Angel May Have Been The Villain This Time

Over the course of the "Daddy Issues" story arc in Angel & Faith, who do you think was doing more good, Angel or Drusilla?

It's true that Dru's motives in taming the Lorophage weren't entirely altruistic. It gave her something she could use to attract followers to her side, people she can take blood from without having to risk breaking the new "rules", keeping her safely away from angry Slayers. Still, she did seem to legitimately help these people move past their pain. The problem was in the fact that what worked for her wouldn't necessarily work for everyone else. So some of the people she helped ended up killing people. But that wasn't true for all of them, and there's a chance if she hadn't helped those people, some of them would have lashed out at others because of their inability to cope with their anguish.

Now that Angel forced the Lorophage to release all that trauma back to them, it still might happen. Which means others could suffer at the hands of people who were released from their pain, and at the hands of people who had it forced back upon them. Not an ideal outcome. Plus Drusilla has lost her sanity again, which makes me think she'll go back to killing people. There's always a chance she'll remember enough to refrain from doing that. With her hypnotic powers, she could convince someone to give her blood easily enough, but there's no guarantee she will, and other than Faith or Buffy, I wouldn't give any Slayers good odds against her in a fight.

The issue for me is I tend to doubt Angel's motives. I rarely feel like he does good because he enjoys it or thinks it's the right thing to do. It usually seems like he's trying to atone for something, or working toward some goal (like the Shanshu prophecy). Even this thing with bringing back Giles, feels like Angel trying to make up for a past mistake. Even though Giles told Faith such things shouldn't be attempted - and I wouldn't be surprised if one of the pieces of Giles Angel's collected so far isn't telling him that - Angel's still doing it. His need to "fix" his mistake supersedes common sense, as well as the wishes of the person he's trying to help. Which makes this stink of Angel and his big martyr complex again. And seeing as stopping the Lorophage got him one step closer to his goal, it's fair to question what his goal really was.

Does he actually care about those people, or even Faith? Angel seems to take it as given that without her pain, guilt, and desire for acceptance, Faith will, I dunno, revert back to the nearly crazed threat to everything around her she once was. But there's no proof that will happen. She still came to his rescue, and she did so in a controlled manner. She wasn't swinging wild, with no regard for anyone else.

Dru didn't help things by trying to fed him to the Lorophage, and you could certainly argue she simply did it because she was tired of his ruining things, rather than a desire to help him. But is forcing Angel to ditch the sackcloth and ashes any worse than his forcing it back on everyone else? I don't know. Angel usually helps people by protecting them from external threats, while Dru was focused on helping them with internal problems. The ones that make them sabotage themselves, that hold them back, that make them self-destruct.

It feels connected to the idea of how much control a person can have over their own lives. If someone is a threat to others, it's easier. You can't let someone harm others, but if they're only a threat to themselves, do you intervene? Or do you decide these acts are their choice and let them deal with the consequences? And if you decide to leave them be until they pose a threat to someone else, how much of a leash do you give them? What's the line where you step in to bar their decisions? Dru lets people run free. They come to her of their own choice, they receive the gift, and what they do after is their call, whether it's stay with her, or go on a killing spree. Once she's lifted their burden, she considers her part done. Angel is more restrictive. He's the teacher that revokes a privilege for the whole class because of the actions of a few students. Even if the rest of the kids aren't abusing it now, they might later, so better to cut it off before it can happen.

I had been thinking of it in terms of people with suicidal tendencies, but I'm starting to make it sound like a freedom vs. security issue now. I tend to believe in letting people make their own choices and deal with the repercussions, but I don't know if that's right. In this case, I think Angel was overzealous (though the fact Dru tried to take the choice away from him muddies that water considerably), and that he's caused more trouble than he's fixed, all in the pursuit of a highly questionable goal, but we may have to wait and see.