beer_good_foamy (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
beer_good_foamy) wrote2009-03-03 09:00 pm
beer_good_foamy) wrote2009-03-03 09:00 pm
Entry tags:
AtF thoughts
OK, core dump of brain in progress, put on your hazmat suits. Collected thoughts on After the Fall under the cut. I swear, I just meant to jot down a few thoughts, and it ate me alive...
Told ya there'd be a reset.
That's how I started my aborted review of #16, and funnily enough it feels even more relevant after #17. In a sense - and I'm aware that there are some major differences - if #16 reset all of AtF, then #17 resets all of AtS. (Or would if we take it as canon, which even Joss seems to hesitate to do these days.) After #16, Angel was right back in the seconds after "Not Fade Away" and everything that happened in the previous 15 ½ issues was undone. After #17, Angel is presented as essentially being back where he started in "City Of"; alone in the big city, facing an unknown future, knowing only that he wants to help people. And while one would hope that he would carry everything that came in between with him... well, let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Let's start off with what I liked about the whole thing, because there's no doubt that there were things to like. Y'know, as fanfic goes. Now, to be fair, I was probably predisposed to disliking After the Fall right from the get-go (and in fact, made a post to that effect back then that I pretty much still agree with). "Not Fade Away" is a brilliant series finale, capturing all the darkness and light of the series in 42 minutes and ending on one of the most obvious mission statements in the entirety of Joss' production. It's a huge friggin' THE END. Any attempt to follow up on that, especially this much later, would have a huge task ahead of it in not only coming up with a way to continue the story without cheapening the previous ending, but also restarting the story, breathing life back into it, teaching it to stand, walk and run on its own and not just be an answer to the question "what happened next?"
That said, Lynch got off to a great start (despite the artwork IMO, but I seem to be in the minority there). Especially the first five issues do a great job of catching up on what everyone's been up to, what they are up to, and (roughly) why. That is, before the series headed off into a drawn-out flashback followed by Angel dying for 5 issues straight or so, from which it never really regained the momentum. But even then Lynch does a good job of keeping the characters familiar – for the most part, and this is both a good and a bad thing, he doesn't challenge the established characterisations. With a couple of notable exceptions, Angel behaves like the Angel of the series (so much so that even as a human, he's nigh-invulnerable), Spike quips like the Spike in the series, Ghost!Wesley is so in character he's even reverted a few seasons, and Gunn's fury at having become what he hates is well realised. I'm even prepared to shrug off that most of the main cast seemed flat and one-dimensional at times, as if Lynch only ever saw one aspect of them; after all, the whole thing (excepting First Night and Spike: After the Fall) only takes place over a couple of days where everyone is more or less constantly trying to stay alive, so it makes sense that they wouldn't have time to show off every single extreme of every single character.
Also, the confusing canonicity of Lynch's previous comics and his self-promotion aside, I really liked a couple of his OCs; Betta George and Kr'Ph ("Untrunk me!") in particular, and Jeremy despite his obvious redshirt status (did anyone else flash back to Deadmeat Thompson in Hot Shots! when Jeremy started talking about his fiancee?). Others were rather pointless and made me wonder if Lynch just forgot to plan the story out before writing them in - Spider and Gunn's sire spring to mind as characters who seemed to be important to the plot, only to suddenly fade out of the main story completely with no pay-off. Of course, Nina (whose complete personality transplant almost qualifies her as a Lynch OC too) and Lorne suffered much the same fate, and Wesley was in danger of it until his (very nice) farewell in #15-16. But juggling a large cast is always tricky, and it's not like anyone missed Spider when she went AWOL, is it?
Damnit, even when I try to be gracious, it feels like I'm damning with faint praise. After the Fall is an adventure, a romp, and as such it works; the arcs that Lynch puts especially Angel, Gunn, Illyria and Connor through as a direct result of their actions in "Not Fade Away" are well done, with a good mixture of seriousness and the odd self-conscious joke (even if everyone seems to have Lynch's sense of humour rather than their own) and plenty of dramatic moments where we're supposed to either get something in our eye or cheer triumphantly. "Cue the music," indeed; sometimes, when you're swept up in the action and drama, you can just about hear it. Even the ending in #17 is pretty well done, as action movie endings go.
