This is the second of four essays on Becoming. The first focused on Willow’s arc; the third on the re-souling debate and Xander’s Lie; the fourth on Buffy’s arc and final choice.
It’s a shame that Darla is dead. She is notable for her absence in this season, which introduces and then focuses so heavily on the surviving members of her vampire family: Angel, Drusilla, and Spike. One of the great tragedies of the Buffyverse is that we never get to enjoy a modern-day reunion for the Fanged Four, all together in one dysfunctional room.
But we must appreciate what we have, and there’s an awful lot to appreciate here. Here, we learn so much about these three remaining vampires. This is a revelatory episode on first watch, and even moreso on a rewatch, with the context of ten more Buffyverse seasons. We see the events that have brought Drusilla to this point, the events that will trigger Spike’s development, and for Angel we see both. We see how the three of them are linked – to each other, but also all to Buffy, their fates irrevocably tied to her and her influence. We see what has brought them to this point, what sends them in new directions. All the possibilities for what they could become.
I’ll show you what I mean.
I Want To Help Her (Angel)
David Boreanaz has a lot on his plate in this episode. Over the course of this story, he arguably plays three different characters, and each of them at two different points in time. The first character, who we meet for the first time in this opening scene, is Liam – the human man that lived from 1727 until 1753, and during that time amounted to just less than nothing. A drunkard, a petty thief, and a terrible disappointment to his father. In the first scene we meet him, he does the first thing in his life that has any meaning at all. He dies.
He is killed by Darla, who enjoys her own kind of becoming in this episode. The very first thing we talked about in these essays was how the Darla of Season One was not real Darla – not the enigmatic, compelling character we see in Angel the Series. In this scene, she is. The creators seem to have realised how good an actor Julie Benz is, and allow her to play Darla with the coy, seductive mystery she was always meant to be played with. With only a few words, and barely any movements, she wraps Liam around an effortless finger and leads him to his death. He closes his eyes and walks straight into the slaughterhouse, just because she tells him to.
I have seen fans suggest that this moment from Liam – asking Darla to “show [him] [her] world” – constitutes him actively making a choice to become a vampire. This is nonsense. He had no context, no way to understand what she was asking. The man was just trying to score with Julie Benz (which, fair). This was a false choice – a choice made with no way to understand what the choice facing him actually is. He just closed his eyes and let Darla make the choice for him. He became an object in the world, at her mercy.
So Darla kills Liam, and gives birth to Angelus. She feeds him blood from her breast – clear motherhood imagery – and in doing so creates the monster that has been the Big Bad of this season. We will only see Liam once more, briefly. After his soul is forced upon him, he awakens with no memory of the last hundred-plus years, confused and appalled at the idea that he has killed someone. This is the last gasp of Liam – a brief rebirth before, as we know they will, the memories of Angelus return, and he realises what he has done.
This scene is also the (temporary) death of Angelus, and just like Liam, he does not get a say in it. Unlike the second vampiric re-souling we will see in four seasons’ time, Angel does not choose to get his soul. It is a curse, inflicted upon him, just as vampirism itself was. Again, he was at the mercy of a powerful woman – the Kalderash elder performing the ritual – and they made the choice for him. Just as he will be at this episode’s end, when the same curse is inflicted on him by another powerful woman. Willow curses him; Angelus dies yet again. Again, an object in the world.
Before he becomes supplicant to the whims of this world, he attempts to destroy it. Acathla is introduced to us early on in this episode, and functionally, he fills the same role as the Judge did in Surprise and Innocence. He is Sealed Evil In A Can – a near-indestructible demon who was temporarily incapacitated by virtuous medieval knights, who possesses absurd power, and if fully awakened will undoubtedly cause a capital-A Apocalypse. This similarity isn’t lazy writing – it’s intentional repetition in order to show Angel’s (and Spike’s, but we’ll get to him later) changing reactions to the situation.
“Psst. We’re going to destroy the world. Want to come?”
Drusilla and Angel, 2×14 Innocence
“Yeah. Destroying the world. Great. I’m really more interested in the Slayer.”
“He will swallow the world.”
