Should you ever get time, and be inclined to help "talk me down" on all of this, these are the specific problems that keep me from reading Lynch charitably:
1. Lorne got his groove back. In the notes he says that he just needed to figure out that it's better to help people than to mope around when you've done something wrong. The last we saw Lorne he was shattered. He was executing someone in cold blood. Moreover, he was executing *Lindsey* on behalf of *Angel*. Not only did Angel use Lindsey for his own purposes before disposing of him; he was giving up on Lindsey's possibility of redemption. That's either hypocritical (since Angel has needed and still needs a ton of forgiveness and room for redemption) or its despairing (he's identified with Lindsey and is giving up on himself by proxy). Either way, Lorne gets it, I think. Which is why he is in such despair. The little message "you get over this stuff by helping people" doesn't seem to fit the dimensions of where we were. I read it as trivializing. Of course it's good to help people, and it's better than brooding. But it loses the commentary on Angel. And it seems to violate one of the principles of the 'verse which is that you don't just shrug stuff like that off.
2. Does Lynch see Angel's tragedy as externally driven or internally driven? The fact that Lindsey and Drogyn have disappeared from AtF, makes it at least possible that Lynch thinks that Angel's mistake here was to not see that the senior partners could retaliate by damning an entire city. But in the series Angel's participation in the evil of W&H was far more problematic. He was there in the first place because he sold himself and his friends out to W&H to save his son. He might be telling himself now that the idea was to fight evil from the inside; but at the time, when Lilah tried to tempt him with that he KNEW it could never work and rejected it. Lilah only got him with the promise of saving Connor. That's an internally motivated tragedy. Angel made a trade which we can understand, but which was still wrong. It violated his own integrity. And the mindwipe violated his friends. And we could go back further. Connor was in a mess because Angel couldn't figue out how to deal with him; he was unreachable or difficult because of his experience in hell with Holtz, but Holtz was motivated by the very terrible things Angel had done to him and his family; Connor himself exists because Angel despaired of his own redemption and sought to lose his soul by sleeping with Darla. It's all character-driven. This is not to say that Angel isn't doing plenty of good as well. But the bad stuff does not just randomly plop on him. But Lynch seems to think so. Read his opening remarks in the first TPB. Poor Angel had all this bad stuff happen; but no mention of why it was happening. And here he delivers Angel a "happy ending". Even if it is ironic in the ways you see, it's not at all obvious that the irony has anything to do with the fact that the tragedy has been driven by his own character all along.
3. In Home Connor tells Angel that you can't save someone with a lie. Angel proceeds to try to save him with a lie. Of itself that's problematic. But now we have a saved Connor, and no sense that there's an underlying dilemma. Further, there's a real question of identity. How is post-Home Connor related to pre-home Connor? Angel killed pre-Home Connor, and replaced him with post-home Connor. So who, exactly, got saved here? Lots of very interesting stuff to be done on personal identity, and on whether Angel's motivation was to save Connor, qua Connor, or to save his son, who happened to be named Connor. We know at a minimum that he did not save the Connor who was standing before him in the sporting goods store.
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1. Lorne got his groove back. In the notes he says that he just needed to figure out that it's better to help people than to mope around when you've done something wrong. The last we saw Lorne he was shattered. He was executing someone in cold blood. Moreover, he was executing *Lindsey* on behalf of *Angel*. Not only did Angel use Lindsey for his own purposes before disposing of him; he was giving up on Lindsey's possibility of redemption. That's either hypocritical (since Angel has needed and still needs a ton of forgiveness and room for redemption) or its despairing (he's identified with Lindsey and is giving up on himself by proxy). Either way, Lorne gets it, I think. Which is why he is in such despair. The little message "you get over this stuff by helping people" doesn't seem to fit the dimensions of where we were. I read it as trivializing. Of course it's good to help people, and it's better than brooding. But it loses the commentary on Angel. And it seems to violate one of the principles of the 'verse which is that you don't just shrug stuff like that off.
2. Does Lynch see Angel's tragedy as externally driven or internally driven? The fact that Lindsey and Drogyn have disappeared from AtF, makes it at least possible that Lynch thinks that Angel's mistake here was to not see that the senior partners could retaliate by damning an entire city. But in the series Angel's participation in the evil of W&H was far more problematic. He was there in the first place because he sold himself and his friends out to W&H to save his son. He might be telling himself now that the idea was to fight evil from the inside; but at the time, when Lilah tried to tempt him with that he KNEW it could never work and rejected it. Lilah only got him with the promise of saving Connor. That's an internally motivated tragedy. Angel made a trade which we can understand, but which was still wrong. It violated his own integrity. And the mindwipe violated his friends. And we could go back further. Connor was in a mess because Angel couldn't figue out how to deal with him; he was unreachable or difficult because of his experience in hell with Holtz, but Holtz was motivated by the very terrible things Angel had done to him and his family; Connor himself exists because Angel despaired of his own redemption and sought to lose his soul by sleeping with Darla. It's all character-driven. This is not to say that Angel isn't doing plenty of good as well. But the bad stuff does not just randomly plop on him. But Lynch seems to think so. Read his opening remarks in the first TPB. Poor Angel had all this bad stuff happen; but no mention of why it was happening. And here he delivers Angel a "happy ending". Even if it is ironic in the ways you see, it's not at all obvious that the irony has anything to do with the fact that the tragedy has been driven by his own character all along.
3. In Home Connor tells Angel that you can't save someone with a lie. Angel proceeds to try to save him with a lie. Of itself that's problematic. But now we have a saved Connor, and no sense that there's an underlying dilemma. Further, there's a real question of identity. How is post-Home Connor related to pre-home Connor? Angel killed pre-Home Connor, and replaced him with post-home Connor. So who, exactly, got saved here? Lots of very interesting stuff to be done on personal identity, and on whether Angel's motivation was to save Connor, qua Connor, or to save his son, who happened to be named Connor. We know at a minimum that he did not save the Connor who was standing before him in the sporting goods store.
Continued...