Slayers and Vampires
Page 47
DAVID FURY
There was a lot of rejiggering of thoughts about where the characters should be at this point and arcs of relationships. It just threw everything out the window. And these things happen all the time. You know, when Seth Green left Buffy, he was a big part of the show and then suddenly he left and we had to write him off, but that helped us introduce Tara. So some of these things worked out well, but we weren’t looking to write off Charisma. She was very much a big part of the show, and having to suddenly present her pregnancy on the show and explain it . . . well, these are things that make it tricky for us, that’s all. It wasn’t for me to decide. All I’m told is the parameters of what I’m writing. “You don’t have Charisma.” Or, “You’ve got to use Charisma minimally.” Or so and so has hurt his leg; he has to be sitting through the whole episode. Weird stuff, and you go, “OK, I’m going to go write that.” I don’t really involve myself with the personal lives, but, hey, it keeps things interesting.
JOSS WHEDON
The evil Cordelia was something we had been planning for a while, but not the Cordelia-being-pregnant part of the story. Season four saw a cap—except for one episode of season five—of the Cordelia arc. The thing with Cordelia that was beautiful is that I got to tell the Buffy story from the movie, which I could never tell on the series. The idea of the movie was that this girl is a ditz, because nobody has ever asked her to be anything else. When you actually put it to her, when there’s more required of her, she steps up, she becomes stronger, she becomes interesting, and she becomes a hero. That’s sort of what we got to do with Cordelia, but once that’s done and she’s having a baby, it’s coma time. Can you squeeze more milk from something usually? Yes, but we really resolved what we wanted to do with the character and because we knew we had to have her go for a period, because of circumstances, it just felt right to wrap it up and move on to new things—which we did with season five.
CHARISMA CARPENTER
They had to write Cordelia out? I don’t know if I’ll ever believe it, but I accept it, although there’s a part of me that feels like we were dealing with some of the most creative people that have ever been in TV, and they couldn’t figure it out? I don’t know. I think I’m a complicated person, I think I’m lovable, I think I tried really hard, but I also think there were things at work, and pressures and insecurities that the job made me feel would rear its head.
By the time I got pregnant, it was seen as the last straw. That’s kind of what I suspect was where they were at with that, and it makes me sad. I’ve had lots of years to reflect on that, and I’ve seen Joss and Alisson and Alexis, and I saw them at Arizona Comic-Con recently, and they always have the most beautiful things to say about my talent and how amazing I was, and it’s sweet and it brought tears to my eyes, because I didn’t know they felt that way.
Who knows, maybe they were just being kind, but I really felt nice. And when I saw Joss, it was complicated. Not to say we’re not friendly and I wouldn’t hug his neck if I saw him tomorrow, but there’s this feeling when I walk around him of, Does he think I ruined his TV show? Does he really believe that? And that makes me sad.
DAVID FURY
I don’t know what the story direction originally was, but I think in terms of relationships and in terms of development between, say, Angel and Cordelia, it might have gone in a different way had her pregnancy not been introduced into it. It just affects how everyone relates to each other. Sometimes you write yourself into a corner. Here we have a romantic relationship developing between Angel and Cordelia, a love relationship that can never be, because there’s no drama in that. Cordelia’s back, what’s going to be the big problem in getting these kids together? What if she’s not herself and she’s the one actually plotting Angel’s demise? It just creates emotional resonance from the perspective of the fact she’s a mother figure to Connor, and the fact that she was a potential lover of Angel. There’s just a lot more emotion.
TIM MINEAR
And the audience knows her. It’s like when Angel became Angelus on Buffy, and suddenly he was the bad guy. One of the other things, too, when we had her ascend to heaven because she was a higher being. I think we ended up hating that and that this was kind of a way to take it back.
DAVID FURY
It was her body being used by this thing, but there’s an emotional connection there because you don’t know what’s going on with her. With the direction Cordelia’s character took, it became impossible to bring her back to where she was. To bring her back to just superficial wisecracking Cordy. A lot of people missed that, but we felt we moved her out of that arena. To try and bring her back would be false and fake.
JEFFREY BELL
(co–executive producer, Angel)
Cordelia went through an amazingly remarkable arc. She came in as this very, sort of, self-absorbed cheerleader and wannabe actress and grew in depth and character and became a love interest for Angel. And as people who watched a lot of television will tell you, it’s always more interesting if they don’t quite get together but have the feelings. She kept growing stronger and then there was this whole paranormal thing happening with her that ended with her going away at the end of season three, coming back in season four, and we were excited to think, “Cordelia’s the bad guy, or the thing inside Cordelia is the bad guy.” We were talking about Angelus and that Faith was going to show up, and we were holding up sparkly things to the fans when we knew that Cordelia was going to kill Wolfram and Hart’s Lilah Morgan.