Drusilla and Angel, 2×21 Becoming
“And every creature living on this planet will go to Hell. My friends… we’re about to make history… end.”
In Innocence, Angelus was disinterested in – even bored by – the apocalypse. He had no massive objection to Drusilla’s plan, but his main interest lay in tormenting Buffy. He actively asked Spike and Drusilla to delay their plans, just so he could go and mess with her. The apocalypse was an afterthought, an irrelevance. It was personal cruelty that motivated him. While in Becoming, he is spearheading the plan to end the world, desperate to make it succeed and becoming angry when it doesn’t. When he meets Buffy, he insists that she isn’t important, that he “doesn’t have time for [her]”, that this “was never about [her]”.
I believe this to be a lie. His changing perspective on the apocalypse has been entirely fuelled by Buffy. After his brush with love in I Only Have Eyes For You, he is more driven than ever to destroy Buffy, and to destroy the part of him that still feels anything for her. He wanted to destroy her in the way that he destroyed Drusilla, but he has failed at that. He has tortured her, killed her friends, and tried to drive her insane, but she has proved herself too strong for him. Destroying the world is his last-gasp attempt to gain power – to make himself a God over her, just as he did to Drusilla.
Angel’s arc this season is one of gradual inversion, with many examples surrounding the rapid inversion at the centre of the season (the loss of his soul). He manages to trick Buffy with the same plan that the Anointed One used back in When She Was Bad. It is an especially cruel moment, that he is using a weakness that he learned about from being her trusted ally. Later, he is almost tricked by Giles’ mid-torture mockery into killing him – an act that would leave him unable to perform his world-ending ritual. This is the same trick that Angel himself almost pulled in What’s My Line – except then it was Spike who almost fell for it. Now, Spike is the level-headed one who stops Angelus’ impulsiveness. In so many ways, these two vampires have swapped places, sliding across the same spectrum and ending up on opposite sides.
“Since when did you become so level-headed?”
Angel and Spike, 2×22 Becoming
“Right about the time you became so pig-headed.”
Angel’s blood was a central plot element in What’s My Line, being the catalyst that could restore Drusilla back to full health. We talked in that essay about how Angel’s blood creates every Big Bad this season – Drusilla both when he sired her and when he restored her, Spike when he sired him (we’re still pre-Fool for Love!), and now, when it awakens Acathla. Angel’s blood is the key here, and it both unlocks the door to the Apocalypse and allows it to be locked again. Both Whistler and Angel himself refer to Angel as the “key”. And if you’re getting flash-forwards to The Gift here, then that is very intentional.
“Blood. Of course. The blood on my hands must be my own. I am the key that will open up the door. My blood. My life.”
Angel, 2×22 Becoming
“‘Cos it’s always got to be blood. Blood is life, lackbrain. Why do you think we eat it? It’s what keeps you going. Makes you warm. Makes you hard. Makes you other than dead. Of course it’s her blood.”
Spike, 5×22 The Gift
Becoming, Graduation Day and The Gift form a trilogy of finales, all of which involve a Trolley-Problem decision for Buffy to make, given an option to kill someone that she loves in order to save the lives of others. And in each of these finales, blood is key. Angel’s blood is required to stop Acathla after he awakens him. Faith’s blood is required to save Angel’s life after she puts it in danger. Dawn’s blood is required to stop flowing in order to close the portal that it opens. You can even point to Buffy’s blood freeing the Master in Prophecy Girl, or blood opening the Seal of Danzalthar in Season Seven to add additional resonance. This is all intentional repetition, to raise the stake of Buffy’s choices again and again, all the time requiring her to shed some blood.
That blood is shed at the episode’s tearful climax, in which Angel is killed by Buffy. This is the second point in time that we see Angel (the first being 1996), and just like the second appearance of Liam, it is one in which he has no memory of what he has done. When he receives the soul he reverts to a blank Angel-state, not understanding where he is or how he got there, but gentle and caring towards Buffy just as Angel was before. And like Liam in the opening scene, it is one in which he is without agency. He cannot make a choice – it’s too late for that, and he doesn’t understand what’s going on anyway. It’s Buffy’s choice to make, and she makes it for him. And just as Liam did with Darla – he trusts her. He doesn’t understand what he is trusting her to do, but he trusts her anyway. This is the key link in this moment, and why “close your eyes” as an instruction repeats. She tells him to close his eyes, and he does. He makes himself blind, and so makes himself an object in the world, at her mercy.
