Ithuriel in Shadowhunters: The Captive Angel Explained

Who is Ithuriel in Shadowhunters?

Ithuriel is an angel with an unlucky record. In Cassandra Clare's novels he is a captive more than once, and the television series wastes no time showing him in chains. When he first appears in Shadowhunters he is an old man in filthy rags, held in a second abandoned factory that Valentine Morgenstern (Alan van Sprang) has turned into a hideout. Valentine says he freed the angel from entombment. The angel, clearly, does not see it that way.

The name has a literary pedigree older than any Shadowhunter. Ithuriel appears in John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost, published in 1667, where an angel of that name touches a disguised Satan with his spear and exposes him. Writers since then have used "Ithuriel's spear" as shorthand for something that reveals the truth. Cassandra Clare has said that her angel names come from a mix of mythological sources, and that background suits a character whose role in the story is to reveal what others want hidden.

The episode is the seventh of the second season, written by Hollie Overton and directed by Ben Bray. Season 2 ran in two halves, ten episodes from January 2 to March 6, 2017, and the rest from June 5 to August 14, with twenty episodes in all. The Ithuriel episode falls in the first half, a week after "Iron Sisters" introduced Cleophas, Luke's sister, and revealed what she was really doing.

For readers who came to the show without the books, a quick orientation helps. The Soul-Sword is one of the three Mortal Instruments, and in this season Valentine plans to use it, in the words of the earlier episode, against every creature with demonic blood, Downworlders included. The angel matters because Valentine wants to use him for that plan, and because Clary, whose rune power is the show's central mystery, has a link to him.

What happens in "How Are Thou Fallen"

Clary (Katherine McNamara) starts to hear a deafening noise that nobody else seems to notice. Cleophas (Lisa Berry) tells her to activate her hearing rune, and the sound turns out to be a voice calling to her. It is Ithuriel, who has been crying out for help. Cleophas had just spent an episode revealing her Circle rune and her loyalty to Valentine, but hearing an angel tortured breaks her. She tells Clary that imprisoning an angel goes against everything Shadowhunters stand for.

Acting as a double agent, Cleophas leads Clary, Luke (Isaiah Mustafa) and Jace (Dominic Sherwood) to Valentine's hiding place. Luke and Cleophas face their former friend while Clary and Jace go for the prisoner. They knock out the guards, and the angel shows Clary another rune to draw on his chains. The chains break, and Ithuriel holds out his hands for brother and sister to take. A vision of the Soul Sword passes before their eyes before he launches himself into the sky.

Ithuriel in the books

In the novels, Valentine's treatment of the angel is one of the cruelest acts of the Circle leader. The Mortal Instruments book City of Glass shows Ithuriel as a captive summoned and tortured by Valentine. The Infernal Devices sequence ties him to a different villain: the angel is bound inside a clockwork angel through a spell by the warlock John Thaddeus Shade, and Axel Mortmain later uses that device against the Nephilim.

Tessa Gray, the heroine of that series, is born of a Shadowhunter and an Eidolon demon, and her demon father's blood lets her shapeshift. She takes Ithuriel's form to destroy Mortmain and frees the angel in the process. The Shadowhunters series does not adapt the Infernal Devices material in this episode, but the connection explains why book readers had been waiting for the character, and why Clary's bond with him is more than a coincidence.

Where the episode sits in season 2

Before the angel appears, the season has spent its first six episodes on grief and fallout. Clary loses her mother Jocelyn, who is mourned in the fifth episode, "Dust, and Shadows", Luke wakes in the wilderness as something new, and Isabelle's yin fen addiction takes hold after a prescription from Aldertree. In "Iron Sisters", the sixth episode, Clary and Isabelle seek help from the Iron Sisters against Valentine and meet Luke's sister Cleophas. She turns out to be loyal to Valentine, kills an Iron Sister and activates a Circle rune.

That is the setup the seventh episode inverts. Cleophas, who looked like Valentine's loyal agent, becomes the person who opens the door for the heroes, and the reason is Ithuriel. A story about a fallen angel pushes a woman who had given up on her own side back to it. It is a tidy piece of plotting, and it gives Lisa Berry the best material of her run. In the episode she presents herself to Valentine as a loyal follower while helping the heroes in secret, and that double game would not exist without the angel in the factory. It also gives the scene in the hideout a second layer of tension, because every look between Cleophas and Luke carries a risk. Viewers rewatching the season will notice how many small choices in the first half lead back to this one scene.

Why Clary hears him

The show keeps the reason deliberately vague. Clary's gift is not that of an average Shadowhunter, and her ability to draw new runes is the series' biggest open question. The angel calling out to her directly, before anyone else notices, is the first clear sign that she belongs to a story larger than Valentine's plans.

Readers of the books know why the bond exists, and that background is best left unspoiled for new viewers. What the episode shows is enough: a powerful immortal being turns to a teenager for help because she is the only person who can hear him, and she acts.

Ithuriel's appearances in the Shadowhunters series

• Season 2, episode 7, "How Are Thou Fallen" (February 13, 2017): held captive by Valentine and freed with Clary's rune.
• Season 2, episode 16, "Day of Atonement" (July 17, 2017): appears in a hallucination Clary has at Lake Lyn, where he tells her that her brother Jonathan is alive.
• Season 3, episode 5, "Stronger Than Heaven": Clary contacts him, and Lilith kills him.

Ithuriel in Shadowhunters: the verdict

The angel's first appearance is short, and the staging does much of the work. Ithuriel arrives as a wretched, ragged figure, and the show gives him one memorable beat before he is gone: the moment his hands open and the siblings take them. For a fantasy series built on invented lore, it is a rare scene that treats an angel as a character and not as a plot device.

The weakness is the same as the strength. A season that has to tend to Simon and Maia, Alec and Magnus, and Isabelle's yin fen addiction cannot linger on one angel, and the show moves on quickly. Anyone who wanted more of him got it only in glimpses, in Clary's hallucination at Lake Lyn and later in season 3.

The broader point is that Shadowhunters used a minor figure from the books to answer a structural problem. By the middle of season 2 the Soul Sword plot needed a reason for the heroes to enter Valentine's territory and a reason for the audience to feel that Valentine had crossed a line. A man in chains is a faster argument than a speech, and the angel supplies both in a single scene.

Even so, Ithuriel in Shadowhunters did something the series needed. He gave the Soul Sword storyline a face, he moved Cleophas to the right side of the board, and he proved that Clary's powers have a source beyond Valentine's blood.

Sources

• Shadowhunters, Wikipedia — cast, characters and episode list