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Thoughts on Angel 5x16, 'Shells'.
I have a confession to make. I’m one of those people who only started watching AtS after Buffy ended and Spike migrated across, so I’m not in a position to appreciate properly the parallels with previous seasons that have clearly been built into the structure of this episode. The echoes and allusions that I pick up on from within the Jossverse are all drawn from Buffy. On the other hand, ME knew that there would be a significant number of viewers like me with inadequate knowledge of earlier events and must have taken this into account, and the story does indeed work on its own terms, even if knowledge of past seasons adds much greater depth to it.
The thing that struck me most forcibly watching this episode was how violent it was. Wesley isn’t the only one resorting to outbursts of violence, although his are the most frightening because they're unpredictable and apparently unconstrained (e.g. shooting Knox in the middle of Angel’s speech about the value of human life – it’s interesting that even if Wesley wasn’t listening at that point, Illyria clearly was). But it really isn’t just Wesley: Gunn beats up Knox, then gut-punches the doctor; Spike tortures the doctor (nastily enough that it has to take place off-screen, so we don’t experience the screaming and the blood); Angel and Spike go head-to-head with Illyria (this last is the only traditional fight sequence, a clear step removed from real-world violence). And, of course, Wesley shoots Knox and stabs Gunn, tries to hack off Illyria’s head and later to shoot her, and goes all caveman on the sarcophagus. This last is interesting because it’s presented as Wesley apparently going so far over the edge that Harmony, of all people, has to tell him to calm down, but it turns out that it was justified violence, controlled violence, precisely exerted to achieve a specific goal. Part of the defintion of a just war is that minimum force should be used to achieve defined goals, and perhaps this is how we can define ‘just(ifiable) violence’ in AtS. Spike’s torturing of the doctor is justifiable in this sense. He does it solely to extract information from him, stops one he has achieved his goal, and clearly derived no personal satisfaction from the process. Gunn’s assault is more questionable because it’s not clear that his punch isn’t as much a way of venting his own rage and frustration as a means of extracting information. Wesley’s attack on Gunn is motivated purely by the desire for vengeance, and isn’t even well-grounded at that, since his claim that Gunn didn’t do enough to try to save Fred after the sarcophagus was delivered is simply wrong. His shooting of Knox is more understandable emotionally, but he is forced to admit to Illyria at the end that it was unjust (it also undermined Angel’s authority in a dangerous situation, so pretty much as far from the definition of justified violence as you can get).
Not only do we get a great many scenes of ‘realistic’ violence, we are also confronted with the reality of death. Angel says hopefully that in his world death need not be permanent, but in our world it is. Buffy and Spike both died and were resurrected. Angel and Spike both lost their souls and got them back. But in our world the essence of a person vanishes for good when they die, and that, it seems is what has happened to Fred (I’m going to assume the doctor was telling the truth, although he seems a distinctly unreliable source of such important information. I like having the characters confronted with real, irreversible death). Even though fragments of her memories and personality remain in Illyria’s brain (I’m sure that was Fred talking about how electrical brain spasms channelled fragments of her personality into Illyria’s ‘function system’, because Illyria tends towards sub-Tolkien-speak, not sciencebabble), her soul, her essence, is gone (interestingly enough, both Spike and Angel, who can fairly claim to be experts, both agree that the soul is the essence of a person. I guess they view their soulless selves as only half a person, even though they were chock full of personality, or at least as not really them).
I don’t know, because of my unfamiliarity with earlier seasons, how usual it is for the good guys to be wandering around with guns. On Buffy, carrying a gun was a clear sign that a boundary was about to be crossed (Spike in FFL, Warren in SR). AtS is generally a more violent series, but certainly in the episodes in this season we’ve never seen as much gun action as Wes indulges in here. He nearly shoots Knox when he first learns of his involvement, and later does shoot him; he comes to see the doctor carrying a shot gun, which rapidly turns into a threat against Gunn; he shoots at Illyria and tells her that the bullets from his SWAT team can seriously incapacitate her. Of course we’ve seen him use guns before, most notably against the Rogerbot, and Fred followed his example and used a gun against Ratio Hornblower, but in this episode his use seems excessive. The usual modus operandi for all the other characters is hand-to-hand combat (Gunn uses an axe in Smile Time, Angel uses swords and fangs, Spike uses stakes and whatever’s to hand). This puts them in the thick of battle, eye to eye with their enemy and at much at risk as their opponent. A gun lets Wesley stand on the sidelines, inflicting damage without risking his own safety. It allows him to act without (physical) consequences for himself. It’s power without responsibility, as he clearly demonstrates when he shoots Knox, who in and of himself poses no threat at all.
