The Buffyverse Character Countdown (#11)

#11.

Hero: Charles Gunn (Angel Seasons 1-5)

All of the heroes going forward are main cast members for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. Moreover, I do not mean this insofar that the characters made the title card – after all, Connor, Dawn, Riley, Oz, and Tara all made the title cards. I mean that these characters have a presence in the series such that the shows’ identity is contingent upon their personalities and arcs. These characters are the meat, of sorts, for Buffy and Angel; while certain criteria may have ended up putting these characters into a particular order, all of them are spectacularly written and have their share of excellent character-centric episodes in addition to individual bits in other episodes. That said, it will be progressively harder for me to cover everything about their characters, and I won’t be able to investigate the ins and outs of every single character-centric episode that they have. With these entries, I’ll be doing my best to cover those developments that I feel are most important to understanding these characters from a critical perspective, though I do realize that I will probably be missing some details. With that said, let’s get to Charles Gunn… the normal character on Angel.

It’s hard to call a 90s gangster rap stereotype turned vampire hunter a “normal” character, but, as compared to the exceedingly quirky and supernaturally talented cast of Angel, Gunn is decidedly commonplace. Though often cast as the “muscle” of the group, he’s neither the strongest nor the most aggressive member of Angel Investigations. More often than not, Gunn serves to ground the series’ philosophical and supernatural curves and pull them back into a narrative that makes some sense to the viewer. He’s one of the most resolute and determined characters in the entire Buffyverse, always doing what he thinks is best to protect his friends, family, and community. Moreover, his genuine loyalty towards Los Angeles makes him a novelty in the entire Buffyverse – he’s a character who can truly claim to be dedicated to his community as opposed to the general good.

Given that his neighborhood is beset by bloodthirsty vampires, Gunn grows up tough and brusque. Throughout his adolescent years, Gunn leads a gang of renegade vampire hunters and demon killers to patrol the “Badlands” of Los Angeles. The only person keeping him sane throughout his chaotic life is his little sister Alonna, a wide-eyed, impressionable young girl whose neck practically screams “drink me.” After all, this is the Buffyverse we’re dealing with: the place where innocence comes to die. Initially, Gunn displays hostility towards Angel and his friends when they try to eliminate the local vampire nest, but he soon accepts their assistance when Alonna is kidnapped, raped, and turned into a vampire. Soon thereafter, Gunn becomes a regular ally of Angel Investigations, eventually joining the firm proper and leaving his team to take care of vampires in the neighborhood without him… another decision that will come to haunt him.

Gunn’s characterization throughout the first two seasons of Angel is simple but decent. It’s clear that the death of his sister haunts him, so he keeps making decisions that he feels might have saved her life – decisions, which, for the most part, are exceedingly reckless and require putting his body into physical danger. His choices of weaponry and companionship are often quite hazardous, putting him into more danger than necessary, especially given that Angel is twice as strong as he is and can take on more enemies than him. It is Cordelia who finally manages to knock some sense into Gunn, if only because she reminds him of his sister. Nonetheless, it’s Gunn’s willingness to put everything on the line for his friends that makes him one of the most reliable members of Angel Investigations. Plus, his blunt humor is a great counterbalance to Wesley’s wit, Cordelia’s snark, and Angel’s sarcasm; he’s at once the straight man to everyone else and the one whose bullseyes are the most fun in the entire series.

That said, Gunn’s bull-headedness leads him into trouble – for both the better and the worse. For the worse, there are episodes like “Double or Nothing,” in which we learn that Gunn once sold his soul in order to get a pick-up truck to defend the Badlands – quite possibly the single most hilariously bad episode of Angel. For the better, there are episodes like “That Old Gang of Mine,” in which Gunn’s choice to leave vampire-hunting to his gang ends up costing the innocent demon, Merl, his life and Angel Investigations the near destruction of Caritas. Without Gunn’s moral clarity to guide them, Gunn’s gang falls under the leadership of a psychopath named Gio who uses their firepower to go on a killing spree of all things non-human. Within a fraught, suspense-ridden episode, Gunn must choose between his new allies and his original allies – a choice that puts him in an uncomfortable position. Fortunately for him, Fred and Cordelia end up making that decision for him by enabling the demons to fight back against Gio’s terror, but Gunn’s inability to defend Angel and company when necessary puts him on the rocks with both Angel and Wesley, the latter of which already has tremendous antagonism towards him… for very different reasons.

