“Destiny”
Written by David Fury and Steven S. DeKnight Directed by Skip Schoolnik The Story We open on a flashback to 1880, the year Dru turned Spike. He’s still William, but she keeps calling him Willy, for some reason. She’s brought him back to where Angelus is. They make out, and then she tells him in her insane way about the people Angelus killed there. William doesn’t know (or particularly care) who Angelus is, until he spots him lurking in the shadows of the doorway to the next room. Drusilla introduces William, and she wants to show him to Darla, but Angelus says he and Darla fought and Darla ran off back to the Master for a bit. He’s not impressed with William. He grabs his hand and shoves it into the sunlight while telling him how annoying it is traveling with just women all the time. William doesn’t like this at all, but then Angelus sticks his own hand in the sun. William sticks his hand back in the sun to prove he’s tough too. Weirdest initiation ritual ever. They both laugh, anticipating a great friendship. Cut to the present, where Angel is super fed up with Spike, who thinks he’s entitled to an office in W&H just because he’s forced to haunt it. Also, Wes is on a leave of absence. Spike isn’t sympathetic towards Wesley’s emotional issues, because he feels his own issues with his mom are way worse than Wes shooting what turned out not to be his father. He yells about his mom hitting on him, which Harmony feels explains a lot. Also, she has a package for him. He reminds her that he has trouble with physical objects, so she opens it. There’s a super bright flash of light inside and nothing else. Harmony blinks hard (which I’ve always found hilarious), then looks at him for an explanation. He doesn’t have one. When Harmony answers the phone, she’s met with a heinous screeching sound. All the other electronics seem to be on the fritz now too. Spike, indifferent, strolls over to the door of Angel’s office to go annoy him some more, but instead of going through it, he bonks off it and falls over. Bahaha. Welcome back to corporeality, Spike. Enjoy the broken nose. Angel comes back outside and finds him on the floor. Spike realizes what this means. He gets to his feet and starts prodding Angel to test if he’s really solid again. Angel doesn’t like that. Then Spike licks the blood from his nosebleed and steals Angel’s mug of blood. Gunn comes up to ask about the electronics and Spike hugs him happily. Spike figures it was the weird package, and he really doesn’t care about the details. Harmony comes over to tell Angel about the problems with the phones and computers, and when Spike sees her, he’s suddenly very horny. He kisses her, informs Angel they’ll be having a nooner, and pretty much tries to drag her off even though she at no point agreed to this. She starts to give him a piece of her mind, but he pointedly compliments her skirt, and she decides she does want to sleep with him after all. They scamper off. Back in the flashback, Angelus and William have just slaughtered a wedding party and are riding off in the carriage with the terrified bride. Angelus beat the groom to death with his own arm, which William thought was awesome. Angelus generously offers to let him drain the bride. He’d rather go find Dru. He considers her his destiny. He loves the bizarre spark of childhood innocence in her. In the present, Spike finds a rando lawyer to evict from his office so he and Harmony can have sex in there. The lawyer goes to complain to one of his friends, but said friend is bleeding from the eyes and goes postal on him for the lack of toner in the copier. Angel and Gunn are still trying to figure out what the heck is happening. Fred hurries up to them. It’s not just the systems in W&H, it’s also the weather. Angel complains about Spike drinking all the blood in his mug, and Gunn reminds him Harmony can’t refill it just yet because of the nooner. This is how Fred learns Spike is corporeal, which is a much bigger deal to her than to either of the guys. She’s upset they didn’t call her (which...they couldn’t have because of the phones being on the fritz, but whatever). It occurs to them that Spike suddenly being corporeal again is probably connected to all the other madness going on. Eve agrees. She says this is all a sign of major cosmic upheaval because Spike being corporeal means there are two candidates for the Shanshu prophecy and it’s tearing the universe apart. That...makes no sense. Even if there were two people who fit the description of the subject of the