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From beneath you it devours. Or not.
Inordinately long grumblings about 'Underneath'.
Bah. I really don’t want all my analyses of Angel to be nothing but grumbling, but honestly, when episodes clunk as badly as this one, it’s hard to look past the obvious technical flaws in order to get at the story. Let me just get it off my chest, and then I promise I’ll take a more positive approach. I know I whine perennially about the lighting on AtS, but this episode has to have been one of the worst offenders. It was so bloody dark I couldn’t see what was going on at all in the fight scene in the basement, but it was the opening scene with Spike and Angel (suppose they held a meeting and nobody came?) that put me in a bad mood in the first place. I quite enjoyed that scene from a content point of view, even if it did clunk a bit (Spike’s the only one Angel’s got left now), but the back-lighting really put me off. I guess the director wanted a dark and moody feel, but it just looked stupid having that broad expanse of light in the background and then Our Heroes in darkness with bars of light across their faces. It was as if the director had said ‘I want this effect, and I don’t care if it’s logical, as long as I get the effect.’
Okay, so the lighting was awful. My other peeve was the music. I really don’t tend to notice incidental music, having all the musical sensibility of a cockroach, but the sentimental violins when Angel was talking about Fred were so painfully obvious even I winced. And that, in a nutshell, was what was wrong with the writing of this episode as well. Everything was so painfully obvious; so much was in there just for the effect. There is an anecdote (I don’t know how true it is) about Freud and Dali. Dali was a huge admirer of Freud and claimed him as a great influence, but Freud, asked about how Dali’s art expressed the processes of the unconscious, replied ‘When I look at his work, all I see is consciousness.’ I felt like that about a great deal of this episode. Yes, there was stuff in there about Themes and Imagery, but it was all utterly explicit. Take Wes’s dream, and his ‘joke’. These weren’t expressions of his subconscious, they were an explicit description of his situation. Why does the man fall through the floor to the centre of the world? Because there’s a Hole In The World, of course. Why does he double over in pain first? Because Wes is doubled over with pain. Why is the punchline ‘We aren’t that close?’ Because the first man is Angel, and Angel did this mindwipe on – oh, you get my point. Or take Wes and Illyria’s whingefest, in which she drones on about walls, and how she’s trapped in this claustrophobic world. If that had any function beyond referencing the theme of ‘shells’, I’ll eat my hat (no, really, I do have one, it snows here in winter, you know). And while I’m on the subject of those partners in misery (I’m reminded of Winston Churchill – ‘How good of God to arrange for Wes and Illyria to pair up, thus making two people unhappy instead of four’) can I just say how much I hated that whole ‘nightmare’ conceit? In AtS nightmares STILL walk the streets, they aren’t just stuck inside people’s heads, that’s one of the basic premises of the show, sheesh). I think my biggest problem is I just get so riled by Illyria’s sub-Tolkien speak that it makes me go all nit-picky. Given the way she talks, she can’t have learned her English from Fred’s memories, so how come she knows what a smurf is? Why isn’t she walking around going ‘What is this "tele-vision" of which you speak?’
