Belly of the Beast?

[elisi]

peasant_ is a genius! I was thinking about all the food metaphors in 'Unleashed' in yesterday's post, and specifically how often drinking/eating blood comes up in S5. And of course these echoed lines about being eaten:

LILAH: People don't need an unyielding champion. They need a man who knows the value of compromise and how to beat the system from inside the belly of the beast.
ANGEL: The beast's belly? Doesn't that usually mean you've been eaten?
'Home'

Spike: I know you, Angel. What do you think you're doing? Made some devil's bargain to take over this company. Thought you'd use it to fight the evil of the world from inside the belly of the beast. Trouble is you're too busy fighting to see you and yours are getting digested.
'Just Rewards'

This was peasant_'s reply:

******
Well you could take it one step further and say the whole season was working towards Angel beating Hamilton by drinking his blood - quite literally consuming the Senior Partners.

Hamilton: "Let me say this as clearly as I can. You cannot beat me. I am a part of them. The Wolf, Ram, and Hart. Their strength flows through my veins. My blood is filled with their ancient power."
Angel (gets to his feet, smirks): "Can you pick out the one word there you probably shouldn’t have said?"
Angel transforms into his vampire facade as he attacks Hamilton, biting him painfully in the jugular. Angel drinks from him, holding on tenaciously as Hamilton struggles to get free. Hamilton is finally able to pull Angel’s head away from his neck, and he throws him across the room again, but this time Angel controls his motion, managing to rotate in the air and land on his feet.
Angel: "Wow." (wipes his lip) "You really are full of it."
Hamilton swings at Angel, but Angel ducks.
"What was that you were saying about ancient power?"
AtS 5-22 – Not Fade Away

All through the season it has been a question of whether Angel will be consumed by the evil of the Wolf, Ram and Hart, or will manage to avoid that fate, and then right at the end he turns the tables and consumes them instead.

*****

I am *so* in awe!

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/peasant_/]

He's a vamp and he ultimatly 'wins' by biting. Which makes one start to wonder exactly what he did win and maybe the senior partners were just quietly playing a very long game indeed.

Lindsey: We don’t want him dead. We want him dark. And there is no better way to a man’s dark side than to awaken his – nastier urges, is there?

AtS 2-5 – Dear Boy

Hmm.

[elisi]

Ooooooh! *loves ATS* And darn it, but why couldn't we have had a Season 6?

::deep sigh::

[azdak.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you said that, because my take on Angel's victory in NFA is that it's very ambiguous indeed. I don't find any way within the Jossverse to see "embracing his vampiric nature" as the equivalent of accepting a gift from God - quite the contrary, it suggests that he's fighting evil by doing evil, that he believes the ends justify the means. I think, in the end, the reason they go out fighting is because they've become so corrupted, that's all they can do. Unlike Anne, they can't make a better world by living in it - they can't create, they can only destroy. So they decide to destroy the biggest evil they can find, and that includes themselves.

[elisi]

So they decide to destroy the biggest evil they can find, and that includes themselves.
Goodness that's bleak! I don't see it like that at all. To quote this post by the_royal_anna (which you should read all of!):

And so Angel finds himself backed into a corner. In a hole. He's all tied up, tied down, by all kinds of strings. He has power. And yes, that power comes at a great cost, and yes, manipulating himself into a position where he can harness that power for his cause has meant selling out on almost every level, but he still has the one power that Wolfram and Hart cannot touch. The power to choose. [...]

Time passes, and it gets used up. Doyle died. Cordelia died. Fred died. And they can’t sit around and wait while they die off, one by one. They have to something about it now, while they still can, while it still counts.

It's a bleak and joyless world where heroes do not fight because they have hope, but fight because fighting is their only manifestation of hope. But here they agree to fight because as long as they still have a choice to make, they will make a choice. My dear boys, my sweet Illyria, all of them so much lost, so much found. And what I always loved best about the Buffyverse was that it wasn’t always about getting out of the hole. Sometimes you can't get out of the hole, and you can’t sit around waiting until you do. You have to make a difference where you are, as you are. That's the point.

[http://users.livejournal.com/peasant_/]

It is ambiguous but I'm not sure it's quite that bleak. They had souls and that meant they always had a chance to redeem themselves. Still.

Mind you, I once posited that how Angel's plan was in fact intended to work was by ensuring that both Spike and himself got killed, thus there would be no souled vamps left, and since at least one of them was vital for the senior partners' apocalypse the SPs would be buggered. No Angel and Spike, no apocalypse - put that in your pipe and smoke it W,R & H

[azdak.livejournal.com]

You may well be right about souls making redemption always a possibility, but I don't think Angel sees it that way - all those discussions with Spike about how he's only on a brief holiday from hell, about how hell is where they're both heading, their discussion in Damage about how they're both monsters, Angel's desperation to save Nina before she kills someone and thereby crosses the line into unsaveable territory, the signing away of the Shanshu - none of these are balanced by a recognition that they may not be damned. I honestly think by the end that Angel knows how to die, but he no longer knows how to live.

[thedeadlyhook.livejournal.com]

I'd have to agree with this. The feeling I get from where S5 left off is that a Season 6 would've had to have started off literally in hell, the postapocalyptic L.A. of which we hear creators mention in interviews, and Angel and Co. having to work their way back out again by first going down low, lower, lowest. Very Dante-esque.