There are three characters that David Boreanaz plays in this episode, and all three have died with no choice, no agency of their own. You might think that this makes Angel a purely passive character, not capable of making the choices required to achieve true change. This would be wrong. Because Angel already made a choice, and it’s that choice that allows him to return. It makes this a temporary death; an inconvenience for three episodes before he will slither, sweaty and naked out of another portal – another rebirth for him.
He is granted this rebirth because Joss Whedon wanted to give him a spin-off, and was preparing to put that in place. It was apparently his performance in I Only Have Eyes For You that convinced Whedon he could carry his own show[1], and Amends is somewhat a backdoor pilot for Angel, but this episode is also setting so much of that groundwork. It gives us the first flashbacks into Angel’s history that will feature so heavily in his own series. It gives us the version of Darla that we will see much more of in Angel. It gives us the first hints of the Powers That Be, and Angel’s role in the Shanshu Prophecy. And it gives us our first glimpse of Doyle.
Whistler is quite transparently a proto-Doyle. He is a wise-cracking demon who receives visions from the Powers That Be, and acts as a guide to put Angel on his correct path. A first-draft version of City Of reveals that Whistler was originally intended to appear in the role that Doyle ended up taking[2]. He does here, in these 1996 flashbacks, what Doyle does in that episode – finds Angel isolated and brooding, and encourages him to live in the world, to engage with it and do good. The lighting in this sequence even evokes the shadowy, noir-lite aesthetics of Angel. Angel is essentially experiencing the pilot of his own show, three years in advance. This is Angel Season 0, Episode -1.
In the midst of all this, Angel also gets to watch Buffy Episode 0 (Episode -1 having aired as a movie starring Kristy Swanson in 1992). We see Buffy receive her calling as a Slayer, and in the brief scene just prior, we get our first and only glimpse of a pre-destiny Buffy that is played by Sarah Michelle Gellar. This is obviously an important moment in Buffy’s life, but the scene actually starts from Angel’s POV. He is witness to this moment, because it is as much the birth of Angel – of Angel – as it is of Buffy and of Buffy. He is made the hero that he becomes by the strength and bravery he witnesses from Buffy. In a way, he becomes worthy of being equal to Buffy by watching an episode of Buffy.
It would be an oversight not to mention the inappropriately-aged elephant in the room, so here I go. The image of a fully-adult David Boreanaz, playing a character who is over two hundred years old and has the body of a twenty-six-year-old, sitting in a blacked-out car and watching Sarah Michelle Gellar, playing a character who is at this point fifteen years old, and playing it as a romantic moment, is uncomfortable to say the least. This isn’t an accident – Buffy’s youth is emphasised. She is walking out of a school, dressed in a frilly top and eating a lollipop. I’m surprised they didn’t put her in heart-shaped sunglasses. Surely you cannot put an older man in a dirty car outside a school, watching a young girl, and not realise the implications there.
I would like to argue intentionality – that the show is intentionally highlighting the age discrepancy and power imbalance in order to make us uncomfortable – but I fear that might be too generous. The scene is played very straight-forwardly romantically, with soft piano music playing as Angel takes his first look at Buffy. We find out in Helpless that this is apparently the moment at which Angel fell in love with Buffy. This is part of a sequence that is meant as a heartwarming turning point in Angel’s arc. And yet, it is tinged with something that I can’t find a better word for than “grossness”. I don’t think that this ruins Buffy/Angel as a romance or renders Angel’s arc here meaningless, but the fact that the show doesn’t seem to be entirely aware of how gross an image this is lends it all a level of discomfort for me that only grows the older I get.