STEPHANIE ROMANOV
(actress, Lilah Morgan)
In the script, they had it that Angel was the one who killed Lilah as Angelus, because they didn’t want anyone to know the shock surprise that it was Cordelia. Although I knew it was her, it wasn’t until the day of shooting that the final page was handed out where it spelled it out. Before it said, “Lilah goes down a hallway and Angelus follows.” On that day the rest of the crew got the right script page. I was shocked, but, being that I was a Wolfram and Hart gal and everybody else had already gotten killed, I was shocked it went as long as it did. My question was always, “Do I finally get killed in this script?” I figured it was a matter of time, because they were killing off everyone else. I had only auditioned for a guest part, and they just kept adding to it and bringing me back. I never had a deal or anything, so it turned into a much bigger thing than I ever thought it would be.
I actually had a great time doing it. I loved playing Lilah, and that year was probably the most fun for me, because they were writing more for her and season four was the only year that we got to see some colors. That was always frustrating to me. Being there as part of the law firm, it was basically playing the same scene over and over again. But they always gave me the really fun lines, which is the nice sarcasm that is a joy to play. So I was happy it went as long as it did. Why look a gift horse in the mouth? I enjoyed it, but it was over for me and freed me up to audition for other things, which was OK. To all endings there are beginnings.
CHARISMA CARPENTER
It’s hard for me to separate the realities of what was going on and the story line. I liked when Cordelia and Lilah would go head-to-head, but when Cordelia was doing it, because it was the right thing to do. Because she was so evil. Lilah had it coming, but I think that the performance could have been better if I wasn’t so caught up in other stuff that was going on at the time, to be honest.
JEFFREY BELL
Trying to make things work with Charisma’s pregnancy was tricky. I think we managed to do it and brought Gina Torres in as Jasmine. But I think at the end of the season, when we were needing the Big Bad to battle, Charisma was having a baby, so Gina came in and that worked out really nicely. We couldn’t get Charisma back at the end of the season in a meaningful way.
TIM MINEAR
From the beginning, Angel had a reputation for the big turn.
CHARISMA CARPENTER
I’m glad to have been part of something so special. Having worked with David, Tim
, and Joss heading up the show was a lifetime of lessons and information about writing. I can identify a piece of shit from something else in the writing process. Their work ethic was so strong. I don’t know how Joss did it all, and I didn’t know how it all turned out for him personally, but I felt really lucky to have been a part of that. It was a very good situation for a very long time, so I feel very lucky to have had that to use as a watermark for the future.
By season four, Angel had largely done away with the idea of crossovers with characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Faith notwithstanding), but to help conclude season four, Alyson Hannigan’s Willow was brought in to work a little of her mojo in fighting off ultimate evil.
JEFFREY BELL
Willow coming over came about because we needed sort of a powerful witch, wizard, magical person. Rather than bring in some guest star to do it, the thought was, “How about Willow?” Alyson came over and really served a huge help for us.
The evil Cordelia story line concludes with her giving birth to the goddess Jasmine, played by Firefly’s Gina Torres. This was also where Ben Edlund made his first major contribution as the writers were trying to solve the Jasmine threat.
DAVID FURY
We knew Cordelia was coming back from her ascension and that it wouldn’t be entirely her. What we didn’t know was how we were going to climax the season in what would have been a fight between a nine-month-pregnant lady and Angel. We figured she would give birth around episode eighteen or so, so we debated for a long time on how to work the pregnancy in. We’d already done Cordelia demonically pregnant, we had Darla, so what we realized was that whatever she gave birth to would have to be the Big Bad. But it wasn’t until we were breaking the specific stories later on that we realized that our first idea, that the Big Bad might be a powerful guy, would work better if it was a woman. And not some big evil woman, but, instead, someone wonderful. She was going to bring peace and tranquility to the world, which was a big twist after the Beast. And she had a genuine point to make in her logic of giving the world peace—admittedly, without free will. There was a Garden of Eden parable there in the idea of, “You get to live in the Garden of Eden, but I make the rules and you can’t choose to eat this apple.”
BEN EDLUND
When I came in, they were still working hard on figuring out the Jasmine story line and how the mechanics of that were going to work with the cults. They brought Zoe from Firefly over to be Jasmine, so it was fun. It was a family affair. I helped Jeff Bell, who was running Angel at that point, break an episode he was going to work on called “Magic Bullet,” if I’m not mistaken. I was raring to go. We sat down, and I felt like I was very handy in that break coming in from an outside point of view. Everyone had been in the same loops they’d been in for a season, so I had just come out and suddenly sat down and it was my job to assess where they were, try to possibly offer another pair of eyes. I was able to see a few things that turned out to be useful solutions. Part of it was the question of how to make it so that someone who had fallen for Jasmine could be woken up again. And my solve was you needed the blood of Cordelia.
