“Lineage”
Written by Drew Goddard Directed by Jefferson Kibbee The Story We open on some kind of storage building, where Wesley is meeting with some shady dudes who specialize in arson, murder, and torture. Wes is super bored with their sales pitch. He wants to meet with their distributor. He has Fred bring out a case containing a modded sniper rifle. The most interesting mod is that it now shoots energy blasts instead of bullets. They’re calmly doing an arms deal about futuristic blasters? Wesley decides he’s done here, but the guy finally gives him the info he’s been angling for. Also, he’s the guy who sold him those arm rigs he had in “Spin the Bottle.” One of the dealer’s muscle dudes gets unceremoniously killed. Wes and Fred dive for cover, and then Wes leaps out, firing two guns while flying sideways through the air in slow-mo. Nice. Fred, however, is miffed that he was more interested in being badass than in giving her something to shoot with. Some weird ninja dude drops down to the floor. He breaks the dealer’s neck with a chain, then rolls away before Wes can shoot at him. Wes follows him and gets his guns kicked out of his hands, but Angel’s here now, and he fights the ninja. When he breaks his neck, blue lightning sparks all over him. Because he’s actually a cyborg. Fred groans from offscreen and Wes rushes to check on her. She’s been shot under the right shoulder. Wes is deeply affected by this. At the office, Angel is chewing Wesley out for taking Fred to that deal, when he could easily have picked someone else. Wes feebly tries to defend his actions, but he definitely blames himself too. Also, Angel pulls rank on him. Nooo, be friends, guys! Wes heads out without another word. Eve thinks Angel was too hard on him. She thinks there’s a secret reason Angel’s extra mad at Wes. She thinks this is leftover mistrust from Wes kidnapping Connor, even though Wes doesn’t remember that. Angel denies it. He even accepts now that Wes was only doing what he thought was right. Eve suspects Angel is waiting for Wes to betray him again. Fred (arm in a sling, but still very cheerful) pays Wes a visit. Apparently she got hit with a grappling hook, not a bullet. Weird. She wants Wes to come see the cyborg, which she’s been dissecting. He apologizes for what happened to her, and she’s annoyed that he thinks she’s all helpless (she blames her own carelessness for her injury). Halfway through her snapping at him, a man comes to the door, distracting Wes completely. It’s his father. He introduces himself to Fred. She awkwardly excuses herself and skedaddles. Roger Wyndam-Pryce is here to discuss business. The few remaining Watchers are reforming the Council, and they want Wes...potentially. He tactfully informs Wes that several of them feel his time as a Watcher was the organization’s worst failure. Wes replies with a dry comment that Roger makes him feel crappy for. He’s here to evaluate whether or not Wes is a good candidate. Wes tries to send him on his way; he doesn’t want to be on the Council. Roger laughs derisively. He’d rather be at W&H than with the Council? The mere presence of his father makes Wes revert a bit to the clumsiness of early-seasons Wes, bonking into things and people and getting flustered easily, very conscious of his father’s disapproval. Wes tries to tell him he and the A.I. team are turning W&H around. Lorne undermines this a bit by walking past, talking to someone on the phone about a party. Wes introduces Roger to him. Lorne tries to be his usual charming yet eccentric self, earning him a discreet “shut up now!” glare from Wes. Roger reacts with dry contempt to the idea that an entertainment division is a necessary component to this alleged fight against evil. Gunn arrives, a bit better at being charming than Lorne. Wes invites Roger to come with him to check out the cyborg. Fred is telling Angel about the cyborg. It has as many organic components as robotic ones, which prompts Spike to make an oblique reference to the Buffybot. Oh man do I wish he’d been a little clearer about that. Angel would’ve made him corporeal again just to beat the crap out of him. Fred shakes off Spike’s comments and resumes her explanation. Spike is basically being a cat, knocking things off shelves just because. He’s very pleased with his improved interactions with the physical world. Nobody shares his sense of accomplishment. Eve’s gaze lingers on him perhaps suspiciously long, though. Knox is there helping Fred. In come Wes and Roger. Spike makes a predictably horrible first impression (not that he cares) in which he insults Wes in a way that recalls the Xander/Cordelia exchange from “Graduation Day” (“I demand an explanation.” “For what?” “Wesley!” “Uh...inbreeding?”). Even though I like Wes about a thousand times more than I like Spike, it’s pretty funny. Hah! Apparently Spike ran into a few of the Watchers in the ‘60s, including Roger. He was killing all the kids in an orphanage at the time, and killed two of Roger’s buddies as well. Spike doesn’t seem terribly abashed, but he does finally decide he’s made things awkward enough that he can leave now. Angel walks over to greet Roger. This is going to be fun. He pointedly declines to shake Angel’s hand. Angel walks it off pretty well, but