The important thing for Angel’s arc is that Buffy is a central part of it. Just as Darla did in that alley in the episode’s opening, she triggers a transformation in him. She unwittingly transforms him from the rat-eating nobody that he was in New York City into a person we recognise as Angel. Later, in Innocence, she unwittingly transforms him from Angel into the monster we recognise as Angelus (an event that Whistler notes as diverging his path from stopping Acathla to bringing him forth). And she perfectly wittingly kills him at episode’s end, setting his path as one of torment for the next hundred years.
But as important as Buffy is to his arc, she does not compel him to become a hero. He makes that choice himself. After seeing her origin story, he decides that it will be his origin story too. He makes the choice to help her – to live in the world, to become someone. It is that choice that puts him on the path to being a hero, to leading a show of his own. This is the choice that allows him to not die for good at the end of this episode; to be deemed worthy of return. This is what facilitates his redemption.
This transformative moment for him is triggered by literally seeing Buffy’s reflection, and this is an important piece of symbolism. Angel cannot see his own, but he can see Buffy’s. He recognises a reflection in her and so forms his purpose around it. He is only able to become the person he does because of that.
There is a lot of talk of “becoming” in this episode (shockingly enough), and most of it from Angel himself. Whistler tells him he can “become someone”, and Angel repeats those words when he makes the choice to help Buffy. When he first tries to awaken Acathla, Angelus makes a speech about how all he has done has led him to that moment, and that this act will be his ascension – his “becoming” – his reason for existence. The point of this repetition is to emphasise the fact that Angel can always become something. He can become a world-ending villain, he can become a hero, he can become a rat-eating wastrel. “Becoming” as a concept unto itself is meaningless. The important question to ask is: what will you become?
Angel’s journey so far has been defined mostly by the choices and influences of other people. Darla chose to make him a vampire, and then encouraged and influenced his evil. Buffy chose to love him, chose to kill him, and all the while influenced his morality. Drusilla and Spike were influenced by him, and then they influenced him back by welcoming his return to their evil vampiric family. If Angel is to ascend to the status of protagonist, as he eventually does, then he needs to define himself by his own choices. That movement into agency starts here, and he uses that agency to choose to be a hero.
We have talked a lot in the back half of this season about the Angel/Angelus dichotomy, and to what extent these two characters are the same person. There is, of course, a meaningful difference between them, but in my mind this episode confirms the fact that they are the same person, and should be considered as such. Liam, Angelus, Angel, Nameless Hobo… they are all a part of the Angel tapestry. All the moments that we see – the big moments and the small ones – they all have led him here, to this episode. Torturing Drusilla, getting cursed, falling in love with Buffy, awakening Acathla, getting drunk on a Galway street – they’re all a part of his life, and they all count. They all contribute to who Angel is, and to the hero he will become.
I Want To Save The World (Spike)
“A demon… technically. I mean, I’m not a bad guy. Not all demons are dedicated to the destruction of all life.”
Whistler, 2×21 Becoming
This is one of the most significant lines in the gradual evolution of the Buffyverse’s morality. Before this point, every demon and vampire we had met had been, without exception, evil. Angel was always a special exception due to his soul, and without it is clearly just as evil as all the others. Season Two expanded the scope of humanity somewhat with Spike and Drusilla’s affection for each other, but they still remained clearly and firmly Evil. With this line, Whistler becomes the first character in the Buffyverse to be both a Demon and unequivocally Good. He sets the stage for Lorne, and Clem, and the array of Good (or at least Non-Evil) demons that will become so common in Angel particularly.
Most importantly though, this episode expands the scope of moral ambiguity when it comes to vampires, and one vampire in particular.
“We like to talk big, vampires. ‘I’m going to destroy the world.’ It’s just tough guy talk. Strutting around with your friends over a pint of blood. The truth is, I like this world. You’ve got… dog racing, Manchester United. And you’ve got people. Billions of people walking around like Happy Meals with legs. It’s all right here.”
