At the risk of irritating quite a number of people, The Prodigal is the first episode
in Angel the series that might break into my top 20.
Yes yes I know, I Will Remember You and Hero are in Season 1, and while I'll agree I
think both of those episodes have wonderful emotional scenes that might be some of the
most memorable in the series, there are aspects to both, especially in regards to plot, that
I find troublesome and difficult to ignore.
But the Prodigal is intricate, musical, emotional, and feels like a complete thought from beginning
to end.
It's 200 years ago and Angelus is standing in a doorway attempting to lure a fair maiden
into the shadows and pounce on her.
Turns out it was just Liam with a blinding hangover.
This actually got me.
The reference to his future vampire self made through the medium of a hangover was such
clever storytelling and made me wonder if I'm a future vampire.
Liam's father kicks him into the sunlight and curses him for his layabout ways, and
we cut immediately to Angel in a subway doing battle.
Kate is now aware of Angel's world but attempting mightily to compartmentalize and insulate
herself from it.
"Can you just say evil thing?"
Still, Kate is the fish out of water through which some nice lore building is done in Angel.
As she learns so do we and her ignorance justifies occasional bouts of exposition from other
characters.
There's a great little exchange between Angel and Kate as she momentarily lets her
guard down and then verbally shoves him away.
Kate: "I'm not your girlfriend."
IMMEDIATE cut to Darla.
Darla and Saffron are taking in Liam for the first time and are obviously impressed.
*firefly reference
Wesley's research reveals that the demon Angel found is actually peaceful.
Something must be up.
Angel tails a subway witness played by Danny McBride's younger cousin Randy McBride
#HornyMcBride
to the apartment of Kate's Dad, where he drops off a strange package.
Angel confronts him and has the door slammed in his face.
In flashback we see Liam leaving home to get out from under this father's thumb.
Liam says goodbye to his younger sister.
And he and his father square off one last time.
And just when you think his father was at risk of becoming a little one dimensional,
he grabs Liam by the arm.
His anger gives way to a look of fear and desperation at the the thought of Liam leaving
home that actually shook me.
Liam is turned by Darla in scenes we once saw in Becoming Part 1.
And after the episode makes Liam's father a more interesting character, Kate's buys
hers a beer and he seems to offer genuine admiration for Angel and his abilities.
"It's not good to be alone Katie."
This can only go well for these two.
Wesley discovers the peaceful demon was on drugs.
Turns out Kate's Dad is unwittingly helping a demon crime lord move them.
The demon orders Angel's death.
Angelus awakens after Liam's funeral.
Darla is waiting for him and Angelus experiences his first kill.
There is a notable moment here where Angelus turns to Darla looking for approval...and
then finishes the murder.
His father is boarding up the windows and Angelus surprises him.
Their exchange is some gripping tragedy.
A tragedy with two victims.
Liam and his father.
And I can never help but picture his father's last desperate glance as Liam walked out the
door.
IT reminded me a bit of…
"Buffy maybe we shouldn't."
Angelus believes this to be his shining moment of victory.
But in the following scene back in the present, Liam's choice to become a vampire with Darla
means that Angel is unable to enter the apartment to save Kate's father.
And he can only watch, until his soul leaves his body.
And then Kate discovers the scene.
This is Angel paying for Liam's choice in the loss of Kate's father.
Kate finds the address of the mafia demons and heads to them.
Angel helps her annihilate them.
But the rift between Angel and Kate is now permanent.
This is a complicated episode and there exists plenty of opportunity for nitpicks, but I
think on closer examination there are some wonderful things going on.
The Prodigal is an engrossing tragedy.
And tragedy is cyclical.
One bad action leads to another, and then another.
Liam left home, and asked Darla to show him her world.
The punishment for that action was the death of his entire family, and many years later,
having to watch Kate's father murdered in front of him while not being able to do anything
about it.
The cycle of tragedy doesn't care about the size of the action that created it.
Or as Angel puts it:
28:10 "YEAH I know all about choice Wesley but sometimes the price we pay for one bad
choice isn't commensurate with the offense."
The Buffyverse doesn't often distill the horror and sadness of the vampire cycle so
dramatically, and display it for us so unflinchingly.
I was most reminded of the haunting gaze Drusilla and Spike gave Ford in Lie to Me, and Buffy
grappling with the complexity of her new life as she waited for Ford to rise.
After two duds and a 'MEH it's alright,' The Prodigal feels so confidently well put
together.
I love the parallel structure of the story, mirroring Kate and Angel's relationships
with their fathers.
As we've said before, for some reason Angel flashback episodes just tend to be really
great.
But even beyond the story, the episode feels technically well executed.
The music by Robert Krahl and Christophe Beck is actually distinct between the two time
periods.