prophecy, it would still only apply to one of them, so this shouldn’t have any impact on it. It’s not like it’s just up for grabs; it’s always referred to the same person. (Which is clearly Angel, for reasons I’ve already outlined.) It’s like how Neville and Harry both could have been the Chosen One based on the clues in the prophecy, but it was always really about Harry, which is how it played out. The Potterverse didn’t freak out and start collapsing just because there were two potential Chosen Ones, so why should it be any different here with Angel and Spike? Eve claims that because Spike died to save the world, he’s become eligible for the prophecy in ways he wasn’t in the year he already had a soul. Fred’s annoyed Eve didn’t tell her this would happen if Spike became corporeal. She says she had no idea, but congrats on pulling it off! Fred and Angel both suspect Eve—well, they suspect the Senior Partners, since the amulet came from them in the first place, but she’s their liaison, so she makes a handy scapegoat. She says serious badness is coming. Meanwhile, in that rando lawyer’s office, Harmony really isn’t having fun on this nooner, but Spike doesn’t seem to care. Wow. Well, he’s going to have to start caring soon, because Harmony’s eyes are bleeding just like the copier dude’s. She vamps out and chomps down on his neck. He jumps off her and she yells that she isn’t his and that he can’t use her as a substitute for his “Slayer whore.” She lunges at him, screaming, and he punches her over the other side of the desk. Wow, none of that was remotely pleasant. Copier guy is strapped to a gurney, still ranting deliriously about toner. Also, he wrote “TONER” in blood above the copier. *snort* Lorne tells Angel how the guy attacked him after he finished up with the first guy. There have been two other attacks, one death so far. Angel orders the building sealed off. Lorne would like to go barricade himself in the office. Angel’s fine with that, but first he wants him to pop by Fred’s lab. Spike comes out of the office just as Angel and Eve are walking past. He tells them what happened with Harmony. Eve explains her theory that all the madness is because there are two Shanshu candidates. Spike’s fine with that. He’ll just leave! Yeah, it’s not that simple. Gunn emerges from the elevator, very unsettled. He tried to go see the big cat in the White Room, but there’s nothing up there except a howling void. This freaks Eve out a lot. Without the big cat, they’re cut off from the Senior Partners. Angel grudgingly asks Spike to stay until they figure out this problem. Spike gives Angel crap for reading the prophecy after saying he didn’t care about it. What, does he think Angel only said that so that Spike would think it was a load of bull? Angel wouldn’t do that. Eve thinks a good lead would be the prophecy itself. Angel doesn’t think so, based on what he read. Cut to Wesley’s department (sans Wesley, unfortunately), where Sirk (the dude who gave Wesley the tour in “Home”) scoffs at Angel’s claim to have read the prophecy just because he read an English translation. I’d have thought Angel, who knows at least eleven languages, would appreciate the subtleties of nuance and syntax that can easily get lost in translation. Sirk continues to be an enormous snob as he reads a section about something called the Cup of Perpetual Torment. Spike makes occasional comments in which he pointedly claims ownership of the prophecy, which irks Angel. If one of them drinks from this Cup, it will apparently settle the matter and everything will go back to normal. Sirk keeps reading to find out where they can find the Cup. It’s in Death Valley, at an opera house that got buried in an earthquake. Angel is fine with heading out there to drink from the Cup, but Spike is already gone. In one of those flashy sports cars. Um...can’t Angel just take his helicopter and be there hours ahead of Spike? Well, apparently he forgot about it, because he’s just in a car. He calls Spike and they argue about whether or not Spike really has a shot at this, before Spike obnoxiously pretends the signal’s cutting out and hangs up. Gunn advises security to use elephant tranquilizers on Harmony. Eve strolls into his office to comment on the A.I. team’s productivity with all the craziness going on lately. Gunn also suspects Eve is up to something. She claims he’s the one most connected to the Senior Partners because he’s the one who talks to the cat. Another bloody-eyed lawyer approaches the office with an axe before