The Buffyverse Character Countdown (#5)

#5.

Hero: Angel (Buffy the Vampire Slayer Seasons 1-3, Angel)

"If there's no glorious end to all of this... if nothing that we do matters, then all that matters is what we do." -- Angel, "Epiphany"

The spin-off is named after him, so it figures that he’d rank pretty high on this list. Of all the characters in the Buffyverse, Angel has the most complex and rewarding backstory. He is also one of those characters who is simply too hard to cover in one simple blog post: I’d need practically 31 days more to come even close to covering his arc with the level of depth needed to get to his core. Thus, for this post, I’m going to try and skim through his arc and point out his strongest and weakest elements. And yes, Angel does have weaker elements; unlike Anya and Fred, he has severe character deficiencies in his writing that hold him back from taking a spot in the top four. However, his highs are so terrifically brilliant that he cannot possibly slip out of the top five.

Let’s start with the low: everything Angel does in the first two seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Look, I understand that most Buffyverse fans, Joss Whedon included, thinks the romance between Buffy and Angel in the second season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is this grand, sweeping, profound romance that will never be rivalled in all of teenage fiction. However, whenever I look at David Boreanaz’s performance as Angel in the season, I’m left wanting more. Angel fits into every 90s bad boy stereotype: excessive brooding, aimless philosophizing, sarcasm, aloofness, wearing a leather jacket, spiking up his hair, his terse humor, lack of inflection in his voice. Without Buffy next to him, he’s about as boring as any character on the series. The acting is wooden, and his actions aren’t exactly interesting. Yes, his relationship with Buffy is fascinating due to its obsessive, all-consuming nature, but that interest only emerges from its impact on Buffy’s life, not Angel’s. He’s just the vampire with a soul who, for some reason, was never told that experiencing a moment of perfect happiness would end up causing him to lose his soul. He honestly becomes infinitely more interesting as Angelus in Season Two, a being completely separate from Angel, a being that outright kills him. Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Angel is a character better off dead than undead.

Things start to look up, however, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s third season. When Angel comes back from the dead, he still lacks a particularly strong personality outside of his 90s stereotypes, but his struggles are all the more potent. Now racked with the guilt of his deeds as Angelus and unsure of the virtue of his path (given that helping Buffy last season ended with him turning back into a soulless demon), Angel must negotiate between his desires to remain with Buffy or to leave her entirely. He even contemplates suicide in “Amends,” viewing it as the only way to deal with the evil coursing through him. Buffy shares with him the hard truth that the merit of one’s soul is contingent upon one’s ability to fight against the iniquities of the universe, to try to be good even if we are already damned. Angel does take this message to heart, yet he must do so in one of the most painful ways possible. Since he will always be a liability to Buffy and an obstacle in the way of her becoming the true Slayer and a fully-functioning adult, he must leave her. They both still love each other, but that love will destroy them. He offers her an extraordinary moment of reconciliation in “The Prom,” one of the most bittersweet and emotional moments in either series, but that’s where their story ends. Outside of that (and being forced to feed upon Buffy in order to save his own life after Faith poisons him), Angel’s arc on Buffy is more or less complete.

If this were all of Angel’s arc, he’d probably rank somewhere around… #15. Sure, he is crucial to the Buffy narrative, but he, individually, is not that interesting. However, on his own show, there’s a sharp turnaround. Once out of Sunnydale, we start to get a better sense of the identity of a vampire with a soul and understand his actual motivations. The first shot of Angel sets up the dominant metaphor of the entire series: Angel as a recovering alcoholic seated at the bar, telling his tale of woe to an audience that doesn’t want to hear it, searching for redemption yet never being able to find it. His quest to help the helpless is simultaneously the path to redemption and a coping mechanism for dealing with his pain. Plus. Angel becomes a complete bad*** on his own show. Sure, we’d seen him kick vampires to the curb on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but it was always with extreme effort and almost agonizing deliberation as he fought his conflicted nature in addition to his fellow demons. On Angel, he’s taking out demons with style, finesse, and outright brutality, almost as if he were a vampiric Batman. He’s more charismatic, suave, and polished. He develops one of the most acute and effortless senses of humor of any Buffy character. Indeed, Angel might just be the funniest member of his own entourage, with the sole exception of Spike in Season Five.

