You Shouldn’t Mess With History
And as long as I’m talking about Buffy, can I share a little gripe that I had recently about an Angel episode that was on TV? I was never as big a fan of Angel as I was of Buffy, although I own all those DVDs, too, and have seen every episode. Several times. Anyway, Angel is on TNT every morning at 6 am and 7 am (ET) and most mornings, I watch it while I’m doing other stuff.
The other day, they aired this one episode from Season 5 was entitled, “Why We Fight” and I’ve never liked it. Its not a bad ep, as episodes go, and I understand why they did it the way they did it, but I still don’t like it. And I’ll tell you why. That is, if anyone is actually reading this and actually cares. The episode is told through flashbacks to World War II, where they have Angel working with the US Navy to recover a captured German submarine with American sailors on board. The Nazis have got Spike and some other vampires in their employ. I get what they are doing. They need to have both Angel and Spike involved, and they wanted to show something in the past, to make the show interesting.
But from other Angel history that we’ve seen in the past 7+ years of these two shows, supposedly Angel had spent close to 100 years being all brooding and wimpy, eating rats and stuff to stay alive, after he got cursed with his soul in 1898. It just seems doubtful that he pulled together the chutzpah to behave the way they have him behaving in this episode, set in 1940s, cause we’ve seen him as a wreck, starting around 1900, and then in both the 1970s and 1990s. There was also an ep in 1950s, where he clearly wants no contact with humans. So what would make him decide to fight for the Americans during the war? Why would he even care, he’s not even American.
Also, we’d been given to believe that Spike didn’t know about Angel’s soul, when he first met back up with him on Buffy in Season 2. The implication was that they hadn’t seen each other since shortly after the turn of the century, back in 1900. Obviously, if Spike had hung around with Angel in the 1940s, he would have known all about the soul.
Like I said, I get it. Since Spike was turned in 1880, I realize that if they wanted to do something in the past that involved both of them, they only have about a 20 year span to place them in, and I’m sure they just got tired of that. Plus, maybe they didn’t want to have to deal with adding in Darla and Druscilla. It makes sense. But still the entire episode ends up feeling forced to me, since they are trying to play around with history. And I hate when shows do that.