And yet.
Maybe there's a trade-off here. As has been pointed out by quite a few people discussing Season 8, anyone can fanwank a backstory. That shouldn't mean the writer can get away with any out-of-the-blue character revamp (sorry) and simply say "something funny happened on the way to theforum castle, but that's not important", but still: filling in the blanks between where you were and where you are is always going to be relatively easy. Once you've filled in every detail – and boy, did Lynch ever go into detail – about what came before, you need to start focussing on what's happening now. And that, IMO, is where Lynch fails.
I would go into detail about exactly what it is he fails in, but fortunately others have done it for me and rather than copy and paste or rephrase, I just need to link to them and nod approvingly for the most part. Check out, for instance, the following links:
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
2maggie2: After After The Fall
angearia: Angel's Redeemed?
And also, Maggie's and Emmie's comments in this thread. I pretty much agree with most of what's said here – I may not give all the problems the exact same weight, but I agree with their outline of what's missing from AtF. For all of Lynch's good characterisation, rapid-fire cliffhangers and emotional suckerpunches, there is very little underneath it. There's no outer core, no inner core, no soft chewy centre, no difficult moral questions, no overarching themes beyond "fight scene!" Some have argued that we shouldn't expect this, for the same reason I'm willing to – at least temporarily – overlook the flatness of the characters: it's just a short arc (and it's even shorter after the reset) and there's no time to tackle the big questions. But the thing is, if this is to be taken as Angel canon, then it should aspire to be as multi-layered, as thoughtworthy as Angel was - especially in an arc meant to follow up the end of s5; at the very least, it needs to acknowledge that there were big questions in NFA. And I'm not sure it even tries. As I've noted before, Season 8's faults may be legion, but at least it's trying (and managed a lot more in 17 issues than After the Fall did). The Jossverse, with all its undead characters, was never a place where the only thing that mattered was whether you survived the next battle, but how you survived it (or didn't), what you had to do in order to become that. In After the Fall, the worst thing that can happen is that people die. In Season 8, the worst thing that can happen is that Buffy becomes a new Hitler. Why this difference? Why this reduction of Angel, especially after the ending of s5, to a fairly standard – if well written – action movie?
I'm going to go off on a tangent here. In one recent comment, I remarked that AtF reminds me of the Schwarzenegger version of Hamlet (from The Last Action Hero):
The plot is familiar, the characters use Shakespeare's dialogue (mostly), and yet... as you watch Hamlet stride down the hallways of Elsinore castle to blow Polonius' head off with an Uzi, it's hard not to get the distinct impression that the director saw a completely different story in Hamlet than, say, Olivier or Branagh did. As long as it's got the Prince of Denmark avenging his father's death and soliloquizing it's still technically Hamlet, it just misses the point. And yes, of course I would pay an insane amount of money to see the full-blown version of Schwarzenegger's Hamlet (a crueler fake trailer than any of the Grindhouse ones, IMO). But as unfair as the comparison may seem, it does remind me of something in AtF - specifically, this bit:
HAMLET: To be or not to be...? Not to be. *castle blows up*
WESLEY: Make no mistake. The Shanshu prophecy is about Angel. He wouldn’t be worth all this trouble if it wasn’t. He’s the vampire with a soul that will play a key role in the apocalypse. He will be rewarded with humanity for his troubles. (...) It is written. It has been witnessed. It is inevitable.