The themes for Liam's fall and the rise Angelus are gothic, restrained, and horrifying.
Tragically inevitable.
*Angel kills his father
Where the notes for the modern day sequences sound out the more conventional heroic motif's.
*Angel fights the vampires
Ignoring the tumultuous aspects of the season, there has been some internal dissonance to
Angel's structure.
The early parts of Season 1 were establishing a supernatural noir procedural, a framework
inside of which Kate's tough-as-nails cop-with-baggage fit rather well.
But episodes like I Will Remember You, Somnambulist, and The Prodigal hint at a more epic direction,
and ultimately are the most accurate representations to this point of what Angel the Show turns
into.
This episode feels like an effort to steer Kate's character more in that other direction.
It kind of works, but pitting her against Angel going forward also puts her outside
the ensemble, a position from which it can be difficult for the writer's to develop
their character and often relegates those characters to throw in scenes meant to remind
the audience they're still on the show.
I love the episodes title and its reference to The Prodigal Son.
The Prodigal Son is one of the parables of Jesus on loss and redemption.
In the story, a father has two sons (Liam/Angelus.)
The oldest son, toils under his father's rule, uncelebrated.
The youngest asks for his share of the family fortune and upon receiving it he moves to
a distant country, living and spending with great extravagance.
The word prodigal actual means, wastefully extravagant.
"I want the whole village."
After he loses his fortune he comes to his senses and returns to his father to beg to
be his servant.
You could say, he finds his soul.
And his father welcomes him home with open arms, saying, when his eldest son objects.
"Your brother was dead.
And is alive again."
The show has been developing quite a storm of father issues.
Wesley's were hinted at in the previous episode.
Kate's father doesn't show love because it might be a sign of weakness.
Liam's father can't see Liam for who is, through the fog of his own imposed expectations
and the belief that Liam will never live up to them.
People with the power in these sorts of relationships, whether unconsciously or deliberately, maintain
control over their loved ones by withholding love and affection, keeping them desperate
for it.
Kate points out in Sense and Sensitivity that after her Mom died, her Father just withdrew.
Which allowed him the dual power of insulating himself from further pain as well as keeping
Kate pursuing him.
Liam's inability to live up to his father's expectations produced a powerful lack of self-worth,
the template for the demon who took him over.
It follows then that Angelus would have a galvanized desire to conquer and destroy.
To dominate everyone as thoroughly and brutally as he could, in as clever way as he could
find.
His first act with Darla, after all, is to destroy his entire village.
But self-determination isn't actually measured by power over others.
And Angel's relationship to Darla throughout the episode undermines the notion that becoming
a vampire has elevated him beyond Liam's desires.
In the graveyard scene he gives Darla such a childlike look for approval, as he kills
his first human.
Even as a monster he will always be trying to fill the void of his human template.
And that GROUNDS Angel's relationships to this point with both Darla AND Buffy.
From the graveyard scene here all the way to Sunnydale 200 years later when Darla entraps
Angel and tries to get him to go after Buffy, we see the power she lords over him because
of Liam's original desperate desire for his father's validation.
In Buffy's third season, once she'd broken up with Angel in Lovers Walk, and with the
aid of some psychological torture from the First, Angel was again looking to escape his
own emotional traps and self-hatred.
Considering his pattern of relationships, leaving Sunnydale to come to LA might've
been one of Angel's first genuine acts of self-determination.
It wasn't an act of childhood rebellion as when Liam left home.
It was a decision made from Angel's integrity.
And that decision proves Darla wrong.
When the two of them stood over the corpses of Liam's family and Darla suggested that
his father's victory over Angelus would now last forever, that was the perspective
of the soulless.
Similar to the Mayor's statement to Faith in This Year's Girl that without him, her
days were numbered.
If the soul is the moral compass, a being who lacks one cannot make a decision in opposition
to their own selfish interests, effectively meaning they lack free will.
Ironically, I think the way out of all of this (the Friar's message that never made
it to Romeo) was what Angel's father said to him as he tried to prevent him from leaving
early in the episode.
And it's what makes the line so crushing.
"I was never in your way boy."
As much as our parents are gods to us when we're young, as we get older hopefully we
discover their simple humanity, flaws and all.
While perhaps we don't always get to choose who we love, the love given or denied us need
not determine who we are.
We do that, through our choices and our ensuing actions.
And if we cede our self-worth and dignity to someone who abuses them, it's on us to
realize that that was still our choice.
The idea is not to try and take that power and self determination back for ourselves,
but to realize that it was always ours to begin with.
Or risk repeating that same pattern over and over again in future relationships.
We can't control what the world does to us but, as one of my favorites, Viktor Frankl
once said, between stimulus and response there is a space.
In that space is our power to choose our response.
And in our response lies our growth and our freedom.
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