Power. To a large extent, this episode is about power. Illyria gives up her plans for world-domination because she no longer has the power. Knox doesn’t just summon Illyria because he has a crazed fascination with her, but because he believes this will bring him power. He has fantasies of being the right-hand man of his king, the eminence grise, guiding her and helping her, and using her to take vengeance on the human race (Knox is ever so keen to see humanity wiped from the face of the earth. Why? My guess is it’s because he’s always been the outsider, the geeky kid locked in his room, the one everyone underestimates. Illyria will change all that, Illyria will put him in his rightful place and everyone else will get what’s coming to them. Fred may have been the only person who ever appreciated him, and she rejected him in favour of Wesley. I don’t think it was coincidence that the events of AHITW take place after Fred has rejected him – for all his protestations, I’m not sure Knox would have sacrificed Fred if she had loved him back. But since she doesn’t, he’ll win her another way, by animating her shell with a demon who owes him a favour). Knox, in fact, is not a million miles away from Gunn, who also feels like an outsider, who also believes he needs to derive power from elsewhere in order to be appreciated. How can he be Angel’s right-hand man without all that legal knowledge? It’s worth sacrificing a few innocents in return for all the good he can achieve with his new powers, and if he doesn’t look too closely at the deal with the doc he can even pretend no-one’s going to get hurt at all. Lorne is devastated when he realises he’s losing his one power. Sure, he’s head of the entertainment division, but what can he contribute that really matters? His one talent that was genuinely of use was reading people when they sang, and even though he knew that was crumbling, becoming unreliable, he did nothing about it. Perhaps, like Gunn, he was afraid he would cease to be a de facto member of the team if he no longer had a contribution to make. Wesley turns to his guns for power. If there’s nothing left in the world that’s worth fighting for, at least he can still destroy (back to Knox again; and, like Knox, Wesley will settle for fragments of Fred if he can’t have Fred herself; just as Spike would have settled for fragments of Buffy if Willow’s resurrection spell had gone wrong).
There’s a positive side to all this angst, however. All the characters have a moment of clarity, a true insight into themselves and their situation, and although for most of them what they see is awful, they all take the hugely important step of talking about it. Gunn, evidently, has been lying to himself about the consequences of his deal with the doctor. He first tells Wesley that he didn’t expect anyone to get hurt, only to admit a sentence or two later that, in fact, he knew that someone would be, he just didn’t expect it to be one of them, he didn’t expect it to be Fred (does that mean he wouldn’t have minded so much if it had been, say, Lorne? Or Wesley?). Talking to Wesley, and subsequently to Harmony, he opens up to himself, faces unflinchingly the truth of his motivations, accepts his guilt and talks about the inadequacies that he’s tried to keep hidden, the self-doubt that drove his actions. Angel tells Wesley what he could have kept from him, that he chose to let Fred die rather than endanger thousands of lives. Lorne publically admits that his powers are failing and that he feels he no longer has any contribution to make. Wesley tells Illyria that killing Knox was wrong, and that he will help her because she is all he has left of Fred. Harmony finally accepts that Spike doesn’t love her, is never going to love her, and articulates this when she tells Wes that the person he loved above all else actually loved him back, and that’s more than most people get (of course Harmony’s devotion to Spike in the teeth of indifference and worse has long paralleled Spike’s devotion to Buffy, so here we get two insights for the price of one). Not all these moments of clarity are negative, however. Spike realises that he doesn’t want to leave, that he wants to belong to the team, and he risks rejection to take the huge step of telling Angel that (hedged about by the defensive ‘I don’t like you’, just in case Angel tells him to get lost). Because Spike’s moment of clarity is so positive, it felt wrong seeing him included in the montage at the end. Yes, he’s still ‘homeless’ in the sense that he doesn’t have an office at W&H, but Gunn, Lorne and Harmony were struggling with the loss of their own self-respect, whereas Spike seemed to have gained some. And, come to that, Angel seemed out of place too, since the episode hadn’t suggested that his inability to save Fred had increased his self-doubt. And I’m going to be charitable and assume that the cheesy shot of happy Fred leaving home at the end was a fragment of memory that Illyria had accessed. These quibble aside, the montage did a decent if unsubtle job of showing how fragmented the MoG have become, lost in their own angst and pain and separated from each other by their own individual issues.