getting tackled by security. Angel arrives at the opera house. Spike is already there. They trash talk each other a bit, before Spike heads off to go find the cup. Angel couldn’t get more irritated. Flashback! William comes back to where he, Drusilla, and Angelus are staying to find Angelus screwing Drusilla because he felt like making a mockery of William’s notion that Drusilla was his destiny. William goes into quiet fury mode. Angel sees the cup sitting on a pillar in a circle of light. Spike drops down next to him. They both stare at it for a minute, and then Spike punches Angel. Angel is super annoyed, but ultimately realizes Spike isn’t giving him a choice, so they’re going to fight. Spike knocks him down next to a big cross, which he tosses aside. Spike mocks him for thinking he’s a hero when he can’t touch crosses. ...His point? He can’t either. Great argument. Next, he claims that he’s better than Angel because he fought for his soul “because [he] knew it was the right thing to do” instead of having it forced on him with a curse. Ugggggggggh. That isn’t freaking the point, Spike. Also, Angel’s right that Spike’s real motive for getting the soul was to get into Buffy’s pants. He absolutely did not do it because it was right. He did it because he was just disillusioned enough to know that, soulless, Buffy would never love him (but not disillusioned enough to realize that getting a soul wouldn’t automatically make her his, because he’s an entitled prat). Angel tries to go for the cup, but Spike comes flying over the balcony with a crowbar or something. The fight isn’t over. Fred has been trying to establish a pattern between the people getting affected by the bloody eyes thing. There’s not one. Eve is very concerned, but Gunn wonders why Fred is even working with her. He looks up to reveal that his eyes are bloody now too. Uh oh. Whoa, weird, that’s the first time Fred has called him Gunn instead of Charles. He starts throttling Eve. When Fred tries to tranq him, he punches her to the floor. He shouts for Eve to show him what kind of monster she is. Fred knocks him out by smacking him over the head with a metal tray. Angel and Spike are having a kind of quarterstaff fight with cast iron poles, trading blows and insults. Spike is determined not to let Angel win. He knocks him off the balcony. He coughs up blood when he lands. Spike says it’s clear Angel’s on the side of the bad guys, what with working at W&H. Yeah, he doesn’t know anything about why Angel’s at W&H. Angel rallies and goes for the cup again. In the flashback, William tries to beat Angelus up for cuckolding him with Dru. Angelus trounces him easily and explains that he’s wrong if he thinks anything belongs to him. William insists that he and Dru are forever. Angelus advises him to come up with a new name, because William’s pretty non-terrifying. Then he gets up and wraps his arms around Dru, who holds hers out to William. They look like something out of a ballet. Angelus dares William to come and take Dru if he wants her. In the present, Spike tackles Angel away from the cup and punches him. Spike says Angel hates him because seeing him reminds him of all the people he killed because Angel taught him to. Wait, seriously? He’s blaming Angel for his own crimes? And he thinks he’s more heroic? Angel disagrees (because it’s nonsense), but Spike smacks him all the way across the room using that big cross. Spike stalks towards him, claiming Angel never really knew him, he was just projecting his own flaws onto him so that he could live with himself. Yeah...I’m pretty sure Spike’s the one who does that, not Angel. Spike says he’s nothing like Angel. Angel agrees; Spike’s inferior, which is why his feelings for Buffy were always unrequited. Well. I mean. It’s true, but it’s still a bit mean to just say it. Still, Spike’s retort is even worse, because he uses the mutually abusive horror show that was Buffy/Spike in S6 against Angel, as if it constitutes proof that Buffy loves him. Gross. He also says it in just about the crudest way he could under the restrictions of network television. Now, Angel is pissed. He rips Spike’s fists away from him and hurls him across the room. They both vamp out for the final showdown. Fred brings Eve a glass of water. She winces and coughs as she sips it, and she wants Fred to stop pretending to care about her. She knows they all think she’s evil. Fred doesn’t believe all of this is Eve’s fault, and she doesn’t believe Gunn would have said those things or tried to hurt her