There are several similar simplifications in AtF, but this is the one that really annoyed me enough to not be able to ignore it: the reduction of a philosophical question that formed the entire basis for the story (to be or not be human) to a simple question of yes or no, with a correct answer and everything - as if the shanshu were not only as literal an object as Spike and Angel were tricked into believing in "Destiny", but also that it always came with a name tag on it. Angel is going to shanshu no matter what he does, making the shanshu a thing in itself rather than the process, the idea, the guiding light that it was in the series. To put it another way: What is Angel's purpose? To seek the graal. Not to find it and put it on his mantlepiece, to seek it. (Also, his unladen airspeed is slow enough to survive any fall and his favourite colour is black.)
The problem isn't that it's impossible to follow up on "Not Fade Away;" it's a very good television episode, but it's not the peak of human culture. No, the problem is in the very nature of "Not Fade Away." Aside from the "it's just a cliffhanger, booo, we want to know what happens next" interpretation, there seem to be two basic schools of thought on it - both of which are supported by the text, and aren't even mutually exclusive.
1) It's a moment of triumph in a way. A way of freezing our heroes in defiant opposition, never giving in, never surrendering, fighting the good fight as long as theyhave a breath in their body can stand... in a way, if we take Anya's definition of humanity into account ("When it's something that really matters, they fight. I mean, they're lame morons for fighting but they do. They never... they never quit") it could even be argued to be the shanshu. Metaphorically, at least.
2) It's a last stand, a suicide run, the culmination of the corruption Angel went through from "Home" onwards - made no less questionable by their actions leading up to it. Angel kills Drogyn, signs over the shanshu, and has Lorne - of all people, Lorne - assassinate Lindsey on the grounds that for someone like Lindsey, redemption is never possible. This from the guy who just proclaimed himself "the greatest mass murderer you've ever met." To quote another dead blonde girlfriend – no, not Spike - "We did so many terrible things together. So much destruction, so much pain. We can't make up for any of it. You know that, don't you?" None of it fades away as we smash cut to black; it might not be eternal damnation, but it's also definitely not the point where they balance the scales and everything that came before is wiped clean.
You can make similar opposite interpretations for many of the decisions made by the characters throughout the series. And if you're going to follow that up, you can't just sweep that under the rug and declare that none of it was important, as if there never were any grey scales or questionable decisions that don't ultimately turn out to be 100% correct. Joss has said in an interview lately that he still hasn't figured out what Angel was about, and some fans have taken that to mean he never cared about the series. I'm not sure that's what he means. Rather, like any good-to-great piece of storytelling, the question is difficult to answer because it's not about one thing. The plot of Hamlet concerns a prince who kills the guy who killed his father, and yet every new staging of the play seems to try and figure out what the play is really about. Part of what makes a story last is its ability to resonate on more than one level; to not just be about one thing, to move beyond the mere plot and find something that we can relate to, that we can see from different angles – or even make us see different angles.2maggie2 used the word "polysemic" about Joss's work - "having more than one meaning." Angel was an action series, a philosophical treatise on the human condition, a comedy series, a family drama (as in, a drama about a family, not a drama for the whole family), a horror series with rubberfaced monsters, etc etc etc. I'm not arguing that Joss Whedon is a philosopher on a level with Spinoza, Kant, Nietzsche or Sartre, but at least he tried to address the big questions of how we live in this complicated world, how we know right from wrong, how we relate to others, how we learn about ourselves, and acknowledge that there are no easy answers; life is not a goal, it's a meat process. All of his series so far are variations on that theme.
As far as I can tell, however, After the Fall is about what happens on the page. No more, no less; it spells everything out, it has clearly good and clearly evil sides (we can empathise with Gunn, but it's made clear straight from the beginning that he's a monster) and it takes all the ambiguity out of the ending that "Not Fade Away" offered by flipping it over into a happy ending (there's a very good reason Angel never had those, as he correctly observes). It doesn't make us ask questions, just provides straight-forward answers. Giving simple answers to complicated questions that were never meant to have simple answers obviously works for comic purposes, as in the Schwarzenegger trailer (or for an opposite version, the theme song to Slings And Arrows - "And by the way, you sulky brat, the answer is 'to be'!"). It's the same anticlimactic joke that shows up in both Monty Python and The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy regarding the meaning of life – neither "42" nor "try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations" is a useful answer to the big questions of life, the universe, and everything. But the reason it works as a joke is because we know there's supposed to be more to it. When the same anticlimax is played perfectly straight, it just makes me wonder if the writer ever understood that the work he's trying to continue was designed to deal with them.