So, something big is coming and Spike’s felt it. That came rather out of left-field, but it’s not the first time demons have been able to sense when something big and evil’s brewing (Halfrek told Anya they could all feel it in S7 of Buffy, and insane Spike picked up on the ‘from beneath you it devours’ vibe). It’s an unmotivated plot development, but not out of character. And it looks as if Illyria, under Wes’s tutelage, will be fighting alongside the good guys when it happens. I wonder just how many of Fred’s memories she can access?
On a final note, I thought this episode was much better shot than usual. There were lots of big fat close-ups, which I find helps enormously to draw me into the story (I wish the shot of Harmony patting Gunn’s shoulder had been shot from closer in. It makes a nice little tableau, but the emotional force is much greater if you can actually see the characters’ faces, as in the corresponding scene in FFL). I really liked the staging of Angel and Spike on the jet, with Angel in the foreground and Spike in the background, both clearly visible (it was the same idea as the shot of Puppet Angel and Nina when he first comes to apologise to her in her cage, but better done). The lighting was also better - even though it didn’t break the current season’s mould of general flatness and greyness, it did more with individual lighting sources to make the scenes visually interesting. The sunlight outside Angel’s office window actually looked like sunlight and you could clearly see the objects outside. It still all looks very dull and lacking in depth compared with Buffy, which was visually gorgeous, but I appreciate that they’re aiming for a very different feel (although the handful of earlier episodes I’ve seen, like City of... and In the Dark, don’t suffer from this dreariness. In the Dark in particular is beautifully lit).
I have a confession to make. I’m one of those people who only started watching AtS after Buffy ended and Spike migrated across, so I’m not in a position to appreciate properly the parallels with previous seasons that have clearly been built into the structure of this episode. The echoes and allusions that I pick up on from within the Jossverse are all drawn from Buffy. On the other hand, ME knew that there would be a significant number of viewers like me with inadequate knowledge of earlier events and must have taken this into account, and the story does indeed work on its own terms, even if knowledge of past seasons adds much greater depth to it.
The thing that struck me most forcibly watching this episode was how violent it was. Wesley isn’t the only one resorting to outbursts of violence, although his are the most frightening because they're unpredictable and apparently unconstrained (e.g. shooting Knox in the middle of Angel’s speech about the value of human life – it’s interesting that even if Wesley wasn’t listening at that point, Illyria clearly was). But it really isn’t just Wesley: Gunn beats up Knox, then gut-punches the doctor; Spike tortures the doctor (nastily enough that it has to take place off-screen, so we don’t experience the screaming and the blood); Angel and Spike go head-to-head with Illyria (this last is the only traditional fight sequence, a clear step removed from real-world violence). And, of course, Wesley shoots Knox and stabs Gunn, tries to hack off Illyria’s head and later to shoot her, and goes all caveman on the sarcophagus. This last is interesting because it’s presented as Wesley apparently going so far over the edge that Harmony, of all people, has to tell him to calm down, but it turns out that it was justified violence, controlled violence, precisely exerted to achieve a specific goal. Part of the defintion of a just war is that minimum force should be used to achieve defined goals, and perhaps this is how we can define ‘just(ifiable) violence’ in AtS. Spike’s torturing of the doctor is justifiable in this sense. He does it solely to extract information from him, stops one he has achieved his goal, and clearly derived no personal satisfaction from the process. Gunn’s assault is more questionable because it’s not clear that his punch isn’t as much a way of venting his own rage and frustration as a means of extracting information. Wesley’s attack on Gunn is motivated purely by the desire for vengeance, and isn’t even well-grounded at that, since his claim that Gunn didn’t do enough to try to save Fred after the sarcophagus was delivered is simply wrong. His shooting of Knox is more understandable emotionally, but he is forced to admit to Illyria at the end that it was unjust (it also undermined Angel’s authority in a dangerous situation, so pretty much as far from the definition of justified violence as you can get).