if he was himself. Eve leaves, sad about the way she’s perceived. Angel and Spike trade a few more blows, but Spike knocks Angel to the ground and stakes him. Not in the heart, though, but only because he knows Buffy would never forgive him for it. Angel tugs the stake free and tries to explain to Spike that the cup and the prophecy don’t just mean happily ever after, they mean a very long, unpleasant road of battles and suffering. Spike shrugs and drinks it anyway, as much to spite Angel as because he wants it. PSYCH! It’s just Mountain Dew! They’ve been had! Back at W&H, Angel goes to Fred’s lab. She’s very concerned to see him so injured, and he uses the “I fell down some stairs” excuse. Really? She still hasn’t been able to make any difference to the condition of the bloody eyes people. Angel tells her the Cup was a setup. Spike walks in, equally beat up, and Fred realizes what the “stairs” were, annoyed. Sirk is gone, so that’s suspicious. Gunn and Harmony seem to come to their senses, but they’re a bit out of it. Eve explains that the Senior Partners stepped in and fixed everything. So we’ve had multiple Deus ex Machinas and a fake MacGuffin in this episode. That’s just great. Eve says the Senior Partners only temporarily stabilized the equilibrium of the universe, and that they’re pissed about this whole thing. She gets up to leave so she can ice her neck. Gunn tries to apologize, but she brushes it off, claiming everyone has bigger things to worry about, like that there are still two Shanshu candidates. Wow, she’s really focused on that, isn’t she? Spike would like to go get plastered now that he can drink alcohol again. He invites Gunn, but Gunn feels hungover as it is from the bloody eyes thing. Spike leaves. Gunn notices that Angel still seems pretty downcast. Angel tells him Spike beat him to the Cup. Gunn thinks it doesn’t matter. Well yeah, not the cup itself, but the fact that Spike won the fight. Angel(us) has always won the fights against Spike. Spike won this time because he wanted the prize more than Angel did. Gunn still doesn’t think it means anything in the grand scheme. Angel isn’t so sure. What if he’s really not the one the Shanshu is about? Eve gets back to her apartment, which is covered in creepy symbols. She speaks to someone off-camera about how their plan succeeded; Angel and Spike now believe they’re in competition for the prophecy. It seems the plan was for Spike to actually kill Angel, but they’ll accept the confusion in the ranks for now. She undresses as she talks, and finally slips into bed with Lindsey. Who has longer hair now and is covered in the same symbols as the apartment. Man it is good to have Christian Kane back on the show. There are many things about “Destiny” that irritate the crap out of me, but I don’t hate it. And that’s pretty much all because the whole universal upheaval and the Cup of Torment and everything turned out to be Eve and Lindsey’s hoax. Had it all been real, it would have been completely ridiculous. As it is, it’s already ridiculous enough that I would’ve expected the team to question things more. But maybe Wesley was the one who would have questioned it, since he’s the one who knows the most about how prophecies work. The twist that it was all a trick and that Lindsey is back pretty much makes it okay. It also makes Eve more interesting. The Characters It’s kind of fascinating to watch Angel struggle this season. I don’t think his sense of purposelessness would be nearly as compelling if there wasn’t a character poised to steal everything that matters to him. Spike is a much more effective foil for him than Groo was, but Angel’s reacting to him in a very similar way. Someone else comes along and seems like he might be better at doing Angel’s role, which makes Angel start to wonder if he’s just redundant. This works so much better in S5 than it did in S3, because Angel vs. Spike is set against the backdrop of Angel working for W&H and trying not to let them control him—he was already wondering if he’s not the hero anymore. He’s lost so much faith in himself that he can’t beat Spike in what seems to be a competition for his own destiny. There were at least two moments where Spike was on the ground and Angel was walking towards the cup. He didn’t race to it. He just stared at it like he wasn’t sure he deserved it. Angel is very much the opposite of Spike. Spike is full to bursting with entitlement (and I’m pretty sure that’s one of the main reasons I don’t like him), but Angel never feels like he deserves