Written by Christos Gage
Illustrated by Rebekah IsaacsHorrors across the London landscape have led Angel and Faith to a certain hot new vampire in the underground scene . . . Drusilla. She is back in her homeland and feeling better than ever!
While Angel indecisively deals with Dru, Faith must sort out an unexpected guest of her own who promises to rile up her inner turmoil with stories from the past.
- Drusilla returns!
- Executive produced by Joss Whedon!
This week I’m going to try something a little bit different. Instead of a straight review, there will be running commentary about the book’s direction, along with speculation as to where that direction will lead us. There will likely be a bit more in the way of spoilers, so I’m going to go ahead and put up warning for heavy spoilers(!!!). But other than that, you know the drill by now!
Scissor past the cut!
With a title like “Daddy Issues,” you know what you’re getting in this arc, especially when you add a character like Drusilla into the mix. She’s the very personification of supernatural daddy issues, beyond anything Buffy encountered with her absentee father or her clinging to Giles. Drusilla and Angel’s father/daughter relationship was beyond toxic. He fixated on her, destroyed her family and then her relationship with God, going so far as to kill her entire convent on the day she was supposed to take her vows. To say his actions were extreme would be an understatement.
But that’s just the backstory. Before now, it has mostly gone accepted as fact through exposition and the occasional flashback, but this issue explores it a bit more from the eyes of Angelus and the narration of Angel. He fully elaborates on how he destroyed her life short of telling us how many people he actually killed while doing it. Drusilla is the very personification of how messed up Angelus was, despite the Scooby Gang’s penchant for letting that slide.
But now, she’s absolutely sane. She’s been healed by her lorophage demon friend and its ability to feed on trauma, and she’s made it her mission to heal anyone who desires it, human, vampire, and demon alike. Unfortunately, her newfound sanity didn’t work as well as it could have, as it just wipes away a lot of her character’s nuance. Part of the brilliance of Juliet Landau’s Drusilla character is that she was very much mentally ill, but she was also capable. Now she’s just another antagonist for our hero, and his connection to her is nearly lost. While you can argue that her status as mentally ill works mostly as a mere plot device for Angel’s angst, it works well as that. If she remembers everything he did and doesn’t care, why should he bother feeling guilty? Well, you know, other than the fact he’s Angel, and all Angel is consists of guilt.
She even offers to heal him of his angst, which doesn’t even make sense if you think about it. She wants to help him in his quest to help the helpless now. That’s all well and good, but when she offers to heal his guilt and trauma, she should know that that would destroy his soul; and the monster that previously destroyed her life would be free to torture her all over again. It’s curious at best, and poorly thought out at worst. But while he’s working out his guilt and man pain, Faith once again has to be the sensible one and pull him back.
This doesn’t really change his mind, however, as he hates the idea of this demon and Drusilla committing acts like this upon people, possibly driving them mad in their own right while doing so. It brings about the question in the Buffyverse of “should we save these people, even if it’s from themselves?”
Ethical quandaries aside, it does bring a fair amount of conflict between the two leads, even if it’s just light argument until the other character who is the cause of many issue himself: Pat, Faith’s dad shows up on her doorstep. This plot running parallel to Angel’s guilt from being a failed father to not only Drusilla but Connor as well, doesn’t really do much for the character of Faith. While you can feel the conflict between Angel and Dru, Faith and her father Pat doesn’t do much for the story until the very end of the issue, but more on that later. There was also some…curious art in this scene as well. For seemingly no reason, Faith starts climbing on a lamp post, as if she’s pretending to be Fred Astaire in Singing in the Rain, only there’s no dancing, singing, raining, or umbrellas in the issue, only sad people and their sad pain.
Continued belowAngel later returns to where he sired Dru in the first place, which is conveniently abandoned and happens to contain Dru and that demon friend of hers, eager to suck that suffering out of Angel’s noggin once and for all. What follows is a stilted fight between angel and the lorophage that is cut short by the demon’s master, who would rather not see her sire killed in front of her (I hear that’s against the rules).
It appears that while she was mainly an antagonist in this issue, Dru may very well become a supporting player in the London with Angel and Faith. Her sight may very well be that missing piece of Angel’s crusade since Cordy inexplicably died in season 5 of Angel the TV show. Now if only she would play by the rules with this friend of hers.
Her advice was awfully well placed, if convenient as well. She knows about the tooth of Angel just as he’s starting to feel the effects of it, effectively overwriting his personality with Giles, or at least adding Rupert’s personality to his own, adding to the voices he already hears in his head. We always knew the soulless Angelus was rattling in his mind, trying to chip away at his goodness, only to torture him some more when he DID slip up.
In the final scene, we get more of Faith patching things up with her father. It was incredibly easy to convince her to try, and it seems like it’s mostly for a plot device. Faith is usually more self-aware than this, which is a shame. Perhaps she really does just want a relationship with her father; and that’s clouding her judgment. Finally, when she leaves her shiny new mansion with her father in it after receiving a call, likely from Angel himself asking for help after such a harrowing ordeal; Pat gets a phone call himself. In it, he asserts that the person on the other end will get exactly what they want as promised.
The timing of these phone calls struck me as more than coincidental, and it may already hint as to how Pat came to London and who sent him there. I have a feeling that Angel may very well be pulling the strings, even if he seemed off his game after the meet up and throwdown with the lorophage and Drusilla. Do I have proof other than the timing of the calls: one pulling Faith out of the house just as the other reminded Pat of this clandestine deal between him and an unknown benefactor? Not really. Does it make sense? At this point, yes it does. I’m willing to be wrong, because who wants to know exactly what’s going on at any given time?
Tune in next time for commentary on Buffy Season 9 #7!
Thoughts on the new issue? Did you like the new format? Let me know!