Not only do we get a great many scenes of ‘realistic’ violence, we are also confronted with the reality of death. Angel says hopefully that in his world death need not be permanent, but in our world it is. Buffy and Spike both died and were resurrected. Angel and Spike both lost their souls and got them back. But in our world the essence of a person vanishes for good when they die, and that, it seems is what has happened to Fred (I’m going to assume the doctor was telling the truth, although he seems a distinctly unreliable source of such important information. I like having the characters confronted with real, irreversible death). Even though fragments of her memories and personality remain in Illyria’s brain (I’m sure that was Fred talking about how electrical brain spasms channelled fragments of her personality into Illyria’s ‘function system’, because Illyria tends towards sub-Tolkien-speak, not sciencebabble), her soul, her essence, is gone (interestingly enough, both Spike and Angel, who can fairly claim to be experts, both agree that the soul is the essence of a person. I guess they view their soulless selves as only half a person, even though they were chock full of personality, or at least as not really them).
I don’t know, because of my unfamiliarity with earlier seasons, how usual it is for the good guys to be wandering around with guns. On Buffy, carrying a gun was a clear sign that a boundary was about to be crossed (Spike in FFL, Warren in SR). AtS is generally a more violent series, but certainly in the episodes in this season we’ve never seen as much gun action as Wes indulges in here. He nearly shoots Knox when he first learns of his involvement, and later does shoot him; he comes to see the doctor carrying a shot gun, which rapidly turns into a threat against Gunn; he shoots at Illyria and tells her that the bullets from his SWAT team can seriously incapacitate her. Of course we’ve seen him use guns before, most notably against the Rogerbot, and Fred followed his example and used a gun against Ratio Hornblower, but in this episode his use seems excessive. The usual modus operandi for all the other characters is hand-to-hand combat (Gunn uses an axe in Smile Time, Angel uses swords and fangs, Spike uses stakes and whatever’s to hand). This puts them in the thick of battle, eye to eye with their enemy and at much at risk as their opponent. A gun lets Wesley stand on the sidelines, inflicting damage without risking his own safety. It allows him to act without (physical) consequences for himself. It’s power without responsibility, as he clearly demonstrates when he shoots Knox, who in and of himself poses no threat at all.
Power. To a large extent, this episode is about power. Illyria gives up her plans for world-domination because she no longer has the power. Knox doesn’t just summon Illyria because he has a crazed fascination with her, but because he believes this will bring him power. He has fantasies of being the right-hand man of his king, the eminence grise, guiding her and helping her, and using her to take vengeance on the human race (Knox is ever so keen to see humanity wiped from the face of the earth. Why? My guess is it’s because he’s always been the outsider, the geeky kid locked in his room, the one everyone underestimates. Illyria will change all that, Illyria will put him in his rightful place and everyone else will get what’s coming to them. Fred may have been the only person who ever appreciated him, and she rejected him in favour of Wesley. I don’t think it was coincidence that the events of AHITW take place after Fred has rejected him – for all his protestations, I’m not sure Knox would have sacrificed Fred if she had loved him back. But since she doesn’t, he’ll win her another way, by animating her shell with a demon who owes him a favour). Knox, in fact, is not a million miles away from Gunn, who also feels like an outsider, who also believes he needs to derive power from elsewhere in order to be appreciated. How can he be Angel’s right-hand man without all that legal knowledge? It’s worth sacrificing a few innocents in return for all the good he can achieve with his new powers, and if he doesn’t look too closely at the deal with the doc he can even pretend no-one’s going to get hurt at all. Lorne is devastated when he realises he’s losing his one power. Sure, he’s head of the entertainment division, but what can he contribute that really matters? His one talent that was genuinely of use was reading people when they sang, and even though he knew that was crumbling, becoming unreliable, he did nothing about it. Perhaps, like Gunn, he was afraid he would cease to be a de facto member of the team if he no longer had a contribution to make. Wesley turns to his guns for power. If there’s nothing left in the world that’s worth fighting for, at least he can still destroy (back to Knox again; and, like Knox, Wesley will settle for fragments of Fred if he can’t have Fred herself; just as Spike would have settled for fragments of Buffy if Willow’s resurrection spell had gone wrong).