anything good. He believed the First when it told him it brought him back from hell for evil purposes, he broke up with Buffy so that she could be with someone with more to offer than him, he smashed the Gem of Amara partly because he felt he was too weak not to be corrupted by it, he had the Oracles turn back time and make him a vampire again partly because he didn’t feel like he’d earned the right to a happy human life with Buffy, and he cut himself out of Connor’s life in order to ensure his happiness. Of course he would question whether the Shansu prophecy is his. It was hard enough for him to believe it in the first place. I think you could make a really good case for Angel’s entire character arc being a metaphor for depression and/or addiction recovery. This is probably the episode that makes me hate Spike the most while he has a soul. He uses Harmony as a sexual object just like he did in Buffy S4 and S5, he uses S6 Spuffy as a weapon against Angel in a way that’s incredibly disrespectful to her (even though he should be deeply ashamed of that entire chapter of his past), and he’s just generally the most entitled, selfish, and obnoxious he’s ever been. He thinks he can take credit for fighting for his soul (while massively twisting his motives for doing so) while shoving the blame for all of his sins onto Angel? No. Either he isn’t responsible for his actions pre-soul, good ones and evil ones alike (and that Angel, by extension, is responsible for the actions of neither Angelus nor Spike), or he’s responsible for all of it and he needs to deal with what he’s done. He thinks he can take all of the credit but none of the blame, which is completely absurd. None of this feels out-of-character, though it is disappointing to see from a Spike who has a soul, but I feel like the writers portrayed him this way on purpose, here in this episode where he’s supposedly a Shanshu candidate, primarily because they wanted to contrast him very strongly against Angel. Spike’s behavior in this episode in no way resembles what one would expect from a champion who might earn the reward of becoming human, so if he really does qualify for that destiny and Angel doesn’t, then Angel’s looming despair that everything is meaningless and there’s no way for him to know if he’s doing the right thing carries much more weight. Oh hey, I was wrong about Angel and Gunn not getting scenes together anymore! I guess it helps that Wes is offscreen, but I’ll still take it. I like how even with Spike making such a fuss about himself, there’s still no doubt in Gunn’s mind that Angel is the one the prophecy’s talking about. He doesn’t even hesitate when he says Angel will be drinking from the cup. And that’s even though Gunn seems to have earned Spike’s respect (I think it was him peeing on Angel’s chair that did it, actually; Spike’s been unusually chummy towards him ever since, focusing his obnoxiousness at Angel and Wes). Gunn still believes in Angel, but unlike Wes, he hasn’t really noticed how hard it is for Angel to be at W&H. He’s so happy himself that I think he just assumes everyone else will adjust and love it too. Fred, don’t fall for Eve’s act! I mean, it’s hard not to sympathize with the petite woman getting choked out by the 6’2” dude, but you were the first one to be suspicious of her! Don’t lose sight of that! Also, I kind of love that Angel’s too embarrassed about fighting Spike to admit it to her. They really do have this brother/sister sort of rapport. Usually he comes across as the big brother, but this time she was more like the big sister. Lorne is only here to get conked on the head and then go hide in his office! Boo! Wouldn’t his abilities have helped them suss out the truth? I mean, he reads people’s futures! He should just have Angel and Spike sing for him and settle things that way. It’s like the writers deliberately sidelined the two characters most likely to call shenanigans on this whole plot, just so they could get Angel and Spike to fight to the death. Boo, no Wesley in this one. Sirk is interesting, though. He’s like what Giles probably would’ve been if they hadn’t managed to find Tony Head to play him. Thank goodness for Tony Head. Favorite Quotes Okay, there's not really a quote, but...this. This is my favorite moment in the episode.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
The Watcher's Diary
In this blog, I'll be reviewing, analyzing, and generally fangirling over excellent television. Exhibit A: the Whedonverse. Archives
March 2018
Categories
All
|