dang, stern older British dudes can generate uncomfortable tension better than just about anyone. Fred shows Roger the autopsy table. Angel and Eve leave the lab together. Knox joins Fred, Roger, and Wesley around the cyborg. He’s very solicitous of Fred, which only makes Wesley’s mood worsen, if that was possible. Fred wants Wes to decipher the equipment in the cyborg before she tinkers with it, because it could be a bomb. She emphasizes how valuable Wes is for this sort of thing. For half a second, it sounds like Roger is acknowledging Wesley’s accomplishments, but then it becomes extremely backhanded. Wes gives his analysis on the cyborg’s core. Then he makes the mistake of touching it, which sets it off beeping ominously. Oops. Wes yells for them to evacuate the building. Spike starts running, then remembers he’s a ghost. Wes tries to convince Fred to leave; he intends to stay and try to defuse it. But not to worry; Roger has the matter stonily in hand. He explains Wesley’s mistakes in interpreting the engravings. He found the failsafe. Simple. In Angel’s office, Fred and Wes are explaining what happened with the cyborg’s core, except that Spike steps in to be obnoxious for a bit. Wes admits he accidentally tripped the bomb. Fred thinks it was a mistake anyone could have made. Wes, inferiority issues ablaze, admits that Roger was the one who saved the day. Lorne is regaling an extremely uninterested Roger with tales of his wild adventure with Judy Dench. Back in Angel’s office, it occurs to Fred that Lorne was a poor choice for someone to keep Roger occupied. Spike leaves the office too, offering to further humiliate Wesley. GO AWAY, SPIKE. Wes admits that he has trouble thinking clearly with his father around. Angel sympathizes a bit brusquely (he had father/son issues with both his dad and his kid, poor guy). He shows Wes a file on assassins much like the cyborg. They’ve been destroying some definitely evil targets, so they might be good guys. Roger is telling Fred a story of the time he caught Wes with a resurrection spell when he was seven, because he was trying to bring back a bird that had fatally collided with his window. Awwww! It’s actually an almost pleasant moment. Wes asks Roger for his input on a Plot A matter. He shows him his library. Roger observes that Fred seems to be fond of him. He asks if she knows how Wes feels about her. Wes super doesn’t want to discuss his love life with Roger. Pleasant moment over. Though Roger does have a point that Wes needs to tell Fred he likes her. Wes shows Roger how the W&H template books work. Roger is mildly horrified, particularly that he has them just sitting there where anyone could grab them. Wes mentions that the more dangerous items are safely in his vault. At least six more of those ninja cyborgs hop down onto the helicopter pad on the roof. Eve gets into the elevator, where she’s joined by Spike, who wants to know why she keeps staring at him. Ha! So it is a thing! I feel all smug now for noticing. He’s convinced she has something to do with why he’s trapped there. He thinks W&H was trying to turn Angel into a ghost stuck to W&H with that amulet. Eve hints that maybe they were really targeting Spike. Then the elevator suddenly goes dark and stops moving. Spike assumes Pavayne is back and trying to drag him to hell again, leading to an amusing outburst during which Eve stares at him like he’s a moron. Alarms are going off all over the building. Gunn finds Angel, who yells for someone to turn off the alarms. They shut off, but that’s kind of worse. They’ve been very infiltrated. Spike pops through the wall to report the elevator malfunction. Then in come all the ninja cyborgs! They also break into the archive room where Wes and Roger still are. Wes fights the cyborg, then tosses Roger a sword. Roger scolds him for disregarding proper attack priority. Wes grabs the sword and guts the cyborg. Roger insists that Wesley move the books into the vault, since they seem to be what the cyborg was after. They take the books over to the back wall, which has a sliding bookcase in front of a vault, the password to which is “Elysium.” Sweet. He goes to put the books away while his father complains about how irritating it is that they have to deal with cyborgs. He grudgingly compliments Wes on how he handled the cyborg, then asks him what they’ll do next. After Wes gets over his surprise at receiving validation from Roger, he starts outlining a plan, only for Roger to clobber him over the back of the head with something heavy, knocking him out. Then Roger steals some kind of knobbly wand from one of the compartments in the vault. He uses a comm to tell someone to “begin phase 2.” Out in the lobby, Angel and Gunn are fighting the other ninjas, which is not easy. In the vault, Wes wakes up and sees that the books are still there, which means they were just a ploy to get to the real target. He finds the cyborg he stabbed and glowers at it with scary intent. It’s still alive. Roger runs into Fred, and she tries to get him to head for safety. He makes up some story about how Wesley is busy with something, so he’s looking for Angel to inform him. Fred’s confused, but he plays the blustering old dude well enough to fool her. Wes pulls the metal mask