Time For Angel To Get On The Responsibility Bus

Even though it was his fault she'd lost her mind again, it was nice for Angel to offer to help Drusilla. Maybe he was doing it because he figured she could call off her extremely riled former followers, but it'd be nice if he showed some responsibility towards her.

It made sense that Angelus didn't worry about Dru. She was someone he destroyed for kicks, and kept around because her visions could be useful, assuming he could make sense of him.

But Angel, what's his excuse? That he spent most of his first century ensouled living in squalor off rats? We know that wasn't all he did. Perhaps the idea of helping people, whether we're talking Drusilla or her victims, simply didn't occur to him until Whistler introduced him to Buffy. That's been a few years now (would this be Angel Season 7?), but he's never made any effort to track her down. Spike brings her to Sunnydale. Wolfram & Hart bring her to L.A. It turns out she's Mother Superior. For some reason, he's never invested the time and energy to dealing with her, even though she was almost certainly killing people, and may start up again.

Which is strange. He created her. He bears responsibility for her as much as he does for every person he killed over the years. Whether it's to dust her once and for all, or try to find some place she can live safely, without risking others, he ought to have done something. But the thought never seemed to cross his mind until now.

Maybe it's a limitation of Angel's approach. He takes the classic reactive hero approach, where something bad happens, and he sets out to find the party responsible, and bring them to justice. That can lead to a situation where he only deals with the problems right in front of him, and that's rarely been Drusilla. There has, however, been a steady stream of other problems to keep him busy. So maybe he hasn't had the time. Plus, it's a big world, though Dru ought to stand out.

I saw a theory online once, that Angel ignores what Dru does (this goes for Spike as well), because he wants to distance himself from Angelus. In the "Daddy Issues" arc, he tried insisting that Angelus only exists when the soul is gone. Soul = Angel, No Soul = Angelus, no gradations. Taking that approach, he might find it better to adopt "out of sight, out of mind". He's Angel, he had nothing to do with making Dru who she is, she's just another vampire, in no way different or special from any other except for her gifts. If he admits she's more than that, that he is responsible for her, then maybe he's admitting the man he was before he was turned had something to do with what Angelus did to her, that he can't blame it all on the demon. Or Angelus is still there, even with the soul in-house, and so he feels a connection.

That could prove very dangerous to the foundations Angel tries to use to keep himself going, and that might explain the reason he's been uninterested in helping or stopping Drusilla up to this point.