There’s a positive side to all this angst, however. All the characters have a moment of clarity, a true insight into themselves and their situation, and although for most of them what they see is awful, they all take the hugely important step of talking about it. Gunn, evidently, has been lying to himself about the consequences of his deal with the doctor. He first tells Wesley that he didn’t expect anyone to get hurt, only to admit a sentence or two later that, in fact, he knew that someone would be, he just didn’t expect it to be one of them, he didn’t expect it to be Fred (does that mean he wouldn’t have minded so much if it had been, say, Lorne? Or Wesley?). Talking to Wesley, and subsequently to Harmony, he opens up to himself, faces unflinchingly the truth of his motivations, accepts his guilt and talks about the inadequacies that he’s tried to keep hidden, the self-doubt that drove his actions. Angel tells Wesley what he could have kept from him, that he chose to let Fred die rather than endanger thousands of lives. Lorne publically admits that his powers are failing and that he feels he no longer has any contribution to make. Wesley tells Illyria that killing Knox was wrong, and that he will help her because she is all he has left of Fred. Harmony finally accepts that Spike doesn’t love her, is never going to love her, and articulates this when she tells Wes that the person he loved above all else actually loved him back, and that’s more than most people get (of course Harmony’s devotion to Spike in the teeth of indifference and worse has long paralleled Spike’s devotion to Buffy, so here we get two insights for the price of one). Not all these moments of clarity are negative, however. Spike realises that he doesn’t want to leave, that he wants to belong to the team, and he risks rejection to take the huge step of telling Angel that (hedged about by the defensive ‘I don’t like you’, just in case Angel tells him to get lost). Because Spike’s moment of clarity is so positive, it felt wrong seeing him included in the montage at the end. Yes, he’s still ‘homeless’ in the sense that he doesn’t have an office at W&H, but Gunn, Lorne and Harmony were struggling with the loss of their own self-respect, whereas Spike seemed to have gained some. And, come to that, Angel seemed out of place too, since the episode hadn’t suggested that his inability to save Fred had increased his self-doubt. And I’m going to be charitable and assume that the cheesy shot of happy Fred leaving home at the end was a fragment of memory that Illyria had accessed. These quibble aside, the montage did a decent if unsubtle job of showing how fragmented the MoG have become, lost in their own angst and pain and separated from each other by their own individual issues.
So, something big is coming and Spike’s felt it. That came rather out of left-field, but it’s not the first time demons have been able to sense when something big and evil’s brewing (Halfrek told Anya they could all feel it in S7 of Buffy, and insane Spike picked up on the ‘from beneath you it devours’ vibe). It’s an unmotivated plot development, but not out of character. And it looks as if Illyria, under Wes’s tutelage, will be fighting alongside the good guys when it happens. I wonder just how many of Fred’s memories she can access?
On a final note, I thought this episode was much better shot than usual. There were lots of big fat close-ups, which I find helps enormously to draw me into the story (I wish the shot of Harmony patting Gunn’s shoulder had been shot from closer in. It makes a nice little tableau, but the emotional force is much greater if you can actually see the characters’ faces, as in the corresponding scene in FFL). I really liked the staging of Angel and Spike on the jet, with Angel in the foreground and Spike in the background, both clearly visible (it was the same idea as the shot of Puppet Angel and Nina when he first comes to apologise to her in her cage, but better done). The lighting was also better - even though it didn’t break the current season’s mould of general flatness and greyness, it did more with individual lighting sources to make the scenes visually interesting. The sunlight outside Angel’s office window actually looked like sunlight and you could clearly see the objects outside. It still all looks very dull and lacking in depth compared with Buffy, which was visually gorgeous, but I appreciate that they’re aiming for a very different feel (although the handful of earlier episodes I’ve seen, like City of... and In the Dark, don’t suffer from this dreariness. In the Dark in particular is beautifully lit).