Long-reaching invisible hands (open spoilers for ANGEL & other shows likely)

Cafe Society
1

What are the best examples you can think of of very finely controlled, long-range planning by villains in TV and movies?

Here’s what brings the topic to mind. TNT reruns Angel in the wee hours of the morning, and occasionally I tune in. Recently I saw the pilot again, and it struck me that the events therein must be taken in an entirely different light given the events of the fourth season. In case you’ve forgotten, in that season, Jasmine (a member of the Powers that Be) takes over Cordelia’s body in order to use her as a human incubator to create a body for herself to use in taking over Earth in a bloodless, and free-will-less, coup. The father of Cordelia’s “baby” is Angel’s son Connor, whose birth, it develops, was arranged for just this purpose. One of Jasmine’s henchmen claims that everything that’s happened to Angel & Co. for years has led up to this moment.

At the time this aired, I took that comment with a grain of salt. But watching “City of…” again makes it seem more plausible. You’ll recall that Angel screws up the very first case sent him by the Powers (through Doyle) because he leaves the note with his client’s name on it where she can find it; when she happens to see it, she becomes convinced that he is a crazy stalker and runs out, causing her death at the hand of the villain of the week. Going after said villain to avenge her death, Angel ends up rescuing Cordelia from him, leading directly to Cordy pushing him to start AI and leading indirectly to her becoming the vessel for the powers’ visions, which caused her to become half-demon and a suitable vessel for Jasmine’s birth. Moreover, this episode’s events are what bring Angel to the attention of Wolfram & Hart, which is what causes W & H to resurrect Darla, who is the mother of Connor. In other words, the whole of Season 4 was set up by Doyle’s having the vision of Angel’s first client, and Angel & Co. were being moved around like chess pieces the entire time.

All of which leads me to my discussion question. What other examples of Jasmine’s invisible hand can you see through Angel Seasons 1-3? For that matter, what other shows have such finely delineated conspiracies?

(Oh, and before anyone asks, I don’t really think Whedon et al planned Season 4 from the very beginning, but once they fixed on an overall arc for the series, they definitely used elements that had already been laid out.)

2

Babylon 5 has a number of conspiracies. The Vorlons and Shadows both have their fingers in lots of pots going way back (the Vorlons are responsible for the creation of Telepaths amongst most of the younger races, and in the novels, it’s shown that they are also responsible for the creation of Psi-Corps, ironic since Psi-Corps became a tool of the Shadows later on.)

EarthGov has all sorts of plots and conspiracies running, with different parties ploting against eachother (Vice President Clarke is in cahoots with the Shadows so he can ascend to the Presidency after President Santiago’s untimely demise, allowing him to put Earth into a xenophobic isolationist stance, keeping one of the major 5 powers almost completley uninvolved in the Shadow War, and keeping Babylon 5 on unstable footing having to deal with the threat posed by EarthForce for much of the final war.

It is also revealed that Psi-Corps, a government organization that regulates all Earther telepaths and their activities, is secretly helping Clarke along, hoping to take over Earthgov through him, while a number of major pharmaceutical companies on Mars are plotting against both Clarke and Psi-Corps, hoping to release a virus that will kill all the telepaths (these two conspiracies eventually collide and result in the Telepath War, a rather violent conflict on Earth between the Psi-Corps, the Telepath Resistance (formed with the help of Dr. Franklin’s Underground Railroad several years earlier), and the Mundanes (non-telepaths).

Also, the younger races (particularly Babylon 5 and later the Interstellar Alliance) find themselves having to deal with all sorts of major crises that are the result of things the older races did thousands or millions of years earlier.

All that is aside from the very large role that prophecies (mostly Minbari, Narn, and Centauri in origin) play on Babylon 5, my favorite being the Coffee Cup Prophecy.

3

I still have nearly a quarter-cup of salt regarding Jasmine’s claims. Certainly it seems that someone or something was arranging events, (or events were arranging themselves in a kind of literal destiny,) but there’s no real evidence that Jasmine, herself, did much. What you were describing about bringing Angel and Cordelia together, and setting Angel up as wolfram and hart’s adversary, could equally well have been about the final arc of the show - the PTB grooming Angel to lead the attack against the circle of the black thorn, say. And Connor is still alive and I don’t think his entire destiny has played out yet. Bringing Jasmine into the world, and killing her, was just Chapter 3.

One of my favorite examples of an unspoken connection between events, though, and I’m not sure if it fits your examples but I’m going to say it anyway, has to do with “The Trial” and Connor. Lorne sends Angel and the human Darla to this freaky magical place where they can save her from her syphilitic heart… and Angel passes through several challenges on her behalf, including to sacrifice his existence for her life, with no catches. Just before actually snuffing Angel, the butler-like guy guiding them through the place realizes that there’s an unfortunate bylaw - because Darla has already been ‘given new life’ by supernatural means, they can’t help her. (Presumably referring to Wolfram and Hart conjuring her back after she was staked, though the Master vamping her might also qualify as getting new life in an odd way.)