Angel’s first season is one of ups and downs, as the character vacillates around different themes and ideas. The only real development occurs when he learns of the Shanshu Prophecy that ordains his eventual transformation into a human and his involvement with an apocalypse-level event. After he learns of the prophecy, Angel becomes disturbingly willing to make grotesque sacrifices in the name of achieving his end-state. In “Are You Now, or Have You Ever Been,” we learn that Angel once abandoned innocents to a Thessulac demon who fed on their despair out of an act of revenge for being attacked by them and betrayed by his friends. Later in the season, he mirrors this event from his past by letting Darla and Drusilla feed upon Holland Manners and the rest of the Wolfram & Hart junior partners. For Angel is fed up. He has spent two entire seasons helping others realize their moral potential – Wesley, Faith, Cordelia, Doyle, Kate, Darla – and nearly every time, his attempts lead to people dying, general suffering, or his own misery. He desperately seeks an end to the pain, firing his team and storming Wolfram & Hart’s compound in order to destroy the firm at its core. His plan, however, does not work: when Holland reveals that the home office of the Senior Partners and the source of all of Wolfram & Hart’s power is nothing else but the Earth itself, Angel finally gives in to his despair. In what cannot be described as anything other than a relapsed suicide attempt, he tries to have sex with Darla in order to feel anything. The result: a moment of perfect despair.

However, this acute moment of pain brings Angel a moral clarity no other character in the series ever quite comes to: the revelation that “if nothing that we do matters, all that matters is what we do.” It’s this insight that allows Angel to not only reform his team and start saving the world once again, but also take a beating from Lindsey with a sledgehammer without flinching and proceeding to kick his rival’s behind without even breaking a sweat. In essence, Angel becomes more kick-*** than he’s ever been. The following episodes in Pylea after his “epiphany” are some of the funniest and most lighthearted in the entire series. Angel finally gets some levity to offset his seriousness.

In Angel’s third season, the main arc pits the three elements of Angel’s timeline against each other. Angel’s past – Holtz and Darla – come into immediate conflict with his future – Connor – and prevent him from acting on the concerns of the present – Wolfram & Hart and his budding relationship with Cordelia. (Speaking of which, I honestly prefer Angel and Cordelia to Angel and Buffy, but I’ll discuss that more within her character arc). It’s here that we get some of the darkest actions from Angel in the entire series, particularly the scene in which he strangles and nearly kills Wesley for kidnapping Connor. After Connor returns, Angel must struggle with the burden of fatherhood, a struggle far more interesting and engaging than anything that Connor himself ever does. This conflict continues all the way into Season Four, in which Angel, despite having been nearly killed by his son on several occasions and watching as his son is prepared to murder dozens of innocent families in a shopping mall, finds a way to save Connor’s soul and give him a reset. This conflict upends everything in Angel’s life, even forcing him to revert to Angelus briefly in Season Four in order to stop an even greater evil from destroying everything he holds dear.

Then, of course, there is Angel’s fifth and greatest season, in which Angel gets the resources and power of his greatest adversary and must try to achieve the greatest good possible. He’s constantly faced with the question of whether or not individual evil actions with positive benefits might end up producing a “greater good” than an aggregate of small good deeds, switching back and forth throughout the season. He also faces the prospect that he might not be the champion of legend, thanks to Spike’s re-introduction into the series. It’s full of great little miniature arcs: including his complex and highly complicated relationship with the werewolf Nina Myers, his heartbreaking goodbye to Cordelia in “You’re Welcome,” forging a final act of forgiveness with his son, and coping with the consequences of Fred’s death and his inability to save her. By the time Angel closes out the series with the line, “let’s go to work,” we’re proud to see just how far he’s grown and just how complex a character he is.