We thus come to one of the more controversial elements of Gunn’s character: his relationship with Fred. Some people really do like the relationship between Gunn and Fred, find it completely believable, and think the two should have remained together throughout the entire series. I am not one of these people. Gunn and Fred’s relationship might be essentially harmless, but it is juvenile in a way Fred and Wesley’s later relationship is not, for while Wesley appears to be genuinely in love with Fred, Gunn is in love with an ideal of Fred. He finds her cute and spunky, and she finds him caring and protective, but there isn’t much connective tissue to their relationship other than that. Thus, when Fred shows off the darker side of her personality in “Supersymmetry,” Gunn cannot bear to see his significant other stain her otherwise stain-free morality with an act of revenge. Thus, when Fred tries to kill the man who exiled her to another dimension, Gunn performs the deed himself to spare Fred from doing the deed herself. He wants to keep Fred pure rather than merely accepting her flaws or – as Wesley does – helping her to confront them and move past them. In a way, he’s somewhat possessive of Fred, and it doesn’t necessarily reflect well upon him. To his credit, he doesn’t throw a tantrum when Fred eventually breaks up with him, but the sour taste of his relationship with Fred takes a while to fade. His later relationship with Gwen Raiden is ultimately far more balanced and believable – if only we’d gotten to see more of that earlier.

That said, not all of Gunn’s character flaws necessarily work against him on the character level. While his relationship with Fred serves to pad out the plot and artificially lengthen the delay between Fred and Wesley’s later romance, his selfish actions throughout Season Five are entirely believable, and the insecurity at the heart of his actions compels the audience in a way few other character flaws do. Now thrust into the middle of Wolfram & Hart’s operations, Gunn is given a boost in legal knowledge and lawyerly articulation such that he can win pretty much any case for the firm. He goes from a high school drop-out to a top law school grad in a manner of minutes, and the newfound talent goes to his head. When Wolfram & Hart’s senior partners then pull the plug on his abilities, Gunn’s impetuousness and anxieties get to his head, and he approves of a secondary operation to restore his powers, not realizing that the small favor he performs in exchange for the operation could prove dangerous. This same favor – getting a certain sarcophagus through customs – ends up costing one of his most beloved teammates her life. Gunn immediately repents for his actions and gives up his gifts, but his fault has definite consequences, as he’s both stabbed by Wesley and sent into a dimension of torment while the rest of Angel Investigations tries to strategize a method of defeating the Circle of the Black Thorn. While this flaw certainly does lose Gunn some virtue points, it does make his arc all the more fascinating; there’s a little element of Sophoclean tragedy in the narrative that really does work.

Though Gunn is a very flawed hero, and I’d be somewhat skeptical if anyone said that he were his or her favorite character in the Buffyverse, I do think that he’s an overall great contribution to the cast. He’s got consistent motivation, well-paced character arcs, strong humor, tremendous likeability, and some quality acting to boot. J. August Richards can praise himself on a job well done, performing one of the most difficult characters in either series with charm and presence. Apparently, Gunn dies after the final beats of “Not Fade Away,” but the impact he left on the series leaves him in the middle of a fight worthy of being his last stand. Gunn’s more than just muscle; he’s a character with a complete heart and mind.

Villain: Darla (Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 1, Angel Seasons 2-3)

For some, it might be odd that the mother of the House of Aurelius misses out on the top ten, especially given that all three of her children did earn spots within its ranks, but Darla has enough baggage in her characterization to hold her back. Granted, not all of the bad factors within Darla’s character arc are necessarily her fault; nearly all of them stem from her being involved in Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s horrible first season, a season in which her character isn’t developed in the slightest and in which Joss Whedon, in all honesty, did not even care who Darla was. However, her re-emergence in Angel is one of the most shocking and rewarding villainous events in the entire Buffyverse. For the season and a half that we get to spend with Darla in Angel, she becomes the villain that Angel deserved but sorely lacked in the first season.

