How “Are You Now or Have You Ever Been” Redefined the Mission Statement of ‘Angel’
Angel was defined in a few different ways throughout his time on Buffy. At first, he was a mysterious guy who would show up to drop cryptic but helpful information, then pivoted toward becoming a mysterious love interest. In season two, he was Buffy’s boyfriend and then he was the season’s villain after losing his soul. In season three, he was pretty much mostly Buffy’s boyfriend, while they both began to realize that their relationship just could not ever work. But there was one constant thing running through his character that whole time, other than simply being Buffy’s boyfriend, and that was his tortured past. Angel, unlike really any other character, could easily be summed up in a single line: he’s the vampire with a soul trying to seek redemption for the terrible things he has done. Throughout much of the early years, that was the thing that defined him and that was certainly loud and clear when he spun off into his own show.
Most of the first season of Angel deals with this as the character’s primary motivation. He’s moved to Los Angeles to go off on his own and separate himself from Buffy. He wants to help people, but he also needs to keep a roof over his head and has no idea how to do that, leading to the opening of Angel Investigations, where it feels like he’s trying to make up for all of the wrong he’s done, one act of kindness at a time. While Angel noted a few times on Buffy that the demon does retain aspects of your personality when you become a vampire, that show and the first season of his own really draw a clear dividing line between Angel and Angelus. First of all, there’s the naming so that people can consider them to be separate characters. With that, it becomes almost more of a Jekyll/Hyde or Bruce Banner/Hulk situation.
There are plenty of flashbacks and stories to show us the horrible things Angelus had done, but after a certain point it almost feels like Angel is resigning himself to pay for someone else’s crimes. The guilt is understandable, without a doubt, because it was his body and he has these memories and he remembers enjoying them. He remembers being Angelus. But the second season of Buffy never shied away from saying “That’s not Angel anymore,” or “Angel’s gone,” and the third season doubled down on that firm dividing line between Angel and Angelus after he and Buffy got back together. So even though it made sense for Angel to seek some kind of redemption, it was never all that clear how much of what Angelus did was actually his own responsibility.
Buffy and especially Angel also gave us occasional flashbacks to the largely unexplored century after Angel had his soul restored, where he mostly hung around in gutters eating rats. Obviously that couldn’t be all he did, but it was clear that being left alone and staying away from people defined him during that time. That’s where this episode comes in. As much as you can say Buffy came into its own with episodes like “Prophecy Girl” and “Innocence,” you could say Angel truly found its footing with “Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been.” That doesn’t mean that there weren’t some incredible episodes in the first season. “Hero” and “I Will Remember You” are without a doubt among the show’s very best. But this one episode retooled the mission statement of both the show and the character into something much more interesting and complex.
At first glance, the concept of “Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been” is simple. It’s basically the Angel version of the Twilight Zone episode “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.” In that, a group of people on a single suburban street see a comet pass overhead and are unsure of what happened and their lack of information leads to inevitable panic, especially as a science fiction loving kid points out that in the stories he reads, aliens can look like anyone. This leads to suspicion, paranoia and eventually murder. The episode is very much a commentary on its time, with the “alien” among them being a metaphor for communism and the general panic being a very pointed satire of the Red Scare. “Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been” takes this concept and cleverly inverts it. Being an episode shot in 2000 and set in the 1950s, it deals with communism much more directly.
The episode sees Angel living as a mysterious, creepy guest in the luxurious Hyperion Hotel, where everyone is already quick to suspect anyone around them of being a communist. The suspicions ramp up as the episode escalates. Guests accuse each other of being a communist, then a murder, then a monster as things get worse and worse. Here, instead of people going at each other’s throats because they think everyone is secretly a monster, everyone is accusing each other of being a communist spy or a murderer while being totally blind, initially, to the monster in their midst.
It’s important to note the way Angel is being depicted in these flashbacks, as well, as he’s somewhere between the Angel we’ve seen in other pre-Buffy flashbacks, while leaning a little closer to the Angel we know. Someone who tries to be on his own but still goes out of his way to help those in need. This is definitely set during a time when he didn’t want to help people, and in fact did everything he could to stay away from them, yet still couldn’t help but get involved. The brilliance of it is that the episode seems to have a clear theme at the start. Once the action picks up and you can see where it is going, it seems that the episode is saying that this goodness was always in Angel’s nature. Which makes everything that unfolds even more devastating as the episode builds to its end.