Spike, 2×22 Becoming
While Spike hasn’t really acted, functionally-speaking, as a Villain since What’s My Line (and outside of The Harsh Light of Day won’t really again) he has been allied with the Villains and is very clearly still Evil. I have seen fans suggest that his desire to save the world is an indication that Spike was never really evil, and never wanted to destroy the world, and I think that perspective is a clear misread. For a start, Spike’s given motivations for wanting to stop the apocalypse are Evil Motivations that clearly indicate him as being Evil – like wanting to have billions of people to eat, or being a Manchester United fan.
Most importantly, this perspective ignores the fact that eight episodes prior, Spike was actively helping Drusilla try to destroy the world, without complaint. Back then, it was Angel who was disinterested in the Apocalypse and focused on Buffy; now they have swapped places. This doesn’t make what he says about liking the world untrue – I think it’s entirely true – but I don’t think it’s the driving force. There is Evil clearly in him, but it’s not his core motivation.
His core motivation is Drusilla. He admits it shortly after (“I want Dru back”), and it is from his point of view an non-negotiable tenet of their alliance (“There’s no deal without Dru!”). He is prepared to still let the world end rather than lose Drusilla. This isn’t theoretical – he does do this, at the episode’s climax. He sees Angelus advancing on Buffy with the sword he has pulled out of Acathla. He knows that Acathla will now awaken and suck the world into hell, and believes that Angelus is about to kill Buffy. And he doesn’t care. He has Drusilla. He leaves the same way he came – speeding in his car, the woman he loves in the passenger seat. He’s got what he wants; he’s happy.
What this indicates isn’t that Spike is false or manipulative in his alliance with Buffy. He’s actually very honest – everything he says is true. He has no secret agenda here, Good or Evil. He just wants his girlfriend back. The apocalypse is a prop. It’s the romance in him that motivates.
I find myself thinking of Giles’ speech in Beauty and the Beasts on the various types of monsters.
“In my experience, there are two types of monster. The first can be redeemed, or more importantly, wants to be redeemed. The second is void of humanity. It cannot respond to reason, or love.”
Rupert Giles, 3×04 Beauty and the Beasts
As much as Spike can be clearly sorted into being either Monster or Man at various points in his journey, at this point, he is most definitely a monster. But this speech firmly aligns him with one type of monster. He can respond to reason – being not driven by a mindlessly Evil urge to destroy the world, but interested in preserving the world, willing to negotiate and form reasonable alliances. He is ultimately driven by his affection and devotion to Drusilla, so yes, he can respond to love.
This marks him out as a special manner of monster. A human kind of evil. He might not actively want to be redeemed at this point in his arc, but what this indicates is that he can be redeemed. He possesses the humanity and free will necessary to facilitate change. The potential exists within him. He doesn’t always have to be a Monster. He can become the kind of person who will, in five years time, sacrifice himself to save the world. Just as Willow’s magic arc really begins here and will climax in Chosen, Spike’s arc from villain to hero will climax in Chosen, and begins here.
There’s an interesting bit of context that the entire series gives us. In Fool for Love, we flash back to Spike and Drusilla in between this episode and Lovers Walk, in which Drusilla suggests that Spike is in love with Buffy. She doubles-down on this suggestion in Crush, and the show plays it as if it is true. While I’m not a personal fan of this revelation in terms of how it frames the Spike/Buffy story, it is interesting to view this episode through that lens. If he was in love with Buffy prior to Lovers Walk, then either Spike was already in love with Buffy at this point, or he fell in love with her during this episode.
I don’t find either especially easy to believe, but it does suggest that the key component for Spike’s redemption and choice to get a soul – his love for Buffy – is already in place at this point. He is, on some level, in love with her already, and so he is pointed towards Good. Her influence will shape him on his journey. She will make him the man that saves the world, the man that he will be. The love – the potential for that – exists within him already. We just don’t know it yet.
On a meta level, the events of this episode make an excellent argument for bringing Spike back, and therefore facilitating his redemption as a character. Pairing him up with Buffy demonstrates what good chemistry Marsters and Gellar have, and how their characters can play off each other. Their moment in front of the house, instinctively fighting a vampire together and then sharing a comedically terrible lie about a band, shows this easy banter and chemistry between them, and starts to construct a good case for Spike/Buffy as a romantic storyline.