Anyway.
So what happens next? What was the point of all this setup only to reset what actually happened and leave Angel once again alone on the streets of LA, with none of the events of the last 16 issues having any lasting effect outside of people's memories?
People have seen similarities between the "Angel is a hero" ending of AtF and the "Vampires yay!" storyline of Season 8, as if they obviously slotted into each other. I'm not so sure.
For one thing, that would mean we'd have to believe that spending six months in hell being enslaved, tortured, and killed by all sorts of demons, including (as specifically pointed out by Gunn's doctor) vampires, will make the population of LA more likely to accept that all vampires are misunderstood fluffy kittens and anyone who fights them is obviously evil. As cases of Stockholm syndrome go, it's one of the bigger ones.
For another, we'd be expected to believe that not only doesn't Buffy seem to know about Spike and Angel, but nobody in her entire organisation (or outside it - none of the LA dwellers we meet in #21 make even vague allusions to it) seems to be aware that millions of people in one of the information capitals of the world have very vivid memories of spending six months in hell and as a consequence have started loving vampires. Which is especially baffling now that it seems we've got official confirmation that Season 8, in whatever way, takes place about 5 years after "Chosen" (which would make it about 4 years after AtF). Surely someone would pick up on it in all that time before Harmony makes a killing off it?
But of course, whether or not it ties into Season 8 shouldn't be the big issue here. The question, since this aspires to be canon, is if this is an ending that fits Angel as a standalone series rather than a storage cupboard for characters and plots to use in any incarnation of Buffy. And yes, I'm saying "ending." Because this is where Joss Whedon's involvement with Angel ends (as far as we know). If his involvement with AtF was minimal, it's now going to be virtually non-existent. Whatever your view on the canon issues, this seems to be the end of Angel as one story with one creative team involving Joss Whedon – and judging from AtF and the first issue of Aftermath, the end of Angel as a story which is about more than one thing. We've exchanged the dark, multi-layered, series-encompassing ending of "Not Fade Away" for one that rules out all but one interpretation, turns Angel into a knight in shining armour, and discounts much of the character development – as opposed to character history – he went through over the course of the series. As well-written as #17 is, I personally think it's a bit like tacking on an ending to Apocalypse Now in which Willard goes back to the US, gets decorated, and lives happily ever after in the knowledge that he did the absolute right thing and that Kurtz was truly nothing but an anomaly, an evil that had nothing to do with him and just needed to be stopped: pointless, and thoroughly defusing the impact of the original ending. Good thing Apocalypse Now Redux isn't canon, eh? ;-)
But then again, it doesn't look at all like an ending – at least, IMO, not a better one. More like a beginning of something different. The effect of AtF isn't so much to wrap up the loose ends of "Not Fade Away" – because Lynch doesn't seem to think there were any loose endings apart from "who died and who lived", which is answered with a very clear "to be!" - but to start a new story, to dissociate the Angel comic from the Angel TV series. Hence the similarity to "City Of": AtF is not a sequel, it's a pilot. The new setting has been established, our expectations have been reset, the old themes have been replaced by a bunch of new ones, our cast has been sent off, and now it's up to IDW to continue the new story – apparently in several different series written by several different writers working in several different timelines. I have no clue what Kelley Armstrong is going to doto with it, though based on what she's said (NFA was just a cliffhanger, Angel is now wholly redeemed of everything, yada yada yada) and the very weak #18 I think I'll pass on the rest of her stuff. .