off the cyborg, pleased to discover that it can feel pain. He jerks the sword around in its chest. He’s keen on finding out if the cyborg has a sense of self-preservation. He activates the self-destruct device, threatening to let it go off if it doesn’t tell him what Roger was after. He can either tell him, or Wes will let the bomb go off and take out the whole building, including Roger and his goal. This looks like it’ll be an effective threat. Angel and Gunn keep fighting, but the one Gunn’s up against gets a chain around his neck. Spike sees this and runs to help. He concentrates very hard, then punches through Gunn to knock out the cyborg. Nice. Roger clobbers the cyborg attacking Angel, and then Fred pops up to pass on Roger’s claim that Wes is on the roof and needs Angel’s help. Angel gives a few orders, then heads for the roof with Roger insisting on coming along. Spike remembers he was in the lobby to inform someone that Eve is stuck in the elevator. Gunn tells him to find maintenance, then hurries off to do what Angel sent him to do, and Spike loses interest. *snerk* When Angel gets to the roof, Wesley is of course not there. Roger gets up there too and uses the knobbly wand on him. It sucks something swooshy out of Angel and into itself. Then Roger tells the person on his comm that it’s time for extraction. But Wes arrives, wielding a gun. Roger tells Wes to walk away. Wes will not. He learned from the wounded cyborg that Roger’s goal was to take away Angel’s free will and make him a slave to his cause, using the knobbly wand. Roger doesn’t see that this is much different than Angel being a puppet of the Powers or W&H. Wes doesn’t get why Roger didn’t just ask him for help (not with enslaving Angel, but with whatever he wanted to use Angel for). Roger scoffs. Why would he ask his failure of a son for help? Fred rushes up to the roof while father and son are still pointing guns at each other. Crap. She runs over to Angel. Roger keeps discussing Wesley’s failures. This confrontation actually seems fairly cathartic for Wes. He can finally give voice to much of the frustration he’s felt his whole life. He knows he isn’t the failure his father thinks he is, and he’s not going to let him belittle him anymore. Wes has the knobbly wand; Roger’s plan is over. Wes makes to drop it off the side of the building. Roger warns him he’ll shoot him if he doesn’t hand it over. Wes believes he isn’t bluffing, but if he dies, he’ll still end up dropping the wand, which will shatter. Roger still loses. So Roger grabs Fred to use as leverage. Bad move. Wes immediately empties his entire clip into him. Fred is shocked. Wes staggers away and vomits behind the AC unit. But when he turns back around, Roger is revealed to be another cyborg under a glamour. Later, Angel is slumped on the couch in his office. Losing his free will made him super nauseous. He and Wes still don’t know why the cyborgs wanted a remote controllable Angel working for them, but they really don’t like the idea that there might be good factions out there that are gunning for them because of their position in W&H. Wes thinks they went for him because he was the weakest link. Angel disagrees. Wes is better than any of them at making hard calls to protect people. He admires him for it. Wes can’t get over shooting what he thought was his dad. As for how it did such a good job of being Roger, Angel figures the cyborgs had access to everything the Council had on him and Roger. That makes Wes feel marginally better. Angel reminisces about killing his own father, but Wes, not comforted, points out that the situations couldn’t be more different. *snort* They both head off to get some sleep. Spike catches Wes on his way out to offer consolation on the presumed patricide by telling him about staking his mom after he turned her. Again, Wes is not comforted. Particularly because Spike blithely includes the bit where his mom came onto him before he staked her. Bahaha. Wes goes back to his own office. Fred finds him there. Wes hopes she’s not there to tell him about killing her parents. She tells him that somewhere deep down, he knew it wasn’t really his father when he shot it. Wes disagrees. He was completely fooled. He did it because “Roger” was threatening her. Before Fred can sort out whether to be touched or horrified, freaking Knox ruins the moment. He thought he was Fred’s ride home. She’s reluctant to leave, but Wes tells her to go with him, because he clearly believes that he has once again blown any chance he had with her. Awww, Wes. After Fred and Knox leave (Fred looking back at Wes), Wes phones his parents. He gets his mum first, then asks to speak with his dad, who’s very annoyed to be woken up at such a ridiculous hour. Wes can barely get complete sentences out because of all the interruptions. He’s just calling to check on him. Hooray, a Wes-centric episode! I love it when that happens. “Lineage” is twisty and fascinating. I’m not sure I’m entirely satisfied with Plot A, because we never see those cyborgs again and the free will stealing wand was a MacGuffin that wasn’t foreshadowed at all and is never used again. But issues like those aren’t dealbreakers when the Plot B stuff is so good. We finally meet Roger Wyndam-Pryce! Well, technically