Spike’s awkward domesticity as he sits in the living room, making small talk with Joyce about the time she hit him with an axe, demonstrates the inherent comedy and entertainment value of sticking an evil vampire into a domestic setting in which they can’t be actively murderous. It is for this exact function that Spike will be brought back in Lovers Walk, and for most of season four – not to be an active villain but to be a strange and softly antagonistic presence within the domestic space of the other characters. To have cocoa and cry over his ex with the protagonist’s mother; to sit in the corner and comment casually on events he’s not otherwise particularly invested in. He has already stopped being a Villain, but this is where he starts to become that kind of character; to move into the next phase of being in terms of how the show is using him.
The key component for Spike at this moment in time is his malleability. He has demonstrated his ability to change; his humanity. His status as a Monster capable of reason, love, and redemption. He has chosen to save the world once, and has therefore set his path to save it again. On character, thematic, and meta levels, he is showing why he can be something different to what he currently is. He is not there yet; he is not Good yet, but in proving his malleability, he opens up the door to his future, and to the man that he can become.
I Don’t Want To Be An Evil Thing (Drusilla)
England, London, 1860. The camera pans down inside a church to reveal, for the first time, Drusilla. We haven’t met this Drusilla before. This is Drusilla as she was when she was human. Before she was turned into a vampire, before she was driven insane, before she ever met Angelus. This Drusilla, we see immediately, is just as Angel described her in Lie to Me: sweet, pure, pious, chaste. The inverse of the woman we last saw inviting Angelus to come slaughter a toddler with her.
This Drusilla had her whole life ahead of her, and we see clearly what she wanted from it, because she tells us directly.
“I want to be good. I want to be pure.”
Drusilla, 2×21 Becoming
…
“I don’t want to be an evil thing.”
She wanted to be good, and to help people. She tells Angelus about a vision she received – of a fatal mine collapse – and is visibly distressed to describe how two strangers who died from it. Despite her mother’s wishes to keep her visions secret, this Drusilla instinctively wanted to help them, to save them. She is the exact kind of hero that Angel the Series will laud so heavily: someone who sees others in pain and wants to help them.
The origin of Drusilla’s visions is never explicitly stated. I have seen some fans suggest Drusilla might have been a potential slayer, and that may have caused her to receive these visions, but I prefer the theory that these are visions from the Powers That Be; the same kind that Doyle and Cordelia will receive. Not only does this fit Drusilla’s symptoms better (painful visions occuring while awake – a opposed to the prophetic dreams that slayers receive), but it adds a tasty layer of irony to Angel’s torture of her. Centuries before he becomes a Champion for the Powers, before Doyle and Cordelia become his closest friends, before prophetic visions become a central premise of his show – here he is, finding the Powers’ prophet and ripping all the humanity and goodness out of her.
In another world, Drusilla could have been a Champion. She had the visions, she had the compassion, and she had the moral drive to help others. She could have been a hero who helped the helpless, who saved the world.
This Drusilla is dead. Figuratively as well as literally. Angelus makes sure of that. He exhibits every torture he can on her. He kills her family. He rapes and abuses her. He destroys everything she loves. He wipes out every germ of goodness in her, makes her a shell he can fill with his evil. And he does for no other reason than because he can. Because it’s fun for him. Because he wants to create something that he can see his own cruel reflection in. The parenthood motif with the vampires is of importance here – Angelus is Drusilla’s “father” (or in her words, “Daddy”). While he didn’t create who she was, he does create the person she becomes. It is not immaterial that when Drusilla meets Angelus she, mistaking him for a priest, calls him Father.
Their conversation in the confession booth is an interesting note in the series’ ongoing discussion of existentialism. Drusilla is attempting to make an active choice that can define her future. She wants to be good, she is choosing to be good, and she wants to know what actions she needs to take in order to be good. But Angelus takes away her choice. He tells her to give into God’s plan, to make herself an object in the world, at His mercy.
“What can I do?”
Drusilla and Angelus, 2×21 Becoming
“Fulfill his plan, child. Be evil. Just give in.”
“No! I want to be good. I want to be pure.”
