Angel Season 1: Leaving Childhood Behind
The moral case for becoming an adult and leaving your childhood behind.
At some point, we all have to grow up.
Much as we might want to, none of us can stay a kid forever. Which is something of a shame since there are so many great things about being a child. You can enjoy yourself without necessarily having to worry about where your next meal is coming from or how you're going to put a roof over your head. Finding these things and maintaining them is an incredibly difficult process. Most people struggle their whole lives to get to a place where they aren't struggling to make ends meet. Yet as an adult, it's a major part of what you do. It requires all kinds of compromises and uncertainties that you really didn't have to make when you were younger and you could rely on your parents for things.
Previously in this space, we looked at what it means to be a child and have to grow up, but once that's over with, you actually have to be a grown up. Being an adult means moving beyond the obvious and easy. When you're a kid, you build your life based on what's around you. Going to school makes that really simple. All you have to do is find people who are forced to go to the same school as you and try to build connections with them. Sometimes it works out and you build life long friendships. A lot of the time though these relationships don't survive high school. Leaving high school means leaving your friends behind. More than anything though, you leave childhood behind when you leave high school.
“High school's over, it's time to make with the grown up talk now.”
This is very much where we find Angel at the beginning of season 1. He's left Sunnydale and everything he knew behind and moved to Los Angeles. Where he's failing though is in the fact that he doesn't have any kind of relationships. No one to rely on or answer to if he does the wrong thing. Very similar to what Buffy went through in season 4. They come at the problem differently though. Buffy still had friends she could rely on and turn to, Angel doesn't. He can cut himself off from the rest of the world if we wants to. Make himself into a lone wolf who isn't interested in what other people think. Obviously, the problem with that is it doesn't lead anywhere good. Cutting yourself off can lead you down the wrong path just as badly as getting in with the wrong crowd.
It's why he needs people like Doyle and Cordelia to help him out. They aren't tied to him in the way he's had in the past. Even though Cordelia did know him in his previous life, she doesn't have a personal connection from their time together, such as it was. Not to mention the fact that she was in many ways a victim of his time as Angelus which gives her a special insight into what getting to close to him actually means. She knows to set boundaries in a way that he wouldn't get from others. Doyle also knows that they aren't the best of friends. At most they're business associates working towards a goal. Lines have been drawn by the people around Angel and also by the character himself. Which allows him to grow as a person in a way that he wasn't able to before when he was around teenagers.
“Doyle filled me in on your little mission, so I was just saying that if we're going to be helping people out, maybe a small charge. A fee, you know something to help pay the rent, and my salary. You need someone to organize things and you're not exactly rolling in it Mr I've been alive for 200 years and never developed an investment portfolio.”
“You want to charge people.”
“Well not everybody, but sooner or later we are going to have to help some rich people, right? Right?”
“Possibly, yeah.”
“Hand me that box. So I figure we should charge based on a case by case analysis but with me working for a flat fee. I mean um, that is if you think you can use me?”
Angel has spent almost his whole life trying to avoid other people in one way or another. For over a hundred years he lived outside of anything like a real relationship, adult or otherwise. He doesn't have to have friends if he doesn't want to. But they do make him better in all kinds of ways. Living without other people isn't really living. It's more like existing. Which is a way of doing things if you want to go down that road. That doesn't make it a very meaningful life though. Because you can see others around you being able to connect and have friends. They can have a life but for whatever reason you've chosen not to go down that road.
Probably the best example of the need to grow up and be more of an adult comes from Wesley. He has been something of a joke for most of his life. Although he had adult responsibilities in his job as Watcher to Buffy and Faith, he didn't do a very good job at it. Wesley never had to confront the real world in any serious way because he was protected from it through his parents and the Watcher's Council. They allowed him to continue thinking in somewhat childish ways about how things work in the real world. It was all theoretical and things he read about in books. As soon as he's confronted with reality, it's in many ways too hard for him to handle.