TIM MINEAR
There were a lot of changes made because of Charisma’s pregnancy. One example is that we had wanted Cordelia to come out of her coma in “Peace Out” and for her to be the one to put her fist through Jasmine’s skull rather than Connor, but she couldn’t work the kind of hours that were necessary. She could come in and be in a coma.
The other part of putting an end to Jasmine required, in the episode “Sacrifice,” for Angel to travel to another dimension for answers. Edlund, who wrote the episode, believes that it captured just how insane—in the best possible way—Angel was as a series. Its insanity is particularly evident when Angel, a vampire, stands before crab-humanoid hybrids to find the solution to remove a goddess.
BEN EDLUND
It was all very, very nuts [laughs]. At Firefly and also at Angel, I had a tendency to do a lot of drawings, predesigning, while I was writing. Not to diminish all of the amazing foundational work done by the people who really had to do that stuff, but I draw a lot. So it was really enjoyable to be able to collaborate on that and throw in on the process to design this creature. And that shit is so over the top—Angel is great that way. Angel would do things no other show would do. Like Ray Harryhausen crap with these creatures. You know what I mean? Most shows just shirk away from that and go, “We’re not going to get involved in that, it’s too ambitious, it’s going to look like crap.” I like how it looks, even if it looks a bit computery and dated. I remember watching Ray Harryhausen when I was younger. Star Wars had come out, and then you would watch Sinbad and it was still cool. Star Wars blew it away, stripped the doors off it, and I still liked Sinbad, because I liked that little homunculus, or the little Pegasus, or whatever the hell they had. All that stuff was great. I feel that you can still have a design that feels good even if the CG is wherever it’s at for the time. You can still have a sequence that’s developed with filmmaking in mind, even if it’s jittery and jumpy. It still does something. It’s even more lovable, like the way Wes Anderson uses animation in The Life Aquatic.
The show in general and that sequence—Angel in the other dimension—was so hard-core in its fantasy. I loved being able to do stuff like the guy going to the humans, “You can’t go there, because your little mouse lungs won’t even take the atmosphere. It takes a dead man to go there.” Those are things that are just woven down deep into this shit. You could also make a whole movie where the whole point is, “It takes a dead man to go there.” But we’re doing eighteen thousand things at once. At the end of the episode, they’re, like, “You gotta go, man, it takes a dead man to go there.” But that’s also while there’s a hive mind being formed and a massive battle between the full cast and all of these National Guard dudes that Jasmine is running, and then she’s taking all the wounds from the battle of the others . . . and laughing about it. So there’s, like, six different genre overnotes going at once. I thought it was a good demonstration of where Angel had gotten up to, and running from that in year five we went from a Nazi-submarine episode to Angel turning into a puppet. The show was, like, a feast of crazy.
With dessert still to come after Jasmine’s defeat. Her followers, without her, feel lost and are filled with despair, having believed they were experiencing pure joy. Connor, who always recognized Jasmine for what she was, now has nothing. Flipping out, he takes hostages—including the still-comatose Cordelia—in a condemnation of everything. Angel sets out to stop him, and seemingly fulfills the season-three prophecy of the father killing the son. In “reality,” an alternative timeline is created (through a deal struck between Angel and Wolfram and Hart—in which Angel takes over the Los Angeles office of the firm, explored fully in season five). According to this timeline, Connor is a perfectly normal teenager being raised as part of a family. As far as the rest of the world (sans Angel, in an echo of season one’s “I Will Remember You”) is concerned, the son of vampires Angel and Darla never existed.
JEFFREY BELL
We were trying to be true to his character. As such, we didn’t give him a break and ultimately realized there was no way to bring him into normal society, thus Angel’s sacrificial decision at the end of the year, which I found emotional. That was the perfect payoff for that character.
TIM MINEAR
Connor’s fate was something we discussed before the character was cast. We knew we were going to go to that sort of epic, mythic place with father and son. It was in season three that I had the prophecy “the father will kill the son,” and that was a place we were really considering going. What we didn’t know was the way that it would ultimately shake out. We decided that we didn’t want Angel to kill Conor in way that he would kill him, so this was a good alternative. The whole notion of taking away free will in exchange for happiness, and Angel fighting against that and, in the end, doing that for his kid . . . that had an irony that I loved.
VINCENT KARTHEISER
I knew people were reacting really strongly to Connor, but I didn’t know why, because I didn’t know the show’s history. To me, the character lost its thrill about four episodes in. From there on out, I felt like I was doing the same scene over and over and over.