Angel is a distillation of the existentialist philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre combined with the wit of Oscar Wilde and the slick action prowess of a comic book superhero. He’s a delightful hero who thrives in his own series as a fun protagonist. Unfortunately, two factors hold him out of the top four. The first, and most important, is his lackluster appearance in the original series; backstory can make up for many faults, but Boreanaz’s performance simply isn’t up to par. The second is the back and forth nature of his character. While the non-linear nature of Angel’s character arc throughout his own series is thematically coherent, it’s not quite as dramatically compelling as those of other characters who do have a clear path and a well-defined story. As the main character, he’s very much privy to the errors of the plot and the writing, which, for a spin-off like Angel, is naturally inconsistent. There’s no way he could possibly rank any lower than this, of course, but there are characters more virtuous, more engaging, and more emotionally compelling than him. That said, this vampire’s got more soul than pretty much any other in the series.

… well, excepting for the fact that he likes Barry Manilow. I have to strike off points for that, as well.

    

Villain: Glorificus (Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 5)

"I'm crazy? Honey, I'm the original one-eyed chicklet in the kingdom of the blind. 'Cause at least I admit this world makes me nuts." -- Glorificus, "The Weight of the World"

Pop quiz: how do you raise the stakes for a hero who has beaten, consecutively, the most physically powerful vampire in existence, the most deranged and lethal vampire ever recorded, a pure-breed demon at the top of the social ladder, and an entire military operation of supersoldiers and bio-mechanically enhanced demons?

Answer: have her fight a freaking god.

Glorificus, or, as she is most commonly known, Glory is the single most powerful and intimidating villain the Buffyverse has ever seen. Sure, the First Evil leads an army of super-powerful vampires and possessed priests; they are all killable by magical McGuffins. Sure, Jasmine can hypnotize people if they so much as glanced at her; she is beaten with a simple neck-snapping from an eighteen-year-old boy. Glory, on the other hand, has a small army of minions, super strength such that she can toss around Slayers as if they were tissue paper, super speed such that she can keep up with a moving vehicle on her feet, and absolute invulnerability to physical harm. And that’s not the half of how dangerous Glory is as compared to every villain preceding her and succeeding her. In terms of raising the stake of her arc, Glory stands atop the Buffyverse villain throne; no one competes with her in terms of creating an atmosphere of suspense, dread, and overpowering terror. It’s a season so dramatic that one could end Buffy the Vampire Slayer at its conclusion and still feel completely satisfied.

Glorificus was the most powerful demon god in her Hell dimension, so powerful, in fact, that her fellow gods decided to keep her power in check by banishing her to Earth and trapping her inside a human body known as Ben Wilkinson. Glory’s power lay dormant for twenty years, unleashed once Glory found a way to take control of Ben’s body and morph into her own unique form. Realizing that Glory was hell-bent on finding the energy known as “the Key” that could return her home to rule the Hell dimension once more, the Order of Dagon turned the Key into Dawn in order to hide it in human form. Through torture and murder, Glory manages to track the Key to Sunnydale, despite not knowing what form it has taken or who it might be. When Buffy and her friends get in the god’s way, Glory demolishes them.

The one adjective that best describes Glory is “overwhelming.” She’s so much more powerful than our heroes that contests with her are practically anti-climactic. Normally, first interactions between Buffy and the Big Bad result in the Big Bad making a tactical retreat to find some more clever way of defeating the Slayer than tackling her head on. In Glory’s case, it’s Buffy who needs to end up retreating after suffering her most humiliating defeat in the entire series. Willow operating at full destructive potential barely manages to scratch Glory’s dress, let alone cause her any physical harm. Glory cleaves her way through dozens of knights devoted to her destruction without breaking a fingernail. More important than her raw power, though, is her ceaseless personal dedication to her quest for the Key. Whereas lesser Buffyverse Big Bads are content to play the Power Rangers villain trope of sending out minions one at a time to achieve their strategic ends, Glory nearly always completes her tasks on her own. She invades Buffy’s home, tracks down and tortures her friends for information, and, when all else fails, kills off whomever serves no purpose to her schemes.