This becomes even more obvious when he finds Angel and Cordelia again. His experience in Sunnydale did give him some real world knowledge of how things work. He's no longer as naive as he used to be. Yet he still doesn't fully interact with the world. Wesley is comforted by his attempt to hang on to what his life used to be. The idea that he can maintain some level of detachment from the world and live within books. Like with most things when you become an adult though, you can't live cut off from the world. You have to confront it directly in order to get anything done. Over time, he's able to do that more and more through his more adult relationships with Angel and Cordelia.
When building relationships like this however, you have to allow for nuances and boundaries. You're not going to know everything about the people around you. They're going to do things without you and you're going to have to be okay with that. More than that, they will have a past which they won't necessarily tell you about it unless they want to. These are the basics of more adult relationships and friendships in particular. It's harder to make a situation like that work.
Which is part of the point of these relationships as well. To build a way to function within the wider society. Contributing to it in some way that can sustain not just you but the people around you... through work. Just any type of work won't do though. People can work for the sake of making money in order to get by, but to really have good work, it has to make you feel like what you're doing gives you meaning. Otherwise you're just existing and that can be worse than not working at all in some ways. Maybe the best way to find meaningful work is to help people. Find something that allows you to make other people's lives better, or at the very least easier.
“You're a civilized man, we don't have to go around attacking each other. Look at me, I pay my taxes, I keep my name out of the paper and I don't make waves, and in return, I can do anything I want.”
Kate is probably the best example of what this is like. To want to make things better and actively work towards it. As a cop, she's confronted directly with the suffering of the world and the less respectable aspects of it. That's often who criminals tend to be. She isn't under any illusions about the way the world really is because she sees it every day in her job. Or so she believed up until the point she meets Angel and her friends. Angel introduces her to the idea that many of the things she believed were the product of fantasies for insane people, aren't as ridiculous as they first seem. What she thought only children believe in do exist and can hurt you. Naturally, coming to understand this forces Kate to try and integrate her childhood ideas into her more adult thinking. Which is the opposite of what most of the other characters are going through.
“So how does this work?”
“There's no real simple answer to that. I won't lie to you and tell you that it'll be easy, because it won't be. Just because you decided to change doesn't mean the world's ready for you to. The truth is, no matter how much you suffer, no matter how many good deeds you do to make up for the past, you may never balance out the cosmic scale. The only thing I can promise you is that you'll probably be haunted, maybe for the rest of your life.”
This type of work might also lead to something of a grey area however. Since many of the people you encounter might not be the best themselves. They're going to be flawed and self destructive just as much as you can. Helping them might not always make the world better. It might just keep things in balance. Instead of making the world better, you just prevent it from getting much worse. Although when you do make that little bit of difference, it can make all the morally grey stuff worth it.
Doyle perhaps more than anyone is a great example of a morally grey person. He's deeply flawed to the point that he has a lot of things he regrets from his past. Things like his marriage, the way he lives his life through doing favours for people who aren't exactly the most upstanding citizens. In some ways his life is much worse than Cordelia and Angel when he meets them. Despite this fact, he's been chosen by a force bigger than he is to try and help people. You might even say that he was forced into a more heroic life by forces beyond his control. However, through his relationships with Angel and Cordelia he learns that these things aren't defining of him. He can rise above the circumstances he lives under and become a better person. The kind of person who can make the adult choice when it comes down to it.
“If you need help then look no further. Angel investigations is the best. Our rats are low...”
“Rates.”
“It says rats... our rates are low, but our standards are high. When the chips are down and you're at the end of your rope, you need someone you can count on, and that's what you'll find here. Someone who'll go all the way... who'll protect you no matter what. So don't lose hope, come on over to our offices and you'll see that there's still heroes in this world. Is that it? Am I done?”
Very few people have it in them to make the kind of choices that a real adult has to make. Ones where the good guys and the bad guys aren't always entirely clear. Knowing that it's not all black and white, morally speaking.
But we will get into how to make decisions like that in season 2. Paid subscribers can access it right now, as well as season 3.
Do yourself a favour and check out Angel as soon as you can on Disney Plus as well as Hulu and Amazon.