion)
and then Faith ended up hurting both of them in the process.
The dancing through the melee also works symbolically for her willingness to just ignore the chaos
she's created and acting the way she always has.
Just close your eyes and keep dancing.
Just keep dancing.
I like the themes.
It's just the excectuion plays out a little campy to me.
Slightly Benny Hill.
*BENNY HILL THEME
In court, Evil Bazinga and Lindsey are about to close a case when Angel brings in the reformed
ruffian and turns over Lindsey's apple cart.
Lindsey and Evil Bazinga scheme to get Faith to kill Angel, and Lillah wants in.
Lillah finds Faith at a bar.
F: I guess we can go somewhere and talk.
But I'm less of a talker.
More of a doer.
L: I think you misunderstood my intentions.
The evil trio makes Faith their offer in exchange for killing Angel and Evil Bazinga makes the
mistake of thinking he's in charge.
Faith politely corrects him.
Bazinga.
Bazinga.
Bazinga.
Back in flashback, a newly ensouled Angel returns to Darla who is confused:
What is this?
Have you met someone else.
"I'm not playing - I just want to feel something else besides the cold.
Don't you feel the cold, Darla?"
Darla kicks him out and Angel tries to feed again but his conscience won't let him.
Faith tries an old trick she'd used on Angel before.
*shooting Angel in the back montage.
It doesn't work.
Angel suggests team Angel split up.
His persistent early attempts to keep people away from him in the first season ARE part
of the point of the first season but, after it has gone badly often enough it starts to
feel a little Cabin in the Woods level satire.
Later that
day Faith tosses Angel a gun to see if he'll shoot her.
He aims for her torso.
Don't know why he throws the gun back to her, blanks or no but she uses it to try and
needle him harder into action.
201
At her place Dennis tries not to let Cordy and Wes in (I LOVE DENNIS) but when he finally
does Faith is there.
"I also believe you're a good person."
"What do you believe now?"
This may be as significant an episode for Wesley as for anyone else.
If everyone on Angel is in LA to atone for something, then the need for Wesley's redemption
was created from failure as Faith's watcher.
This moment with Faith gives him a real chance to atone for his previous failures.
Wesley absolutely knows he can't overpower her.
If he can avoid playing into her game, letting her actions inflame his anger, and just find
some way to get through to...
Okie dokie.
Instead, Wesley acts quickly and violently, without consideration of the cost.
It may be a fistpump moment watching Wesley stand up to the out of control Slayer who
has been taking a wrecking ball to all the people we care about, but it's significant
that Wesley just forfeited this possibility of atonement for vengeance, and validated
the toxic behavior of someone in a suicidal tailspin - who is trying desperately to convince
everyone that she is not worth saving.
It's a shocking moment and more important than it may seem.
This begins a remarkable scene between them.
A case study in dramatic tension and character.
It's incredibly tense but there's very little violence shown in the shot.
Everything is implied.
Hinted at.
The actual horror isn't onscreen.
And what makes it work are just monumental performances from Dushku and Denisof, along
with some pitch-perfect musical coverage.
As strong as he is in this scene, Faith's attempts to terrorize Wesley worked on me
completely.
"We've done blunt.
But that still leaves hot, cold, sharp, and loud."
Uhh...can we go with tickle?
In an episode that wasn't quite holding together for me, this scene is Giles' walk
up the stairs to La Boheme.
There's no looking away from this moment on.
W: "I was your Watcher Faith.
I know the real you.
And even if you kill me there's just one thing I want you to remember.
You...are a piece of sh..."
F: "You should talk."
We've seen Wesley's vulnerability in earlier episodes but this episode gives us a glimpse
of something darker.
Something...more vengeful.
It is also the end of bumbling Wesley.
As the series has gone on there has been growing pattern of rashness or impulsivity revealed
in Wesley's character.
*demon face
It appears that Faith is succeeding in convincing everyone else what she is.
"You're nothing.
Disgusting murderous bitch.
You're nothing.
You're disgusting."
The bad guy.
As Angel tracks her down Faith looks emptily at a shard of glass covered in Wesley's
blood which she drops half heartedly in the alley.
I wondered if it was to bait Angel closer with the smell.
