You are pretty spot on with your character descriptions except for one. Yeah Angel was the Champion but he also had tons of experience for living over two and a half centuries, as well as speaking and reading many languages, and a near perfect memory. So once Angel learned something he would never forget it just like he never forgot a single one of the evil deeds that Angelus was responsible for. Which is why many of his opponents underestimated him. Wesley had the most formal education and seemed to do very well at applying his knowledge.
The episode where Fred is giving a talk on her article that appeared in a Physics Journal Angel was sitting in the audience. Afterwards he was able to pinpoint from memory where every person was sitting or standing in the auditorium. I don’t know if this is because he was born with a great memory or whether it is something that he got through becoming a predatory creature like a vampire. I don’t remember any of the other vampires displaying this eidetic memory. Usually Angel didn’t show off this ability maybe because he didn’t want the humans to know how acute his senses and perceptions were. It might freak them out as it would make him so different from them.
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Thanks for the vindication. So many fans like to underestimate the value of Angel’s experience and intelligence. I don’t know how he could stand being in Sunnydale and having to play second fiddle to the teenagers of the Scooby Gang, when he probably knew more than Giles did about so many dangers they faced. But since he could only travel around during the nighttime, they told much of the story during their school hours and this left his character out of the loop.
Then season one of Angel we find he knows how to research using the Internet as he haunts the public library that is until Wesley joins the group and does the research instead. This is totally better than what Giles was doing as he is actually adapting to the modern world better than the Watcher who remains a total bookworm. Willow has to use the computer for the Scoobies as Giles won’t touch that infernal machine.
I also maintain the opinion that saving souls as well as lives is a higher purpose than just saving the populace from vampires. I believe that TPTB knew through prophecies that Liam becoming Angelus than Angel would provide them with the perfect Champion when it came time for the Final Days.
Your posts on Angel are amazing.
I say many of the same things, but you said it very eloquently. I hate how much Angel’s intelligence is frequently overlooked. Angel was one of the smartest characters along with Wesley (who was miles ahead of Giles) and Giles. Fred and Willow’s intelligence was a bit more specific to math/science and computers and had less wisdom. In fact, besides Buffy, Angel was most able to connect to Giles before Angelus destroyed that.
Angel was also one of the wisest characters (Spike had a lot of experience, but didn’t have nearly as much self-awareness–Angel was perfectly aware of how doomed his future with Buffy always would be long before the curse added to his problems). That brooding nature of his resulted in him doing a lot of thinking (even his brooding time reading material about existentialism lead to one of his most famous speeches in Epiphany). Angel was a bit of a nerdy bookworm himself, which made Wesley and Giles some of the easiest characters with whom for him to connect to. They were also all lonely men denied love, as well as the figures used to making hard logical decisions that other people weren’t willing to make because emotions get in the way.
And yes, Angel’s eidetic memory is really underestimated and underrated, despite some very blatant examples of him using it (Supersymmetry, but also the sheer number of human languages he’s conversational in or able to understand). His knowledge of history and demonology was probably only bested by Wesley’s.
One thing that always pops out at me is that Liam says “I always wanted to see the world, but…” Liam wasn’t only the drunk womanizing idiot that so many non-fans of the character consider him to be.
Guess what Angelus and Angel both did a lot of? Fulfilling Liam’s wishes to get out of Galway and see the world. There’s a further hint of Liam having been severely unhappy with his time period, what was expected of him by his father (being a linen and silk merchant?) and surroundings in Halloween. The drinking, brawling, the intention of theft (interestingly, he insults his father as uncultured) and looking for unusual women in less respectable places (Angel definitely gets the bad girls out of his system and idolizes Buffy’s purity and goodness) might have been a symptom of that unhappiness. Angel tells us that he hated the sorts of dull women common in his time and was looking for someone intelligent and interesting (he ended up being seduced by Darla with promises of seeing a different world).
Angelus and Angel both have art collecting, drawing skills, interest in the fine arts such as ballet and poetry, travel, learning languages and the eidetic memory in common. These have to have been Liam’s unfulfilled interests and abilities that were being wasted. Liam wasn’t dumb, just unfulfilled. The demon might not be the human person, but he has that former personality, interests and mental capabilities that the human had to work with and expand on. Angel is Liam being horrified at what was done in his body, proving that Angel’s goodness was in Liam all along after he had a rude awakening and a shock to his system.
Thanks. Your posts on Angel and Buffy are also written very eloquently. Liam is a very misunderstood character in the Whedonverse. I can see someone intellectually gifted and artistic to boot being smothered in a mercantile atmosphere.
Your comments about his father and how Liam believed him to be uncultured and a boor are so true. When his father complained about him trying to seduce the servants and he answers that they only have one, you can see the contempt for his father’s pretensions. No doubt Liam wanted to pursue a career utilizing his artistic talents which his father in all probability denigrated as women’s busywork rather than a career as a silk merchant. It’s possible that his father was no more than a shopkeeper living beyond his means.