Someone asked me how I would have liked it to end. And there's another question which isn't easy to answer, simply because it's the wrong question. As far as I'm concerned, Angel already ended, and as enjoyable as it was at times, I saw nothing in AtF to make me change my mind.
You know my love: Not Fade Away.
With Buffy, I needed closure, because she, poor girl, had earned it. Buffy is about growing up. Angel is really about already having grown up, dealing with what you've done, and redemption. Redemption is something you fight for every day, so I wanted him to go out fighting. People kept calling it a cliffhanger. I was like, "Are you mad, sir? Don't you see that that is the final statement?" And then they would say "Shut up."
- Joss Whedon
Told ya there'd be a reset.
That's how I started my aborted review of #16, and funnily enough it feels even more relevant after #17. In a sense - and I'm aware that there are some major differences - if #16 reset all of AtF, then #17 resets all of AtS. (Or would if we take it as canon, which even Joss seems to hesitate to do these days.) After #16, Angel was right back in the seconds after "Not Fade Away" and everything that happened in the previous 15 ½ issues was undone. After #17, Angel is presented as essentially being back where he started in "City Of"; alone in the big city, facing an unknown future, knowing only that he wants to help people. And while one would hope that he would carry everything that came in between with him... well, let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Let's start off with what I liked about the whole thing, because there's no doubt that there were things to like. Y'know, as fanfic goes. Now, to be fair, I was probably predisposed to disliking After the Fall right from the get-go (and in fact, made a post to that effect back then that I pretty much still agree with). "Not Fade Away" is a brilliant series finale, capturing all the darkness and light of the series in 42 minutes and ending on one of the most obvious mission statements in the entirety of Joss' production. It's a huge friggin' THE END. Any attempt to follow up on that, especially this much later, would have a huge task ahead of it in not only coming up with a way to continue the story without cheapening the previous ending, but also restarting the story, breathing life back into it, teaching it to stand, walk and run on its own and not just be an answer to the question "what happened next?"
That said, Lynch got off to a great start (despite the artwork IMO, but I seem to be in the minority there). Especially the first five issues do a great job of catching up on what everyone's been up to, what they are up to, and (roughly) why. That is, before the series headed off into a drawn-out flashback followed by Angel dying for 5 issues straight or so, from which it never really regained the momentum. But even then Lynch does a good job of keeping the characters familiar – for the most part, and this is both a good and a bad thing, he doesn't challenge the established characterisations. With a couple of notable exceptions, Angel behaves like the Angel of the series (so much so that even as a human, he's nigh-invulnerable), Spike quips like the Spike in the series, Ghost!Wesley is so in character he's even reverted a few seasons, and Gunn's fury at having become what he hates is well realised. I'm even prepared to shrug off that most of the main cast seemed flat and one-dimensional at times, as if Lynch only ever saw one aspect of them; after all, the whole thing (excepting First Night and Spike: After the Fall) only takes place over a couple of days where everyone is more or less constantly trying to stay alive, so it makes sense that they wouldn't have time to show off every single extreme of every single character.
Also, the confusing canonicity of Lynch's previous comics and his self-promotion aside, I really liked a couple of his OCs; Betta George and Kr'Ph ("Untrunk me!") in particular, and Jeremy despite his obvious redshirt status (did anyone else flash back to Deadmeat Thompson in Hot Shots! when Jeremy started talking about his fiancee?). Others were rather pointless and made me wonder if Lynch just forgot to plan the story out before writing them in - Spider and Gunn's sire spring to mind as characters who seemed to be important to the plot, only to suddenly fade out of the main story completely with no pay-off. Of course, Nina (whose complete personality transplant almost qualifies her as a Lynch OC too) and Lorne suffered much the same fate, and Wesley was in danger of it until his (very nice) farewell in #15-16. But juggling a large cast is always tricky, and it's not like anyone missed Spider when she went AWOL, is it?
