Confessions of a Liberal Puritan

[refers to events in last night's "Angel"]

Yes, I loved last night's new episode of "Angel" (5.02 "Just Rewards") -- loved it so much that I had to watch the tape twice over this morning again, when I should have been getting ready to drive 9 hours to visit good friends. I loved it for the glorious snarks, of course, but what really kept me going back was the intriguing and somewhat disturbing ideas it raised. Because I'm running so late (as usual!), I can only jot down some rough thoughts right now, and hope to polish them (or, possibly, deeply regret them!) later.

Did it strike anyone else that both times when Spike FADED out (not talking about the time when the necromancer yanked him instantaneously from one room to another in mid-word) it was just as or just after he'd been railing against the injustice of his current, noncorporeal existence as a reward for his having so heroically saved the world? In Fred's lab, he'd started raging against the powers that be for not letting him rest in peace after he'd gone and saved the world and everything, when he faded out, mid-rant. And in the necromancer's mansion, Spike was -- in his usual, charmingly un-subtle fashion -- expressing some resentment against Angel and what he perceived to be Angel's undeserved luck, contrasting that with the raw deal which he'd received, even after hurling himself on the proverbial hand-grenade, for love and honor and all the right reasons. In that case, whoever or whatever is responsible for yanking him out of his ghostly existence and (as he indicated to Fred, in the show's concluding scene) dangling him over the abyss, let him stick around just long enough to hear Angel's counter-rant, before fading him out again. So, Angel was able to point out that the big injustice from HIS perspective was Spike's apparently glib acceptance of the whole soul thing (that something which had been forced on Angel and had him suffering for 100 years before he could even start to have some sense of hope and purpose, had been freely CHOSEN by Spike and had taken relatively little adjusting to -- "three weeks moaning in a basement, and then you're FINE with it! Where's the justice there?").

So, from my perspective, it seems that whenever Spike (however rhetorically) asks for JUSTICE in return for his self-sacrifice in "Chosen," someone or something is not-so-delicately hinting that, RIGHT AT THIS MOMENT, justice might not go in his favor. Instead of the hero's reward, it's "the other place, the place of fire and torment," that seems to await him, if he is to be judged on his merits right at this moment (on the theory that the heroism and self-sacrifice and fighting the good fight that he'd engaged in, mostly for love of Buffy, in the past few years was apparently still not enough to outweigh his terribly bloody past, which had made him second only to Angel in the "awful crimes of vampires" hall of fame, as we were carefully reminded early in the episode). Does this imply that Wofram & Hart, and being tied to Angel's broody self, is somehow Spike's chance at Purgatory? His chance to refine and purify his soul (which I, along with many ardent Spike-fans, already thought was plenty refined and pure, shining through the pose of the monster, in words and looks too numerous to cite), being forced by his noncorporeal state to go beyond the passions of blood and flesh that he was always so good at and REALLY grapple with the spiritual and intellectual side of his existence? His chance to learn how to fight for good with something more than "fists and fangs"? At any rate, that "psychopomp" thing certainly seems to be developing.

While a belief in Purgatory is not part of my own religious tradition, it DOES seem to fit in with the over-all theology of "Angel," where Angel himself (during torture at the hands of Spike's hireling in "In the Dark") admits that what he wants most of all is forgiveness, but he wants to EARN it. Yes, he seemed to advance beyond that in Season 2 of AtS, coming to the conclusion by mid-season that he could never be good enough to truly even the scales for all his evil deeds, but we've still got that on-going sense that Angel SHOULD feel repentance and continue to atone. Perhaps the paradigm shift, at least as far as the character Spike is concerned, has been from the much more open-ended theology of BtVS to the stricter moral demands of AtS's world-view? Maybe.

What I do know is that, while Angel's dismissive "three weeks moaning in a basement" vastly under-stated what Spike had really suffered in season 7 of BtVS -- see, for example, his heart-rending words and actions at the end of "Beneath You," his agony when he's chained in Buffy's basement and telling her that the things he's done (done to girls Dawn's age, especially) mean that she MUST stake him before the First can make him kill again, and his torture by minions of the First (which he withstood through his conviction that BUFFY believes in him, in his capacity to change and be a good man) -- Spike is NOT "Mr. Introspection," usually. As he told Buffy just before he simply held her while she slept through the night, he doesn't consider himself a great thinker, but the one thing he KNOWS, BELIEVES, is SURE of is HER.

Perhaps the big shift for Spike this year will be to find a moral universe, a belief system, a personal compass for himself that DOESN'T revolve around BUFFY. Yes, I love the Spuffy, and I will continue to love the Spuffy. But we've always known that there's more to Spike than that. If Spike remains incorporeal, if he perhaps starts to look beyond his sense of injustice (which the very stern powers that be of Angel's universe don't seem to have much patience with), we may see a spiritual journey this year which is in some ways even more impressive than the one he's already completed.