True to Buffy and Angel form, the metaphor at the heart of the episode is also incredibly literal. Much in the way that high school actually sits on the mouth of Hell, this episode has an actual demon that is whispering into the ears of the guests of the hotel to fuel their suspicions. That does not let them off the hook, though, which is important to know. All the demon is really doing is highlighting how easy it is for people to turn on each other when they’re scared. And that is exactly what they do.
The episode, with its flashbacks set in 1952, certainly isn’t only talking about communism, though. Racism is also an incredibly important factor. The person Angel can’t help but help, after trying so hard to stay out of everyone else’s affairs, is a young woman named Judy, who is part African American, passing as white. She was fired from her job after they found out and stole a good bit of money and is now being tracked by a private investigator, in a plot that appreciatively draws heavily from Psycho. She has more to risk than anyone else in the hotel because all the finger pointing could end her if it is ever drawn in her direction, as it obviously eventually is. After going out of his way to help her, once people find out Judy’s secret, she immediately points out that Angel has blood in his room and is therefore probably the killer that everyone is looking for. The angry mob then grabs Angel and hangs him from the rafters, only to realize — horrified — what they have done after the fact.
Obviously, they don’t kill Angel, but they don’t know that. As far as everyone in that hotel is concerned, they all participated in killing a man. One that they believed to be a killer, but only moments after hearing the first shred of evidence against him. And even if he had been the killer, that’s not remotely any kind of justice. Their paranoia had simply gotten to the point that they needed to kill someone to make themselves feel better, to quell their fear. It would have been Judy, without a doubt, until she shifted the blame to Angel. And if he had blamed anyone else, it could have been them.
Once the demon Thesulac is made flesh, that’s when it becomes clear what the episode is really about. As established, he feeds off the paranoia and fear of others. Judy in particular is already racked with guilt over what she had done. Thesulac in particular notes that “there’s an entire hotel here just full of tortured souls who could use your help,” as if goading Angel, challenging him as so many demons have done throughout the show. The language plays into what’s expected of Angel in a very clever and pointed way, because he does not rise to the challenge. Instead, he simply says “Take them all” and leaves everyone in the hotel to the demon and turns his back on them. He tried to help Judy and it got him “killed.” And that’s where it becomes explicitly clear that this isn’t about an early instance of Angel helping the helpless back in the 1950s.
This is, instead, the story of the worst thing that he, Angel and not Angelus, has ever done. This episode is so important to the show because of that. Maybe the most important. This is the moment that Angel stopped being black and white and embraced the uncomfortable questions and gray area that would define the show at its best. It’s not just about Angel and Angelus and making up for all of the things that he did without a soul, even if that aspect is certainly crucial to his character and never goes away. This is the episode that tells us that Angel has plenty to make up for on his own. He, Angel, has made a ton of mistakes and has done some really bad things that he has to try to make up for even if he maybe never will. That is so important to the character moving forward, as well. It feeds directly into the person he becomes later on in that season, firing his crew and abandoning his friends and turning his back on the world to intentionally bring himself down into a place of despair and darkness. In its dealing with the inherent corruptibility of the human spirit and its depiction of how much Angel has to atone for both with and without Angelus, it is the episode that lays the path for the entire second season. It also redefines the path of the show.
The lessons learned in “Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been” stick with Angel throughout the series, in some overtly and some less obvious ways. It starts right there at the end of the episode with Angel’s decision to move everyone into the Hyperion Hotel, into the very spot where it all went down, so that he never forgets what happened. There are a lot of tortured souls out there that could use his help, the demon was right about that and instead of turning his back on them anymore, he’s going to at least try to make up for what he had done by helping as many as he can.
Angel’s impacted by his time at the Hyperion in the ’50s in smaller, less obvious ways as well. It feeds directly into the fight against Wolfram and Hart and the “If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do” speech in “Epiphany,” as it might be the thing that most prominently teaches Angel that helping is not about winning or losing and certainly not about being thanked for it. You do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do, no matter how it turns out. This episode might make that clearer than any other, simply by showcasing what happens when you do turn your back on those who need your help.
Because of that, “Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been” is maybe the one episode that truly set the course for the show as a whole, in addition to being one of the series most important episodes, and very possibly its best.