So, events continue to unfold - Drusilla vamps Darla, Angel goes dark, Angel and Darla do it and Angel has his epiphany, etcetera. Darla becomes pregnant with a mysterious human baby. I don’t think anyone on the show mentions this connection outright… that Angel and Darla together earned ‘saving a life’ and were unable to use what they’d earned on Darla herself - so maybe the cosmos provided them with a new life instead. As I’m writing this, I just realized that even the element of sacrificing a vampire falls into place. Angel was willing to sacrifice himself to save Darla’s life. Darla definitely sacrificed herself to save Connor.

Now, just who might have been responsible for drawing Angel and Darla into the trial, I’m not going to speculate. But it’s an interesting connection I think.

4

That’s the best fanwank I’ve ever heard to explain Darla’s impossible pregnancy, and even covers why she couldn’t give birth (she didn’t have another “life” ticket), but could conceive and gestate! Good job.

5

Fanwanker? Moi?? :wink:
Actually, I remember talking with some other Angel fans about this connection back during season four, and at least one said that “Oh, that’s completely obvious. Joss must have set it up that way, it’s obvious as soon as they found out the baby was human. He just doesn’t like to make stuff like this too obvious. Makes it more fun for us when we figure it out.”

But if you count it as a good fanwank on my balance sheet… I’ll accept that. :smiley:

6

I do. Of course, it’s 5 AM, I’ve slept for 1.5 hours of the last 36, and I’m on a **lot **of cold medicine right now. So Your Points May Vary. :smiley:

7

I thought it was stated flat out on the show that Connor was the result of the earned life. No fanwanking required.

8

I don’t remember them linking it to the life Angel earned for Darla. But I will admit I don’t remember the details of *Angel *as well as I do Buffy. (I still haven’t gotten the last season on DVD yet. hangs head in shame ) Do you remember what episode it was stated in? The “Darla’s Pregnancy” section of the Buffyverse Dialogue Database only goes up to Season 3, and I don’t remember enough of the later seasons to wade through it ep by ep.

9

Okay, points for Otto!

I’ve found the reference he meant, in ‘Shiny happy people.’ (The first one with Jasmine.) Means that I guess I’ve been remembering things wrong. This dialog is from the buffyworld.com transcript - the ‘woman’ is she-who-will-be-known-as-Jasmine.

10

Sweet! Thanks, chrisk. I can’t believe I missed that the first time around.

11

Although of course, Jasmine could have been lying.

12

Yes. As I said above, I don’t really believe Jasmine’s claims that she was pulling the strings - there were enough other powers who might have wanted to bring Connor into the world. But the resonance of the connection between the trial and the birth is strong enough that I do believe that there’s a link.

13

I’m not familiar with that one… Was that from Season 5?

14

Goes all the way back to Season One. Basically, the visiting Centauri noblewoman had a vision (Centauri women are unusually prone to prophetic visions, possibly related to the fact that they apparantly developed telepathy naturally without Vorlon meddling) that involved the destruction of Babylon 5. Later in the same episode, the station is attacked by the Raiders, using their nifty new space carrier, after luring Delta Squadron away from the station.

Anyhow, Ivonova figures out something is wrong and takes her squadron back to B5, and gets there just as Garibaldi and Alpha Squadron are trying to fight off a large Raider attack. The Raiders get pinned between Alpha Squadron, Delta Squadron, and Babylon 5’s defense grid, and are wiped out, with the carrier escaping (soon after destroyed in the first Shadows Ex Machina of the series)

Everyone is all “Yay we thwarted the prophecy! Suck it prophecy!” and the lady, drinking something of a coffee-like appearance from a coffee mug, sees a vision (in the coffee, no less) of a shuttle leaving Babylon 5’s shuttle bay moments before the entire station explodes. Thus, the prophecy is still there.

In later episodes and seasons, they keep running into that same prophecy, finding out via visions or distress calls sent through time-rifts in space that the station is due to be destroyed in the future, occasionally with some variation of the shuttle leaving the hanger bay and the station exploding.

In the final episode of the series, which takes place 20 years after Sheridan’s return from Z’Ha’Dum (so around 2280), Babylon 5 is decomossioned, having been rendered obsolete by the maturation of the Interstellar Alliance and new hyperspace navigation technologies, and they demolish the station, with the last people leaving the station via a shuttle just before the reactor blows up (apparantly the result either of Garibaldi stealing a wine glass on his way out, or JMS shutting off a load-bearing light switch soon after).

After the first appearance of the prophecy of the station’s destruction being in an episode with a woman seeing the vision in a cup of coffee (making one pause to wonder what other plants Ivonova and Takashima may have smuggled into the hydroponics garden), I call it the Coffee Cup Prophecy.

15

Oh, okay, I do of course remember that one. I just never made the coffee cup connection.

16

Yeah, well, I’ve been told my thought processes are weird, with many loops and cul de sacs.