But after making Faith a terrifying character through the torture of another character that
I already loved, Dushku and company did enough with one single shot to completely restore
my empathy for her.
It's kind of a marvel.
In the shard of glass we see the horror of what she's done and in her expression we
see her horror at who she is.
As Faith menaces Wesley with a blowtorch, Angel comes to save the day.
This is a terrific fight but what makes it work for me so much more are Angel's lines
during the brawl.
First he cuts instantly to the quick of her braggadocious artifice
A: This isn't about Wesley.
This is about you and me.
F: No baby he's payback.
A: For what?
I thought you were happy being the way you are.
He is SO incisive in this scene.
This could be one of my favorite Angel moments in the series.
The writer's using EVERYTHING that he is so he can save someone.
Wesley breaks loose and so does the fight.
But it's important the way Angel fights.
Never really with initiative.
He deflects.
He drains.
But he doesn't really attack.
When she lunges with a stake, Angel takes the fight outside.
"I wish I could make the world a better place for you to wake up in.
But the hard pill to swallow is that once I'm gone, your days are just plain numbered."
And as Angel strips away Faith's reasons for attacking him, her real intention starts
to become clear.
A: You think I don't know what you're after, I do.
Wesley cuts himself free and grabs a knife to jump into the fray.
But in the alleyway, Faith's defense is crumbling.
Before we go any further let's look at what has lead up to this moment to try and understand
the characters in the Buffyverse in a way we haven't before.
We've spoken at great lengths now about the show's philosophy and portrayal of the
soul as the moral compass.
And how it is the moral compass that enables us to make choices that might be contrary
to our own self-interests, as varied as those self interests may be.
In other words, the soul is what empowers us with genuine free will and the possibility
of making choices that fill our life with meaning.
To this point we've also spoken vaguely about the role that love has played in the
philosophical model.
Buffy's show makes clear that one of the reasons for her longevity as the Slayer is
the love she shares for the people around her.
Mother, Father in Giles, and Xander and Willow.
"You're the Slayer, and we're the Slayerettes."
But I've also suggested that the soulless and the evil in the Buffyverse can love.
Lacking a soul doesn't make you incapable of loving, just incapable of loving selflessly.
To put it all into perspective, it's useful if we take a look at the three Slayer's
we've met in the Buffyverse so far, Faith, Buffy, and Kendra, all three of which have
souls.
Loosely the three of them actually work quite well as symbols for Freud's three aspects
of the human personality.
The ID, the Ego, and the Superego.
The ID, Faith in this case, is our inner child.
The ID is the source of every impulsive desire we have towards loving and be loved, joy,
rage, and post adolescence, sex.
As much as we might intellectualize and romanticize our ability to love,
babies aren't born with any sense of duty or purpose, but obviously are attached to
and show affection for their mothers from birth.
Attachment and affection are just terms that fall under the broad umbrella spectrum by
which we define love.
And as we get older and become more complex, so too do the ways in which we desire and
show affection for the people closest to us.
Kendra, symbolically would be the superego, pursuing duty and the ideals of the Watchers
to a fault, almost totally at the expense of love, friends, or indulgence of any earthly
impulses.
This element of personality is not the soul itself but it requires one in order to be
present.
Which is why vampires are all ID monster.
For now Buffy is the ego, or balance between.
Walking the tightrope between the passionless Superego
"That emotion you're feeling right now?
That's anger."
And the reckless and impulsive ID "But we don't get to pass judgement on people,
like we're better than everybody else.."
--- "We ARE better."
But Buffy's show is about becoming an adult that lives with authenticity, which to me
means accepting an ongoing process of integrating the impulses of her ID and the demands of
her superego into her own unified identity.
In other words someone who loves herself while always striving to be better.
And the engine of that process is living an examined life.
"You must be so disappointed in me."
"No."
"Oh but I know you, Anne.
So afraid, so pathetically determined to run away from whatever you used to be.
To disappear.
Congratulations.
You got your wish."
"I'm Buffy, the Vampire Slayer and you are?"
"Before I became the Slayer I was... well I don't want to say shallow, but... let's
just say a certain person who shall remain nameless, let's call her "Spordelia", looked
like a classical philosopher next to me."