But back to my main gripe, that everything in this episode is painfully deliberate. Like the title. Nothing ambiguous about that. Or Gunn’s decision to take Lindsay’s place in the Basement of Prometheus. The only way that particular plot twist makes any sense is if it’s an externalisation of the punishment that Gunn is inflicting on himself following Fred’s death – he’s wallowing in it, paralysed by guilt, going over and over and over it in his mind. It’s understandable, even necessary, but it renders him useless to the team, just as Angel had to preach at him about atonement before he could summon up the will to help him look for Lindsay. I’ve seen comments on other ljs that being trapped in Pleasantville means Gunn doesn’t actually remember what it is he’s atoning for, but that’s not the way I read the scenes of Lindsay’s fantasy life. As soon as his wife mentions the cellar, he starts to wake up a bit – he’s clearly loath to go down there, trying to find excuses for not going, and when she insists, he pauses at the door and looks at her in a way that shows he knows there’s something horrific down there. I’d bet that once he’s down in the cellar he remembers everything –after all, the Senior Partners aren’t going to get any satisfaction out of torturing a man who doesn’t understand why he’s being tortured. Unlike Prometheus, Lindsay/Gunn doesn’t get his liver torn out, instead it’s his heart, the seat of the emotions, the place where love lives. You can’t tear out a metaphorical heart if the heart’s owner doesn’t remember loving. No, down in that basement is the truth, the end of the amnesia. Gunn will remember Fred all right, he’ll remember why he’s there, but then, because this isn’t hell but purgatory, he’ll get the blessed remission of forgetting, at least for a few hours before it starts all over again (kind of like contractions, except the pauses in between are longer ;-)). It’s quite a powerful image, if a little clunky, but the reason why I say that it only makes sense as a metaphor is because in plot terms it’s way undermotivated – not so much that Gunn chooses to make the sacrifice, but that Angel would let him stay. After all, it’s not as if they need Lindsay to save the world (or at least they don’t know that yet). They set off after Lindsay because they’re pursuing a line of enquiry. Angel has finally decided Something Must Be Done about the Senior Partners, but he doesn’t yet know what. Spike’s got a feeling his urine – or his rheumatic knee, or whatever – that something bad is coming, but he doesn’t yet know what either. Eve claims that only Lindsay knows what the Senior Partners are up to and hence he must be rescued, but as Spike points out, she would, wouldn’t she. Under those circumstances to trade in a member of the team for Lindsay just isn’t credible, especially since Angel doesn’t even promise Gunn they’ll come back for him (though I’m sure they will – he didn’t get a big enough goodbye for this to be a permanent sacrifice). Spike and Lorne make token noises of protest and outrage, but subside immediately afterwards. At the level of plot and characterisation it simply makes no sense to trade Gunn for Lindsay.
Continuing with my own whingefest (nearly over, I promise) I found the humour in this episode very jarring. Again, the problem is lack of motivation, stuff happens just for the sake of raising a laugh, it doesn’t manage to be simultaneously funny and functional. Take the Smurf line – why would Illyria home in on that one insult when Wes must have used plenty of others? The group scream shot was funny, but out of place given that at that point the sharp-dressed man was still supposed to be scary. Spike and Angel screaming at the sunshine – again, funny, but it jarred, because it was so clearly an OTT reaction inserted for humorous effect. It’s not like the plot required them to be immune to sunlight, they could perfectly well have got into the house under their coats.
Whew, now I’ve got all that off my chest I can try to look past these flaws in execution and get to grips with the concept. What was the point of this episode? There’s a lot of stuff about layers. I have to admit that I can’t yet get a handle on this. it’s like A Hole in the World. I got the point that Fred’s death left a hole in the world, I got the point that the mindwipe has left a hole in the MoG’s memories, but I got nothing out of that great big physical hole running through to NZ. I have yet to be convinced that all the layers imagery is anything other than spin, designed to make the central conceit seem more eerie and significant, because when you poke at the imagery, it all seems to unravel. There’s the obvious notion that things are not as they seem, scratch the surface and you find a different reality, the one that was lost to the MoG and to Connor by the mindwipe. But that’s only one layer that needs peeling back, not layers plural. Why does Dream Fred accuse Wesley of never having been deep inside her (kind of a yucky thought, really)? Is she accusing him of never having seen the real her or is it just one more mention of the Theme? I’ll be charitable and ignore the singular/plural distinction and say that what we’re being shown over and over again is that unpleasant truths lurk beneath the surface of life. Underneath the surface of Lindsay’s suburban paradise is a cellar with a horrible secret; underneath W&H is a basement with a ‘failsafe’ in it (you have to wonder what was actually in that container thingy, because we were very carefully not shown the contents); and it was in a basement that Spike was forced to confront the truth about himself. It’s not just basements, either. Since AHITW, Fred is all surface, everything inside is Illyria. I get all this. What I don’t really get is the shells and walls stuff Illyria keeps spouting, beyond the obvious fact that she’s inhabiting Fred’s shell. It *sounds* as if it’s saying something profound about this central metaphor, but I can’t see what it’s actually contributing.