Lindsey is the one who mentions the linen and silk merchant factoid and “middle class” is used. In fact, the merchant class was indeed history’s original middle class after the collapse of the feudal system. It’s a class where a decent education and families with upwardly mobile ambitions would be possible. After the Bubonic Plague, the merchants became incredibly powerful. I know (my medievalist background is kicking in) that merchants would learn foreign languages in order to conduct business. Most of the upward middle class or well-educated individuals I’m aware of from the 18th century seemed to be highly self-taught. The nobility, mercantile and professional classes had access to education and literacy. A lot of education was religious.
We know Liam was heavily influenced by his father’s Catholicism (he viewed him as a hypocrite). Angel’s character is dripping in it when he discusses ideas of redemption, cosmic forgiveness and damnation. Being a demon unwanted by God and damned to Hell means something to him. He’s obsessed with God. Darla pushes his buttons with it. Angelus mocked God and targeted convents, nuns and virgins. Angel looks fearfully at Jesus on the cross when he goes into the church. Angel might be a vampire in a multiverse that is seemingly polytheistic, but he didn’t stop being Catholic. Interesting for a series where the creator is a devout atheist.
Angelus and Darla definitely had a taste for finer things and Angelus looked down on the Master living in the sewer and being disfigured from being able to hunt among the human pestilence. Darla always liked “the view” (she’s also a veritable fashion show). Her background of being a prostitute in 1609 would explain her love of finery and wanting to live with things she didn’t have before (there were exactly two English women in Jamestown that year and both graves are accounted for–interestingly, two women are shown in that flashback, which leaves stowaway, erased from history or Roanoke for her origin). Angelus was all too happy to oblige. They traveled in style and in finery. This seems to flow with Liam’s seeming views of his father.
His obsessions with travel, human languages (he never seems to know any demon ones, unlike Spike or Wesley, though he tries to learn a demon language at W&H), fine arts (ballet, poetry, his drawing skills, drawings he has on walls, classical music on a record player, mostly likes old music from classical up through the oldies period, etc…), collecting antiques (statuary, Ming vase, misplaced books of prophecy, etc…), reading old books in foreign languages, preference for extravagant living spaces despite his team being always broke (we know he was notoriously cheap with a buck–perhaps he just is very reluctant to dig into Angelus’ stash of probable blood money–he pulls out a big wad of cash to get rid of Cordy and Groo, though), etc… is present in the character from the first time we see his apartment and is with him to the end. Shame Joyce and him never really got to discuss art antiques, though she mentions the things in his mansion in passing.
Interestingly, Liam is talking about stealing cutlery that his father never uses. It wasn’t until the 18th century that multiple sets of provided cutlery became common in wealthier homes and the fork was the last to catch on. Prior to this century, people often carried their own utensils in pouches called cadenas and used their personal knife they carried. I read some interesting stuff recently about how some frowned on using the fork well into the 19th century, as they could use their hands. Some deemed it unmanly when the fork arrived in Italy (they needed it for pasta) from the Byzantine Empire. Countries other than Italy took centuries for it to catch on. The four-tine fork design didn’t exist until the early 19th century (two or three-tined forks were used prior).
Now, of course, Liam was no saint and not helping the situation with his father by living down to his low expectations after feeling that he was a disappointment no matter what he did. Interestingly, we later see this dynamic turned on its head where Angel becomes his father to an out-of-control son who has to also have an extreme intervention to save him from self-destruction (a complete rewriting of memories in Connor’s case, while Angel needed Angelus’ horrific actions to wake Liam’s underlying morality up). Angel walked a mile in his father’s shoes in an intentional echo of his own past. Liam saw nothing but the bad in his father, while Connor saw nothing but the monster who killed Holtz’s family in Angel. By Connor reconciling with Angel, Angel may have found peace with his own father.
Liam’s biggest flicker of goodness and humanity had been with his sister Kathy; the very sister who gave him his name when he “returned to her an angel”. Thus, the demon with the face of an angel was born. Noticeably, after the crimes of Angelus, he doesn’t return to being Liam, but something altogether new resulting from the combination of minds: Angel.
The misdated Watcher’s Diary entry (1775, my rear, that’s supposed to be 1745) is supposed to be him at 18 dating the fancy noblewoman. But that entry seems kind of ridiculous given the errors. If you try to read it, the name looks like “Sarah Goodfried”. Halloween makes my inner fashion history nerd cringe. Buffy’s costume has an excuse of being a modern costume, but the drawing in the book has a bustle and no pair of chest-flattening stays. It resembles Victorian. LMAO.
Granted, these same Watchers’ Dairies told Giles that Spike was barely 200. And then Spike says he’s 126 in The Initiative (he’s 119!). Spike sounds like he tries to get people to think he’s older.
At least the exact line with Angel is “240 years
or so”, not exactly that (243-244).
I have to mentally just headcanon that Angel liked shaving off a few years when Buffy rounded down his age and kept it going. Unlike Spike wanting to boost his cred., Angel’s age mostly served to make him feel old.