Becoming a better human being is not simply a matter of environmental coincidence combined
with the inevitability of time but requires a healthy (as in non-neurotic) amount of introspection.
We can't actually make a meaningful choice if we deny what we've done or who we genuinely
are in this moment.
And, to some degree, Angel's show is more full of characters grappling with that ongoing
process of adulthood than Buffy's.
"Then it's like I'm still being punished."
"Punished?
For what?"
"For who I was.
For the things I did in High School."
"Well we all got something to atone for."
"The council was right to sack me."
"What do you want Angel?"
"I want...forgiveness…"
"And that's the truth."
As I've said before, if Buffy is principally a show about growing up, then Angel is a show
about being adult.
It's important to make the distinction that just because Kendra and Faith work well as
symbols, doesn't mean they aren't also complex characters.
Kendra had human impulses but denied them in the name of duty.
Faith acts almost entirely impulsively but there has always been indications that she
wants to be more.
As when she fell victim to Gwendolyn Post's manipulations or even her subconscious dream
self giving Buffy the key to defeating the Mayor.
There is much evidence in the Buffyverse to suggest that a necessary balance for living
a moral, ethical life of meaning is love.
Friends.
Family.
Partners.
As the title suggests with Out of Sight, Out of Mind - Marcie's inability to connect
with anyone around her eventually lead her to turn completely invisible and, following
that, insane.
Her's is not simply a hedonistic spree of violence.
"The loneliness.
The constant exile.
She has gone mad."
Jonathan's inability to connect with anyone lead to his suicide attempt in the clocktower,
where Buffy tried to share with him the perspective that everyone is suffering.
Everyone is turned inward.
But rather than developing that empathy for everyone else and letting that bring some
peace to his own pain, in Superstar he made himself the nexus of everyone's focus.
"Jonathan you can't keep trying to fix everything with some, grand gesture."
One way or another, our innate desire to love and be loved must be grappled with.
But I wouldn't dare oversimplify as to say that the reason Faith committed evil was because
she wasn't loved enough.
We all suffer loneliness and loss and cruelty.
But certainly Faith came to Sunnydale with some open wounds and lacking the tools for
closure.
She makes no mention of her father but her mother is dead and we can infer what her upbringing
was like:
"Mom was so busy, you know, enjoying the drinking and passing out parts of life, that
I never really got what I wanted."
She also witnessed her Watcher's grisly murder.
She has a use-them-and-lose-them attitude to any men in her life.
They are not a source for connection.
"All men are beasts Buffy."
But she and Buffy were, for a few episodes, on the verge of making that necessary connection
for her, before the recklessness and impulsiveness which she brought along with her to Sunnydale
causes a morally abhorrent act that she can't take back.
And she reacts as someone with a hungry unfed ID might, unable to take any responsibility
for her actions.
"The bodies gone.
I weight it and dumped it.
It never happened."
Her denial causes a permanent rift with the one person she might've had a healthy connection
to.
And I think perhaps having been the victim of some monstrous acts in her lifetime, the
only way she can understand Alan's murder is that she too much be a monster.
With that, Faith tumbles into darkness.
Abandoning free will for the only source of connection she can find.
The problem is that the Mayor was soulless and because of that the mayor's love could
only be conditional.
In this case upon his being able to control her.
"Replacing Mr. Trick was problem enough."
- "Shoes shoes shoes."
He didn't hold Faith to any higher moral standard, as Buffy, Xander, and Willow hold
each other, because he was incapable of one himself.
But he did love her, and one of his final acts on earth was to leave a message, and
one last shot at Buffy.
After the body swap, in Who Are You, Faith gets a taste of a life she's always wanted.
A mother who loves her.
Friends who include her.
A tender intimate boyfriend.
And people who express great gratitude towards her for being the Slayer.
Her decision to go to the church is her first moral choice since Alan's death.
But she doesn't want to live as Buffy has.
She wants to be Buffy.
Because she…
Is tainted.
When Five By Five begins, we find her dancing, alone, eyes closed as the violent consequences
of her actions domino around her.
This scene is so reminiscent of another that I think we might interpret what she's imagining
as she moves alone across the floor.
And the name of the club is Club Hell.