I did actually like Lindsay’s Pleasantville purgatory (though the cross-cut from Eve wailing about unspeakable tortures to him cuddled up with his ‘wife’ was so clunkingly obvious that the entire audience must have known the next shot would show him wallowing in happiness). It was about the only thing in this episode that provided some genuine sub-text. It can be seen as a reference to the fake life that Angel has created for Connor, where all the angst and the bloody memories have been paved over, leaving a surface that is sunshine and puppies and ultimately unreal, because an essential part of Connor’s self has also been walled away. And it was also the most convincing image yet of life at W & H, with the proviso that Angel has always known, all along, that the sunshine wasn’t real. Right from the start he’s been torn: on the one hand he’s tried to believe that the deal wasn’t a zero-sum scenario, that he really can pull a fast one on the Senior Partners, that he can live in Pleasantville with his cars and penthouse suite and otter blood, and still take on the monster in the basement; on the other hand he’s been progressively losing faith in his own ability to do just that, to fight the fight and be a hero. Gunn, by contrast, really bought into Pleasantville. He looked at all the goodies working for W&H brought them (chief among them the mental upgrade) and repressed as best he could all thoughts of the monster in the basement. And of course because Gunn also clung on to his own self-image as a good man, someone who was doing more good than evil in the cosmic scheme of things, he was also in denial about his own monster, the one in the basement of his psyche, the one that was prepared to cut a deal with Sparrow to get his upgrade back, even though he knew there’d be fall-out for someone. It’s fitting that Gunn’s (self-) punishment consists of an eternal cycle of denying and then facing up to that monster. (The mechanics of his purgatory dimension don’t really bear close investigation. The identikit dream wife and child are not mental projections of his own desires, yet the amulet clearly does do some kind of mental programming since Gunn was following exactly the same script as Lindsay. Since the wife and kid aren’t mental projections but guards, you’d think they would get bored of this particular form of eternal recurrence (or maybe it’s a little temporal loop that only gets interrupted when the amulet is removed?) – anyway, I’m not really complaining, because it was worth any amount of wonky engineering for that shot of the chubby-faced kid blasting the hell out of Our Heroes with a machine gun, followed by the slo-mo of them leaping behind the couch. That was satisfyingly bizarre).
So, two soldiers down. Angel is losing his friends, one by one: Fred is gone, Gunn is gone, Wes is dysfunctional, Lorne’s not much better (I get the feeling that Lorne’s sense of inadequacy has been building up ever since they arrived at W&H, simply because in this new environment he has almost nothing to contribute. He threw himself heart and soul into running the entertainment division, but that contributed precisely zilch to the fight against evil. Quite the contrary, he was the one rubbing shoulders with ghastly demon lords. The tremendous efforts he made to ensure the Halloween party was a success – a party to which none of the MoG was planning to come - must have made Lorne feel really useful – take on in retrospect more than a hint of desperation. It’s the action of a man who throws himself into his work to avoid facing the fact that his work is pointless (or worse still, evil – I’m reminded of those Nazi bureaucrats carefully adding up lists of names and making sure the cattle trucks were filled with maximum efficiency, focusing on the job at hand to avoid having to think about the implications of that job)). And oh, look, at the meeting in the opening scene nobody showed up except Spike. Foreshadowing or what? At the moment, Spike is the one who’s got Angel’s back, and moreover he’s accepting Angel’s decisions (like leaving Gunn behind) even when he isn’t happy about them. I can’t believe this state of affairs will last, not just because this is the Jossverse but because it would be awfully boring if Spike’s role turned out to be Solid, Dependable Sidekick, so there must be some renewal of the Angel/Spike tension in the offing. And since we know from the promo that Dru will be back I’m very hopeful that her presence won’t be solely confined to flashbacks. Drusilla is Spike’s big unresolved issue, the one link with his evil past that is also an emotional connection, and as such she has the potential to cause significantly more conflict between Angel and Spike than even Buffy could. Moreover, the fact that Lindsay was wearing, of all things, an amulet immediately brings to mind that other amulet, the one which turned up in the very first episode. There are a lot of questions related to that which still haven’t been answered. Assuming that the SP had expected Angel to wear the amulet, why did they bother to bring Spike back? If being returned to W&H was all part of the amulet package, why did they bother to recorporealise him once he’d arrived? (I’m assuming that Lindsay wasn’t behind the flash-in-a-box, because I’m not convinced he’d have the resources, thought I have a better grasp of his motivation for wanting Spike recorporealised than I do for the SPs). If it was Lindsay who did that, and Spike’s return is merely the product of a series of coincidences, why reintroduce the idea of an amulet at just this stage? I’m very hopeful that this new amulet reference means that these issues will be addressed.