“We all do, at first. The world doesn’t work that way.”
Angelus doesn’t actually believe anything he’s saying here. He’s only saying it to torture Drusilla; to push her towards being the creature he wants her to be. But it is notable for how explicitly counter to existentialism it is. In season two of Angel, when Angel himself delivers what is probably the most quotable summation of existentialism in either show (“If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do”), he reaches that conclusion through realising that there is no Grand Plan devised by higher beings. Here, he is exalting the idea of a Grand Plan, and insisting that Drusilla follow it rather than make her own choices.
Except the higher power devising this Plan isn’t God, or Satan, or the Senior Partners, or the Powers That Be. It’s Angel. This is his plan, his design. He robs her of her individuality and makes himself God over her. He watches over her, decides her fate, makes her in his image. He is Father to her three times over. Her progenitor. Her priest. Her God.
This is a tragedy for Drusilla, and one she has no escape from. She cannot. As we have said before, Drusilla is a dark reflection of Buffy – a potential future version of her. Someone who loses her personhood, who is destroyed by Angel’s abuse and turned into a demon. She is Darkest Timeline Buffy. She has to suffer all that she does in order to fulfil her thematic role. Drusilla suffers the most inescapably tragic fate of all: being a character in a tragedy.
Both Angel and Spike get their ‘moment of becoming’ in this episode. Angel when he sees Buffy and makes the decision to help her. Spike when he allies with Buffy. They both have this formative moment with the woman they will fall in love with, which puts them directly on the path to becoming Champions. Both of them die at various points, but they get to return from the dead and gain even greater narrative importance after they do. Their significance as characters only grows.
Drusilla does not get that. She has already gone through the bulk of her screentime in this series. Outside of flashbacks, she will only appear in four more episodes across both shows. Of the four main vampire characters, she is the only one who never receives a soul or any kind of redemption arc. She is stuck in this role of Tragic Villain forever.
If there is a ‘moment of becoming’ for Drusilla in this episode, then it is the moment that she kills Kendra. Kendra, who also represents a dark future for Buffy – a future in which she forgoes her individuality and follows Council orders unquestioningly. One mirror stares into another, and one kills the other. This kill lets her ascend to a VIP area of villains, along with Spike and The Master, as a vampire who has managed to kill a Slayer. This kill also makes her persona non grata in Buffy’s eyes – she is initially willing to let Spike leave Sunnydale without reprise, but not Drusilla, because of her murder of Kendra, and she has to be strongarmed into letting her go. In-universe, there is a good reason why she would never have been able to return long-term and not be killed by Buffy. In a way, by killing Kendra, Drusilla signs her own death warrant.
There is more going on out-of-universe. It’s common knowledge that Juliet Landau refused to return (outside of visions or flashbacks) after Crush because she didn’t want her character to be killed off, and this is not an unfounded fear. While there are many factors in play, a redemption arc for Drusilla was always going to be less likely than one for Angel or Spike for the simple fact that female villains are not often granted the same slack and assumed complexity by fans that male villains are. Women who commit atrocities are less easily forgiven in fiction than men who do so. While Darla does get a redemption arc, it’s one that specifically requires her death (and a gendered death at that) – and unlike Spike and Angel, it’s not a death she is allowed to come back from. There are both justified thematic and in-universe reasons for Drusilla never getting her redemption, and less-justified Doylist ones.
Whichever way you look at it, the end result is a tragedy. Drusilla had so much life ahead of her, so much goodness in her heart. Yet the men who took control of her life had different designs. They made her a demon, and ensured no escape for her from this fate. She is locked inside this tragedy. She could have been a Champion. She was only ever going to be a Monster. She never wanted to be an evil thing, but Choice was wrested from her. Evil is what she has become, and all she will ever become.
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References:
[1] https://screenrant.com/joss-whedon-reason-david-boreanaz-angel-show/
[2] Keith Topping, Hollywood Vampire: An Expanded and Updated Unauthorised and Unofficial Guide to Angel. Virgin Books (2004).
Insect Reflection 
2 thoughts on “You Made Me The Man I Am Today (Becoming: Part Two)”