The most lethal child of the Master, Darla was originally a prostitute living in 16^th century Britain. After contracting a fatal case of syphilis and turning her back on the church, Darla ends up being turned into a vampire after willingly embracing death in the form of the Master’s bite, becoming one of the single most lethal vampires in history. Her main feeding tactic: feigning physical weakness before muscular men and then sucking them dry. She eventually sires Angelus from the low-life once known as Liam, taking him on as both a lover and an apprentice. However, over the course of seven years, Angelus proves himself to be the far more psychotic vampire, and he convinces Darla to elope with him and leave the Master’s service, forming a lethal family of their own once Angelus sires Drusilla and Drusilla sires Spike. The four become the most lethal vampire group in history, up until the point where a band of Roma grant Angelus a soul and turn him into Angel. Hereupon, Darla rejects her charge and continues her rampage on her own, once again casting her lot with the Master and traveling to Sunnydale in order to open the Hellmouth.

It is important to note that Darla is a landmark villain in the Buffyverse, as she is the first vampire – and, indeed, the first villain – we ever see in the series. In the pilot episode, “Welcome to the Hellmouth,” Darla kills a former student within the halls of Sunnydale High as a warning to the Slayer that vampires were willing to kill anyone and everyone in the area. It’s a lovely little fake-out; one would think that the lumbering Chris Boal would be the real threat, but the monster is instead the Catholic schoolgirl. In the same episode, she sires Jesse, one of Xander’s closest friends, establishing that villainous actions within Buffy the Vampire Slayer have tangible consequences. Unfortunately for Darla, her strong presence in the beginning of the season is undercut by her pathetic appearance and death in “Angel.” Though her scheme to have Buffy and Angel is one of the more clever villainous schemes in Season One, the final battle between her and the heroic couple is pathetic, what with Darla toting two pistols as her primary weapons. It’s such an out of character appearance for every other vampire in the series; at no point does she ever feel threatening in the manner she does in her first appearance. Plus, her being subordinate to the goofy, flaccid Master is another huge strike against her as an early series antagonist.

Her appearances on Angel, however, change everything.

The ending of Angel’s first season brings us information about the mysterious Shanshu Prophecy, which foretells that Angel will eventually conquer the evils of Wolfram & Hart and become human. Throughout Season Two, Angel’s impatience to reach this goal comes to a peak, leaving him uniquely vulnerable to the forces of evil. This is where Wolfram & Hart’s plan to resurrect Darla comes into play. Darla, now a resurrected human, uses her knowledge of magic to implant sexual dreams of herself into Angel’s mind, seducing Angel without even being close to him. All of these schemes are designed such that Angel might experience a moment of true happiness, triggering his transformation into Angelus, the most dangerous vampire in history. It’s here wherein Darla’s classic femme fatale character traits truly get a chance to shine, as she tries every manipulation possible to cause Angel to lose his soul.

These schemes soon come to an end, however, as Darla’s newfound humanity begins to sink in. In her eponymous episode in the series, her guilt for all of the various atrocities she’s committed over the centuries starts to sink in, and she becomes practically suicidal. It’s in this episode that we bear witness to her entire backstory and her relationship with Angelus, one of the rockiest and most tumultuous in the series. This is also the first time in the series in which we get to see the initial impact of a vampire’s regaining her soul; after all, in “Becoming Part 1,” we only get to see flashbacks of Angel when he’d had his soul for a century or so. Darla has all of her self-destructive, PTSD symptoms rush upon her at once, and her inability to cope with her misdeeds brings her to ask Angel to turn her back into a vampire. Unlike Angel and (eventually) Spike, Darla sees her humanity as truly monstrous, preferring a life of moral black as opposed to one of moral grey. She’d rather be a monster than feel as if she were a monster. Certainly, she’s able to do some pretty nasty things as a human – killing guards, trying to seduce Angel, sexually manipulating Lindsey – but these actions pale in comparison to her vampiric deeds, and she feels guilty for the whole swath of them.

