Well, for what it's worth, here's my take on the whole Jasmine thing, which seems to be a bit of a sticking point for some people...
As far as motives go, I've always felt that Jasmine was pretty up-front about what she actually wanted. She wanted to essentially be a god to the human race, but knew that as far as the numbers go, the human race would be better off. She just didn't place the same value on free will that we do. Unlike most of the other major villians in Buffy and Angel, Jasmine didn't consider herself as evil. The Mayor, Angelus, W&H, Darla and Drusilla, The First, etc were all evil and they knew it. The Initiative was a little more of a grey area, but once it got out of control and Adam came into the picture, it fell firmly in the "bad" camp. Glory was pretty much evil and insane, but her major motive was that she just wanted to get back home. She had no interest in taking over/ending the world, or anything along those lines.
The Jasmine storyline was a nice change of pace from the usual "evil being trying to end the world" storyline.
While it was never said as much, I always pegged Evil Cordy's actions as a combination of distraction and preparation. Cordy needed to be able to get close enough to Connor to get pregnant by him, and she needed to carry the baby to term without Angel, Inc getting involved. All the events that Cordy put into action kept the good guys off balance long enough for her to give birth. If they weren't preoccupied with dealing with The Beast, the rain of fire, the lack of sunlight, etc, then they may have figured out what was really going on. As is, they were content to let Cordy just hang out in her room while they dealt with other matters.
As far as the preparation goes, think back to when AI first met Jasmine. The first thing she had them do was to go on what amounted to an anti-demon crusade. Judging by this, I always figured that Jasmine's powers only worked on Humans, or at least any being with a soul (seeing as Lorne was converted), in our dimension. She knew that once her followers grew in number, the smarter demons would most likely try and band together to stop her. This is also why she had The Beast take out W&H. The Beast could have just gone straight to the White Room and taken out the conduit, but he instead systematically slaughtered every W&H employee (Lilah mentioned that he even took out the people who were out sick that day). Jasmine knew that W&H would have been directly opposed to what she wanted to put together, so had them completely taken out.
As far as reviving Angelus, think back to "the answer is among you". The entire AI team clung to that and started trying to make connections to everybody. Once they started being suspicious, Cordy knew that if they managed to determine that nobody else could fit the saying, then they may start looking her direction and putting the pieces together. Conveniently "remembering" her memories from her higher plane right as The Beast scored yet another major victory by blotting out the sun made everybody completely focus their attention on Angel, and Cordy knew that Angel wouldn't remember The Beast, since she erased all mention of him in all of the records and memories in our dimension. She knew that one of the AI people would have the bright idea that Angelus may know something, and that they'd be desperate enough to try anything at that point.
Now, as far as The Beast goes, it's entirely possible that Jasmine's powers wouldn't have affected him, and he would have most likely tried to kill her as soon as she was born. Of course, since she had the knife he made, she could have killed him herself before she was born (bringing back the sun and killing any vampires in the area that happened to be outside, too). However, it soon became clear to her that even though she stole Angel's soul, there were holes in her plan. She seemed to know that what Willow was going to try would work while Willow was still figuring it out, so I'm guessing that she knew that stealing the Muo-Ping would only be a temporary setback to AI, at best. The only thing she could do to keep the attention off her would be to release Angelus. I'm guessing that she never wanted to recruit Angelus, only keep him busy so that he wouldn't harm her. She had no way of knowing that he'd end up killing The Beast (she really should have held on to that knife...), but when it did happen, she then tried to get Angelus to do her dirty work, and once that fell through, she ended up with Connor.
Papa Smurf said:
Oh I don't trust the prophecies. If there's a prophecy in Angel that looks clear cut, I assume that something different is going to happen. But the Connor theory...I just find it incredibly lame, quite aside from the fact that I don't believe it. And there's still the world breaking with two champion vampires thing which I can't see anyone easily explaining way.
Uhh, the events in Destiny were set up by Lindsey and Eve. The Cup of Perpetual Torment was a complete fake, and all of the other events could have been put into motion by Lindsey. We saw that he gained a good amount of magic knowledge after he left in S2, and it wouldn't be that much of a stretch to figure that him and Eve set up the crazy bleeding eye thing, the wacky phones, and the temporary disconnection from the White Room. Also, given that Lindsey could just waltz into W&H due to his tatoos, he could have easily done something to their copy of the Shanshu prophecy to make it reflect his plan, or have whoever try and translate it read it wrong.
Judging by L&E's plan later in the season, the idea was to get Angel to start doubting himself and his role as the vampire in the prophecy to make him an easier target later on.