Glory’s also got one heck of a personality. With the sole exception of Drusilla, there isn’t another Buffyverse villain quite as insane as Glory. Glory exhibits signs of both schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorder, switching back and forth between Ben and her Glory persona whilst being unable to deal with the stresses and the voices screeching in her head. Her main motivation might be revenge against her former deities, but her insanity more than contributes to her motivation. Indeed, this insanity is so central to Glory’s personality that she has to devour human sanity in order to keep herself functional. She sucks out so many minds, including Tara’s, that she forms a small army of mentally incapacitated civilians. Mannerism-wise, Glory is quite similar to first-season Cordelia – completely shallow and vain – but mixed with the charisma, power, and sensuality of Faith. She might lavish herself on her appearance, but she gets her real kicks from killing her minions and sucking out others’ brains. Much like Angelus, she practically orgasms on the thought of inflicting pain. This personality makes each scene with Glory all that much more unpredictable and intimidating.

Glory also continues the excellent trend of Big Bads highlighting significant obstacles of adulthood that Buffy must overcome. This time, it’s the evil of the Slayer power itself. Glory is essentially a demon addicted to her own power high; the only reason she wants to go back home to her Hell dimension is the prospect of ruling it without being encumbered by a human body. Similarly, if Buffy is all Slayer all the time, she too will become jaded and friendless. She’ll satisfy her own Slayer “death wish” by becoming nothing more than pure action, without room for love, compassion, and decency. This is a stark contrast to Dawn, who is pure childish innocence, incapable of doing anything truly evil or even truly effective. The only way Buffy can beat this future back is by rallying all of the powers of her friends, from the hammer of Anya’s ex-boyfriend, to Willow’s magic, to Spike’s distractions, to Giles’s strategic expertise, to Xander’s experience operating a wrecking ball. Only community can destroy complete and utter despair.

Glory pretty much maxes out the criterion of diegetic achievement. Not only does she beat up Buffy on dozens of occasions, not only does she torture Spike and Tara, not only does she wipe out every single opposing force to her other than the Scooby Gang, not only does she reduce the town of Sunnydale to a population of mentally feeble patients, not only does she actually achieve her goal of opening a portal to Hell, but she also does the one thing that no other Buffy villain does: she kills Buffy. Sure, the Master was able to drink Buffy’s blood and send her into a near-death state, but Xander was able to revive her with CPR. To bring Buffy back from her sacrifice to stop Glory, Willow has to rip her out of heaven. No other villain can claim to have come anywhere close to this level of victory over Buffy, at least on the individual level. Heck, in the final battle between the two, Buffy’s physical victory over Glory is only temporary. Were it not for Giles strangling Ben, Glory would have recovered and taken revenge on all of Buffy’s friends and family.

Speaking of which, let’s talk about the one area of Glory’s character that doesn’t work: Ben Wilkinson. You’d think that the human half of a demon god, especially created to contain her powers, would be at least somewhat interesting and engaging. However, Ben is one of the most forgettable and dull human characters in the entire Buffyverse. Sure, he schemes to kill off all the mental patients to further Glory’s goals, but he’s little more than a distraction the rest of the time and a means by which Glory can be killed off. His existence keeps the themes of duality that pervade Season Five afloat, but it’s not sufficient to keep the audience’s influence. Even the amnesia spell that prevents the characters from remembering that Ben and Glory are the same being offers little more than a few jokes. The only good thing about Ben is his death, and that’s only good because we get to see Ripper Giles once again.

Despite her few faults, Glory is arguably the height of Buffyverse villains. Indeed, I’d go so far as to claim that the series pretty much gave up trying to write better villains after she died. There isn’t another villain whose lifted the stakes of a season arc to a higher level than the peaks of Season Five. It’s only thanks to her one major flaw and the utter perfection that is the top four villains on this list that she misses out on the top four. She really is one of the all-time great Buffyverse antagonists, the god to which most other villains must bow.