A callback to another episode, Anne, when Buffy abandoned her calling and ended up a
nameless nothing in a hell dimension surrounded by victim's she couldn't save.
"What is hell, but the substantive absence of hope?
The tactile proof of despair."
But in Faith's hell, she is the devil.
The rotten and selfish monster, ignoring choice and freewill, because not doing so would mean
having to take responsibility for deeds she can't take back.
F: What if you had Buffy?
And Giles was my watcher.
Do you think you'd still be sitting here right now.
Or would Giles be sitting in that chair?
Or is it just fate?
And there's not choice.
You were going to be here no matter what?
Think about that stuff?
...I don't.
It's a hell in which she is the evil person she's afraid she is, constantly escalating
the violence with a single specific purpose in mind.
In the finale she regularly refers to herself as bad which we can interpret in this case
as someone who has murdered.
And she uses the same term for Angel.
"Come on Angel.
I thought you were bad."
And since she had a soul and murdered several people she thought she might be able to get
Angel to kill her, if given enough incentive.
She even tests if Angel he's ready to go all the way.
"You didn't shoot to kill.
We're going to have to up the stakes a little."
But somewhere inside, the spark is burning her.
Just as Faith story parallels Buffy going to LA to escape herself and ending up in Hell,
there were two instances of Angel attempting suicide because he had given up hope.
The first I pointed out earlier in Buffy Season 1 Episode 7, and the second is in Amends.
To be clear though, the weight of the soul may often be a source of despair, regret,
and hopelessness but suicide is still an act that emerges from our ID.
Which is why Spike is capable of attempting it.
It's an act motivated to remove oneself from suffering, pain done to you or the pain
of the what you've done.
Coupled with the belief that things are truly hopeless.
That either we lack the ability to affect actual change in our lives.
Or that we don't deserve it.
"Am I a thing worth saving?"
After Angel decides to keep fighting, his first real client, was actually Faith in Consequences.
"You don't have to disappear into the darkness Faith."
Think about the original mission statement in the first season: Angel investigations
we help the hopeless.
Wesley botched Angel's chance there but here in the final scene of the episode, despite
all the horror she is capable of inflicting on him and his family, Angel's unwillingness
to kill her, and to bear every brutal punch and let her beat her self-hatred against the
shoreline, is an immutable act of compassion.
Finally, for Faith, and after she's done absolutely everything she can to prove she
doesn't deserve it, an act of selfless authentic love.
And if she's worth that, then maybe it follows that there's hope.
After all, the episode in which Faith premiered was called Faith, Hope, and Trick, which was
a play on Corinthian's 13:13
And now these three remain, faith, hope, and love.
But the greatest of these is love.
701
It's complicated.
It's beautiful.
It's gut wrenching.
I love this episode.
The psychological mechanics going on are absolutely lovely.
And as much as I may have a complaint or two about the opening, the back half is flawless
and just emotionally devastating.
Wesley dropping the knife is one of the most beautiful and cinematic shots in the series.
If Angel lacked a Big Bad before, Wesley, Lillah, and Evil Banzinga scheming to have
him killed certainly cements their role in the Angelverse.
In this series we've been using Buffy and Angel as mediums for discussing life, philosophy
and psychology, but I believe it's important to make an addendum to this one.
As much as I think the characters work as interesting models for authentic living, they're
are always saved by another's love.
Angel is saved from the void by Buffy.
Twice.
Jonathan.
And here Faith.
And that works well in drama.
But the hard truth is that oftentimes, our suffering is solitary - our self-hatred, something
that we flay ourselves with from the shadows.
As I've said in other videos, part of finding the will to go and get the rock is not just
believing that there are things worth fighting for, but accepting that you are one of them.
In truth, I'm not sure that unconditional love exists except in our capacity to give
our own away freely, including to ourselves.
And whatever has come before, there is in every passing moment an opportunity to create
good.
That's hope.
Which has ended up being my reason to hike back down the hill for another go with rock.
The hope that in a day or so, I'll create something new that might provide someone a
moments peace.
I don't always, but it happens sometimes.
And when it does, it's enough.
She's like us.
She's a monster now.
She's an innocent victim.
So were we.
Once upon a time.
...once upon a time.
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