That ambiguous victory
May. 17th, 2004 07:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowscastAgain, I'm going to be talking about stuff that happens through to the end of Angel Season 4.
The most worrying thing about Angel Incorporated's victory over Jasmine, I think, is the fact that Wolfram & Hart seems to approve. Anyway, Dead!Lilah says that it does, and explains that's why they're turning over the L.A. office to the Angel bunch.
So if W&H really is so darn pleased with the outcome, it can't be good, can it? W&H are evil - that's well established. They've been the main force of evil in the show through all the first four seasons (showing a remarkable stability - no major villian on Buffy survived more than a season).
But there's more than one version of evil in the Buffyverse, and maybe W&H really did just pull an enemy-of-my-enemy maneuver here. Let's think about the particular version of post-apocalyptic world that Jasmine offered: everyone blissed out, and no free will. I think that last bit would threaten W&H just as much as the good guys.
Seriously, know what Jasmine reminds me of? Ever read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley? The future Huxley imagines in that novel has a lot in common with the world Jasmine tried to build. In BNW, everyone is happy because:
1) everyone is engineered to be no more intelligent than they need to be for their destined job
2) everyone is constantly subjected to propaganda telling them how happy they currently are
3) everyone is blissed out on drugs all the time
I read BNW back in high school, and I can still remember the lively class discussions as we idealistic 17-year-olds struggled to wrap our heads around a dystopia in which everyone was happy. Was it really a dystopia? Exactly how important is free will? How much more free are we, really, than the people in BNW?
And what about the fact that Conner, alone, followed Jasmine freely? He saw her for what she was right from the start, but still worshipped her, and only wished that he could feel the happiness she gave everyone else.
Makes me think about the Garden of Eden story, too. Eve and Adam had paradise - perfect happiness - but then they lost it when they ate the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Now, the traditional Christian understanding is that the Fall was a bad thing, but I'm not so convinced. It seems to me like they chose true free will over perfect but empty happiness. And that's what Angel did, again, on behalf of the world, when he sliced open the mouth of the keeper of the name.
The most worrying thing about Angel Incorporated's victory over Jasmine, I think, is the fact that Wolfram & Hart seems to approve. Anyway, Dead!Lilah says that it does, and explains that's why they're turning over the L.A. office to the Angel bunch.
So if W&H really is so darn pleased with the outcome, it can't be good, can it? W&H are evil - that's well established. They've been the main force of evil in the show through all the first four seasons (showing a remarkable stability - no major villian on Buffy survived more than a season).
But there's more than one version of evil in the Buffyverse, and maybe W&H really did just pull an enemy-of-my-enemy maneuver here. Let's think about the particular version of post-apocalyptic world that Jasmine offered: everyone blissed out, and no free will. I think that last bit would threaten W&H just as much as the good guys.
Seriously, know what Jasmine reminds me of? Ever read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley? The future Huxley imagines in that novel has a lot in common with the world Jasmine tried to build. In BNW, everyone is happy because:
1) everyone is engineered to be no more intelligent than they need to be for their destined job
2) everyone is constantly subjected to propaganda telling them how happy they currently are
3) everyone is blissed out on drugs all the time
I read BNW back in high school, and I can still remember the lively class discussions as we idealistic 17-year-olds struggled to wrap our heads around a dystopia in which everyone was happy. Was it really a dystopia? Exactly how important is free will? How much more free are we, really, than the people in BNW?
And what about the fact that Conner, alone, followed Jasmine freely? He saw her for what she was right from the start, but still worshipped her, and only wished that he could feel the happiness she gave everyone else.
Makes me think about the Garden of Eden story, too. Eve and Adam had paradise - perfect happiness - but then they lost it when they ate the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Now, the traditional Christian understanding is that the Fall was a bad thing, but I'm not so convinced. It seems to me like they chose true free will over perfect but empty happiness. And that's what Angel did, again, on behalf of the world, when he sliced open the mouth of the keeper of the name.