we don’t, because he was a cyborg the whole time, but it still serves as the payoff to hints we’ve been getting about Wesley’s unpleasant relationship with his father since at least “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” way back in S1. I remember reading something about Alexis Denisof having serious reservations about Roger actually becoming an on-screen character because he didn’t think they could do justice to all the subtext they’d built up about that relationship, but in the end he was very impressed with the material this episode offered. I definitely agree that it was a difficult thing to pull off, which makes it particularly awesome that it worked. And an extra layer that just occurred to me is that Wes just lived out the reverse of the fake prophecy. The Characters Perhaps appropriately for an episode in which Angel temporarily gets his free will stripped out of him, he’s not so much an actor in this story as an object being acted upon. At least in Plot A. The cyborgs want to control him, W&H wants to control him, and he’s been working for the Powers for years. (Also, soon, he’ll be turned into a literal puppet, which is a much more hilarious version of this metaphor than the no-free-will thing.) I kind of feel like this episode was so Wesley-centric that it neglected to give Angel a chance to reassert his autonomy. Then again, they might be deliberately saving that for later, but even if that’s true, it still leaves the episode feeling like it’s missing something. Angel did alright in Plot B, though. He’s been very good at acting like there’s nothing wrong between him and Wes, but clearly he’s still been harboring doubts. Those now seem to have been replaced with sympathy and understanding. Which is great! More points for the Angel & Wes bromance! I actually really enjoyed how Spike was written in this episode. I checked, and Drew Goddard did write five of the Buffy S7 episodes, but he never wrote Spike like this until Angel S5, where he consistently portrays him as deliberately and shamelessly obnoxious and inconsiderate, but in such a way as to make him as much the butt of the jokes as the characters he’s trolling. It seems that I’m more okay with characters being jerks if they’re presented as absurd morons while they’re being jerks. Gunn gets to do some more physical fighting in this one. That seems to be happening with increasing frequency. I wonder if that’s on purpose. I definitely think Fred has feelings for Wesley by now, but she’s not sure about his feelings, and him shooting what he thought was his dad to save her, while perhaps clearing up the question about his feelings, only complicates the situation further. Also, it’s interesting how much more comfortable Gunn always seemed to be with having Fred in the field, even though that was way back when she had only been on the team for a few months. Wesley is maybe a bit overprotective of her, which she is interpreting as him underestimating her. She does not like that. He needs to stop it. It seems odd that it wouldn’t occur to Lorne to tone down his loud personality on behalf of the extremely prejudiced old grouch on the premises, but I guess he pretty much represses himself for no one. And hey, it’s a strategy that eventually won him Angel’s friendship, and Angel’s, if not prejudiced, then definitely still an old grouch, so I suppose Lorne felt he had a sporting chance. Roger (I’m just going to call him Roger instead of cyborg-Roger or whatever, because his act was convincing enough to fool Wesley, so this is essentially the genuine personality of the man) really seems like the kind of father nobody would suspect of being psychologically abusive. He just seems curmudgeonly. The interactions with Wesley show the insidious darker side to Roger’s high expectations and emotional inflexibility. Someone like Wesley—a very earnest, self-critical perfectionist, needs validation and encouragement to feel confident and capable. Roger withholds that, and I kind of don’t even think it’s out of spite; he’s just firmly set in his ways and blind to how badly they impact his son. Now, Wesley takes the revelation that he would apparently kill his own father without hesitation if it meant protecting Fred very hard, and even though I don’t imagine logic is very useful in a situation like that, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with what he did. Okay, maybe in the number of bullets he used, but all familial bonds and obligations were gone the second Roger pointed the gun at Wes. I just feel so bad for him that he thinks this makes him unworthy of Fred. Can Angel break his no-hugs policy and hug Wes? I think Wes needs a hug, even if he’s too English to admit it. Favorite Quotes “Daddy, eh? I always thought Wesley was grown, in some sort of greenhouse for dandies.” “You’ve heard of me.” “No. We’ve met. 1963, my colleagues and I fell upon you slaughtering an orphanage in Vienna. Killed two of my men before you escaped.” “Oh. How’ve you been?”
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The Watcher's Diary
In this blog, I'll be reviewing, analyzing, and generally fangirling over excellent television. Exhibit A: the Whedonverse. Archives
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