Darla presents a true test for Angel unlike any other antagonist in the entire series. Angel’s ultimate telos throughout the series is an arc of redemption for all of the evils he has committed as Angelus; by eventually becoming a human after fulfilling his destiny, he comes to a fullness of moral being a vampire cannot truly attain on its own. He earns the soul he has been cursed with every single day. Darla has been granted moral clarity accidentally, and she is no longer able to function within that framework. Angel thus has a chance to serve as a mentor for someone going through the process of earning his morality, like an alcoholic guiding another through the 12-step process. Angel has already done this for Faith; Darla is the next most difficult challenge. However, Angel, currently impatient for a soul of his own, has clouded his own moral compass and is only able to gain Darla’s trust through acts of reckless self-sacrifice. Thus, instead of the audience’s feeling frustrated when Darla is once again turned into a vampire by Wolfram & Hart, since all of Angel’s efforts up until that point are rendered fruitless, we feel horrified and saddened. No matter how hard Angel tries, he’s just not complete enough yet to save her.

Darla’s actions as a newly sired vampire, though, are compelling and villainous enough in their own right. No sooner does Darla get revived and convinced back into the world of evil by Drusilla than does she come up with her most devious and bloodthirsty scheme in the entire series: locking herself into a room with all of Wolfram & Hart’s junior partners and turning the place into a bloodbath. She personally takes out Holland Manners – a villain who, up to that point, is the most nefarious villain we’d encountered in the series – in a truly chilling scene. She leaves alive only Lindsey and Lilah, both of whom she intends to manipulate in order to prevent Wolfram & Hart from tracking her down while she turns Los Angeles into her own personal playground. Her villainous focus is laser-guided upon turning Angel back into Angelus. Moreover, she actually comes close; when Angel, depressed after realizing that Wolfram & Hart cannot be defeated with raw force, encounters Darla in “Reprise,” the two actually do have sex, Angelus’s standard trigger. However, instead of producing happiness, this roll in the sack actually leads Angel to have a moment of despair and moral clarity, as he renounces his temporary nihilism and returns to the path of good. He also makes a very compelling case for Darla to leave Los Angeles for good – namely, that he’ll destroy her if she doesn’t.

Darla makes one final major appearance in Season Three, as she is revealed to be pregnant with Angel’s human son. Throughout this arc, Darla isn’t so much evil as she is a victim of her circumstances, as she’s beset by Wolfram & Hart assassins, a cult of vampire worshippers who are willing to kill her in order to steal her baby, and, worst of all, a vengeful Holtz. She and Angel become capable allies to defend “the one good thing they ever did together”: Connor. (Editorial commentary: she makes it seem as if Connor is a good character… ha.) She even sacrifices her own life in order to save her baby from her natural bloodlust.

As one can see, Darla is central to the plot of Angel, and her involvement throughout the first three seasons of the show is integral to the development of Angel as his own character. Her sexual teasing of Lindsey also advances his own villainous arc, one that’s ultimately a little bit more rewarding even than Darla’s. That said, Darla the personality can often get lost within Darla the plot device. Few can deny she’s one of the most sinister and conniving vampires in the city, but when her brand of psychopathy and scheming is placed against that of Angelus or Spike, it really doesn’t stand out all that much. Her role as a temptress is somewhat fascinating, but she doesn’t quite have the menace of similarly seductive villains like Drusilla. That said, Julie Benz puts her all into her performance as Darla; it really is one of the unspoken treasures of Buffyverse acting. But, when I combine the sheer amount of dense plotting surrounding Darla with her lackluster appearances on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the sins start to stack up.

Darla is a great villain, and she does bring a new dynamic to Angel that few villains in that entire series managed to rival. That said, her somewhat standard personality and moments of narrative contrivance do drop her out of the top ten by just that much. She’s the last villain featured on this list who has noticeable deficiencies in her writing that hold her back. There are a lot of interesting flavors within a character that never quite comes together in the way she should. She’s just not fun enough, devious enough, or terrifying enough to leave the same impression as the villains in the top ten. But it should be said that Darla is the only villain who was able to bring Angel to his absolute lowest point in either series. That’s an accomplishment no one else on the list can claim to have topped.