Damnit, even when I try to be gracious, it feels like I'm damning with faint praise. After the Fall is an adventure, a romp, and as such it works; the arcs that Lynch puts especially Angel, Gunn, Illyria and Connor through as a direct result of their actions in "Not Fade Away" are well done, with a good mixture of seriousness and the odd self-conscious joke (even if everyone seems to have Lynch's sense of humour rather than their own) and plenty of dramatic moments where we're supposed to either get something in our eye or cheer triumphantly. "Cue the music," indeed; sometimes, when you're swept up in the action and drama, you can just about hear it. Even the ending in #17 is pretty well done, as action movie endings go.
And yet.
Maybe there's a trade-off here. As has been pointed out by quite a few people discussing Season 8, anyone can fanwank a backstory. That shouldn't mean the writer can get away with any out-of-the-blue character revamp (sorry) and simply say "something funny happened on the way to the
I would go into detail about exactly what it is he fails in, but fortunately others have done it for me and rather than copy and paste or rephrase, I just need to link to them and nod approvingly for the most part. Check out, for instance, the following links:
2maggie2: After After The Fallangearia: Angel's Redeemed?And also, Maggie's and Emmie's comments in this thread. I pretty much agree with most of what's said here – I may not give all the problems the exact same weight, but I agree with their outline of what's missing from AtF. For all of Lynch's good characterisation, rapid-fire cliffhangers and emotional suckerpunches, there is very little underneath it. There's no outer core, no inner core, no soft chewy centre, no difficult moral questions, no overarching themes beyond "fight scene!" Some have argued that we shouldn't expect this, for the same reason I'm willing to – at least temporarily – overlook the flatness of the characters: it's just a short arc (and it's even shorter after the reset) and there's no time to tackle the big questions. But the thing is, if this is to be taken as Angel canon, then it should aspire to be as multi-layered, as thoughtworthy as Angel was - especially in an arc meant to follow up the end of s5; at the very least, it needs to acknowledge that there were big questions in NFA. And I'm not sure it even tries. As I've noted before, Season 8's faults may be legion, but at least it's trying (and managed a lot more in 17 issues than After the Fall did). The Jossverse, with all its undead characters, was never a place where the only thing that mattered was whether you survived the next battle, but how you survived it (or didn't), what you had to do in order to become that. In After the Fall, the worst thing that can happen is that people die. In Season 8, the worst thing that can happen is that Buffy becomes a new Hitler. Why this difference? Why this reduction of Angel, especially after the ending of s5, to a fairly standard – if well written – action movie?
I'm going to go off on a tangent here. In one recent comment, I remarked that AtF reminds me of the Schwarzenegger version of Hamlet (from The Last Action Hero):
The plot is familiar, the characters use Shakespeare's dialogue (mostly), and yet... as you watch Hamlet stride down the hallways of Elsinore castle to blow Polonius' head off with an Uzi, it's hard not to get the distinct impression that the director saw a completely different story in Hamlet than, say, Olivier or Branagh did. As long as it's got the Prince of Denmark avenging his father's death and soliloquizing it's still technically Hamlet, it just misses the point. And yes, of course I would pay an insane amount of money to see the full-blown version of Schwarzenegger's Hamlet (a crueler fake trailer than any of the Grindhouse ones, IMO). But as unfair as the comparison may seem, it does remind me of something in AtF - specifically, this bit:
HAMLET: To be or not to be...? Not to be. *castle blows up*
WESLEY: Make no mistake. The Shanshu prophecy is about Angel. He wouldn’t be worth all this trouble if it wasn’t. He’s the vampire with a soul that will play a key role in the apocalypse. He will be rewarded with humanity for his troubles. (...) It is written. It has been witnessed. It is inevitable.
