The Best Girlboss in All of Television

by Odin McDermott

My favorite genre of music isn’t jazz, man, but my favorite antagonist in media is Jasmine! Jasmine from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer spinoff series, Angel, to be exact. I first watched both of those shows about five years ago, and I much preferred Buffy over Angel. In fact, I don’t remember a whole lot of what happened in Angel. But I do remember Jasmine, portrayed by Gina Torres, and she is a girlboss that is as memorable as she is powerful.

She has a lot of significance to the overall plot of Angel, but the short version is (SPOILER ALERT, by the way) that she was a member of The Powers That Be, the gods of order and goodness in the Buffyverse that exist to wage war against the forces of evil: demons, vampires, clowns, and so on. But unlike their evil counterparts, The Powers That Be view the earthly realm as a spectator sport and only urge others to intervene instead of intervening themselves. The entity that later became known as Jasmine didn’t like that and split off from her omnipotent but aloof colleagues, all while enacting a plan that would let her inhabit a physical form on Earth.

What does Jasmine do that’s essay-worthy, though? Well, most villains in media are gruesome, twisted, or at the very least cruel. Jasmine, on the other hand, is delightful! She’s kind and attentive; you can’t help but feel a bit better when she’s on camera. This is then magnified by the fact that anyone who sees or hears her immediately falls in love with her. But it’s not a romantic love so much as a blissful, all-encompassing love, like when I eat Cheez-Its. Her followers feel no pain, sadness, misery, or guilt, only love for Jasmine and for each other. As she spreads her love throughout Los Angeles like the plague, people do everything they can to help her, be with her, and spread her message of love. It’s not mind-control in the traditional sense–Jasmine isn’t forcing anyone to do anything, she’s just making them love her, which in turn makes them a lot more likely to do things in her name. Her followers all work together in a communal living environment, taking care of each other and doing their part to help newcomers. She would have created a blissful utopia free of any suffering if it weren’t for a small coincidence that enabled one of our heroes to escape her thrall (side note: one of the episodes that features Jasmine has just one of our heroes free from her thrall when nobody else is, and it is horrifying! She has to evade capture by Jasmine’s followers while also figuring out how to free her friends. It’d be like being the sole human during the zombie apocalypse, but instead of turning into zombies, all of your friends are just happy and think you’re insane. Our lonely hero, Winifred “Fred” Burkle, figures out that exposure to Jasmine’s blood negates her effect on you, and so she shoots Jasmine and Angel–neither of them dies from this, but with Jasmine standing in front of Angel, Jasmine’s blood gets on the bullet and then enters Angel’s bloodstream. SO cool!!! Ok, long side note over). After the heroes defeat Jasmine, everyone consequently loses their sense of bliss. Some people loot, riot, and even die by suicide, all of which the heroes are aware that they caused. To add even more insult to injury, the heroes are then congratulated and thanked by their long-time enemies, Wolfram and Hart (a law firm that aims to bring about the apocalypse). Jasmine’s presence as the antagonist was a relatively new development, but Wolfram and Hart have hated Angel’s team since the pilot episode. To have his enemies thank him for something he did…that’s gotta hurt.

This is why Jasmine is my favorite villain: there’s an argument to be made that nothing she did was morally wrong. The heroes (once they’re freed from her thrall) argue that humanity has to make its own choices, even if those choices result in war and poverty. But millions of people are killed every single day by the greed of the few; is it fair to destroy a literal utopia just for the sake of free will (also, I would argue that you don’t lose free will under Jasmine’s thrall: she isn’t making anyone do anything). In the current world, suffering and death run rampant. In Jasmine’s world, nobody suffers, and only a few hundred people need to die in order for Jasmine to feed on them (whoops, forget to mention this earlier). But even then, these people die doing what they love most: helping Jasmine. Utilitarianism can justify tons of awful things (see: "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas"), but I don’t know if Jasmine is an “awful thing.” In her head, she’s done the math of the Trolley Problem, and she comes to a reasonable conclusion: less suffering = good. And with her powers, she probably decreases total suffering more than any other possible action. How could you turn that down?

Please don’t leave this essay and come to the conclusion that I’m in favor of eradicating free will–I’m not! But Jasmine is a charming, well-written villain, and I think her actions and abilities are worth a deeper examination than this short, goofy essay. So remember kids, fascism is good if it meets three criteria: people are happy, communal living spaces are created, and Gina Torres is the girlboss in charge.