There are several similar simplifications in AtF, but this is the one that really annoyed me enough to not be able to ignore it: the reduction of a philosophical question that formed the entire basis for the story (to be or not be human) to a simple question of yes or no, with a correct answer and everything - as if the shanshu were not only as literal an object as Spike and Angel were tricked into believing in "Destiny", but also that it always came with a name tag on it. Angel is going to shanshu no matter what he does, making the shanshu a thing in itself rather than the process, the idea, the guiding light that it was in the series. To put it another way: What is Angel's purpose? To seek the graal. Not to find it and put it on his mantlepiece, to seek it. (Also, his unladen airspeed is slow enough to survive any fall and his favourite colour is black.)
The problem isn't that it's impossible to follow up on "Not Fade Away;" it's a very good television episode, but it's not the peak of human culture. No, the problem is in the very nature of "Not Fade Away." Aside from the "it's just a cliffhanger, booo, we want to know what happens next" interpretation, there seem to be two basic schools of thought on it - both of which are supported by the text, and aren't even mutually exclusive.
1) It's a moment of triumph in a way. A way of freezing our heroes in defiant opposition, never giving in, never surrendering, fighting the good fight as long as they
2) It's a last stand, a suicide run, the culmination of the corruption Angel went through from "Home" onwards - made no less questionable by their actions leading up to it. Angel kills Drogyn, signs over the shanshu, and has Lorne - of all people, Lorne - assassinate Lindsey on the grounds that for someone like Lindsey, redemption is never possible. This from the guy who just proclaimed himself "the greatest mass murderer you've ever met." To quote another dead blonde girlfriend – no, not Spike - "We did so many terrible things together. So much destruction, so much pain. We can't make up for any of it. You know that, don't you?" None of it fades away as we smash cut to black; it might not be eternal damnation, but it's also definitely not the point where they balance the scales and everything that came before is wiped clean.
You can make similar opposite interpretations for many of the decisions made by the characters throughout the series. And if you're going to follow that up, you can't just sweep that under the rug and declare that none of it was important, as if there never were any grey scales or questionable decisions that don't ultimately turn out to be 100% correct. Joss has said in an interview lately that he still hasn't figured out what Angel was about, and some fans have taken that to mean he never cared about the series. I'm not sure that's what he means. Rather, like any good-to-great piece of storytelling, the question is difficult to answer because it's not about one thing. The plot of Hamlet concerns a prince who kills the guy who killed his father, and yet every new staging of the play seems to try and figure out what the play is really about. Part of what makes a story last is its ability to resonate on more than one level; to not just be about one thing, to move beyond the mere plot and find something that we can relate to, that we can see from different angles – or even make us see different angles.
2maggie2 used the word "polysemic" about Joss's work - "having more than one meaning." Angel was an action series, a philosophical treatise on the human condition, a comedy series, a family drama (as in, a drama about a family, not a drama for the whole family), a horror series with rubberfaced monsters, etc etc etc. I'm not arguing that Joss Whedon is a philosopher on a level with Spinoza, Kant, Nietzsche or Sartre, but at least he tried to address the big questions of how we live in this complicated world, how we know right from wrong, how we relate to others, how we learn about ourselves, and acknowledge that there are no easy answers; life is not a goal, it's a As far as I can tell, however, After the Fall is about what happens on the page. No more, no less; it spells everything out, it has clearly good and clearly evil sides (we can empathise with Gunn, but it's made clear straight from the beginning that he's a monster) and it takes all the ambiguity out of the ending that "Not Fade Away" offered by flipping it over into a happy ending (there's a very good reason Angel never had those, as he correctly observes). It doesn't make us ask questions, just provides straight-forward answers. Giving simple answers to complicated questions that were never meant to have simple answers obviously works for comic purposes, as in the Schwarzenegger trailer (or for an opposite version, the theme song to Slings And Arrows - "And by the way, you sulky brat, the answer is 'to be'!"). It's the same anticlimactic joke that shows up in both Monty Python and The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy regarding the meaning of life – neither "42" nor "try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations" is a useful answer to the big questions of life, the universe, and everything. But the reason it works as a joke is because we know there's supposed to be more to it. When the same anticlimax is played perfectly straight, it just makes me wonder if the writer ever understood that the work he's trying to continue was designed to deal with them.
Anyway.
So what happens next? What was the point of all this setup only to reset what actually happened and leave Angel once again alone on the streets of LA, with none of the events of the last 16 issues having any lasting effect outside of people's memories?
People have seen similarities between the "Angel is a hero" ending of AtF and the "Vampires yay!" storyline of Season 8, as if they obviously slotted into each other. I'm not so sure.
For one thing, that would mean we'd have to believe that spending six months in hell being enslaved, tortured, and killed by all sorts of demons, including (as specifically pointed out by Gunn's doctor) vampires, will make the population of LA more likely to accept that all vampires are misunderstood fluffy kittens and anyone who fights them is obviously evil. As cases of Stockholm syndrome go, it's one of the bigger ones.
For another, we'd be expected to believe that not only doesn't Buffy seem to know about Spike and Angel, but nobody in her entire organisation (or outside it - none of the LA dwellers we meet in #21 make even vague allusions to it) seems to be aware that millions of people in one of the information capitals of the world have very vivid memories of spending six months in hell and as a consequence have started loving vampires. Which is especially baffling now that it seems we've got official confirmation that Season 8, in whatever way, takes place about 5 years after "Chosen" (which would make it about 4 years after AtF). Surely someone would pick up on it in all that time before Harmony makes a killing off it?
But of course, whether or not it ties into Season 8 shouldn't be the big issue here. The question, since this aspires to be canon, is if this is an ending that fits Angel as a standalone series rather than a storage cupboard for characters and plots to use in any incarnation of Buffy. And yes, I'm saying "ending." Because this is where Joss Whedon's involvement with Angel ends (as far as we know). If his involvement with AtF was minimal, it's now going to be virtually non-existent. Whatever your view on the canon issues, this seems to be the end of Angel as one story with one creative team involving Joss Whedon – and judging from AtF and the first issue of Aftermath, the end of Angel as a story which is about more than one thing. We've exchanged the dark, multi-layered, series-encompassing ending of "Not Fade Away" for one that rules out all but one interpretation, turns Angel into a knight in shining armour, and discounts much of the character development – as opposed to character history – he went through over the course of the series. As well-written as #17 is, I personally think it's a bit like tacking on an ending to Apocalypse Now in which Willard goes back to the US, gets decorated, and lives happily ever after in the knowledge that he did the absolute right thing and that Kurtz was truly nothing but an anomaly, an evil that had nothing to do with him and just needed to be stopped: pointless, and thoroughly defusing the impact of the original ending. Good thing Apocalypse Now Redux isn't canon, eh? ;-)
But then again, it doesn't look at all like an ending – at least, IMO, not a better one. More like a beginning of something different. The effect of AtF isn't so much to wrap up the loose ends of "Not Fade Away" – because Lynch doesn't seem to think there were any loose endings apart from "who died and who lived", which is answered with a very clear "to be!" - but to start a new story, to dissociate the Angel comic from the Angel TV series. Hence the similarity to "City Of": AtF is not a sequel, it's a pilot. The new setting has been established, our expectations have been reset, the old themes have been replaced by a bunch of new ones, our cast has been sent off, and now it's up to IDW to continue the new story – apparently in several different series written by several different writers working in several different timelines. I have no clue what Kelley Armstrong is going to do
Someone asked me how I would have liked it to end. And there's another question which isn't easy to answer, simply because it's the wrong question. As far as I'm concerned, Angel already ended, and as enjoyable as it was at times, I saw nothing in AtF to make me change my mind.
You know my love: Not Fade Away.
With Buffy, I needed closure, because she, poor girl, had earned it. Buffy is about growing up. Angel is really about already having grown up, dealing with what you've done, and redemption. Redemption is something you fight for every day, so I wanted him to go out fighting. People kept calling it a cliffhanger. I was like, "Are you mad, sir? Don't you see that that is the final statement?" And then they would say "Shut up."
- Joss Whedon