Bah. I really don’t want all my analyses of Angel to be nothing but grumbling, but honestly, when episodes clunk as badly as this one, it’s hard to look past the obvious technical flaws in order to get at the story. Let me just get it off my chest, and then I promise I’ll take a more positive approach. I know I whine perennially about the lighting on AtS, but this episode has to have been one of the worst offenders. It was so bloody dark I couldn’t see what was going on at all in the fight scene in the basement, but it was the opening scene with Spike and Angel (suppose they held a meeting and nobody came?) that put me in a bad mood in the first place. I quite enjoyed that scene from a content point of view, even if it did clunk a bit (Spike’s the only one Angel’s got left now), but the back-lighting really put me off. I guess the director wanted a dark and moody feel, but it just looked stupid having that broad expanse of light in the background and then Our Heroes in darkness with bars of light across their faces. It was as if the director had said ‘I want this effect, and I don’t care if it’s logical, as long as I get the effect.’
Okay, so the lighting was awful. My other peeve was the music. I really don’t tend to notice incidental music, having all the musical sensibility of a cockroach, but the sentimental violins when Angel was talking about Fred were so painfully obvious even I winced. And that, in a nutshell, was what was wrong with the writing of this episode as well. Everything was so painfully obvious; so much was in there just for the effect. There is an anecdote (I don’t know how true it is) about Freud and Dali. Dali was a huge admirer of Freud and claimed him as a great influence, but Freud, asked about how Dali’s art expressed the processes of the unconscious, replied ‘When I look at his work, all I see is consciousness.’ I felt like that about a great deal of this episode. Yes, there was stuff in there about Themes and Imagery, but it was all utterly explicit. Take Wes’s dream, and his ‘joke’. These weren’t expressions of his subconscious, they were an explicit description of his situation. Why does the man fall through the floor to the centre of the world? Because there’s a Hole In The World, of course. Why does he double over in pain first? Because Wes is doubled over with pain. Why is the punchline ‘We aren’t that close?’ Because the first man is Angel, and Angel did this mindwipe on – oh, you get my point. Or take Wes and Illyria’s whingefest, in which she drones on about walls, and how she’s trapped in this claustrophobic world. If that had any function beyond referencing the theme of ‘shells’, I’ll eat my hat (no, really, I do have one, it snows here in winter, you know). And while I’m on the subject of those partners in misery (I’m reminded of Winston Churchill – ‘How good of God to arrange for Wes and Illyria to pair up, thus making two people unhappy instead of four’) can I just say how much I hated that whole ‘nightmare’ conceit? In AtS nightmares STILL walk the streets, they aren’t just stuck inside people’s heads, that’s one of the basic premises of the show, sheesh). I think my biggest problem is I just get so riled by Illyria’s sub-Tolkien speak that it makes me go all nit-picky. Given the way she talks, she can’t have learned her English from Fred’s memories, so how come she knows what a smurf is? Why isn’t she walking around going ‘What is this "tele-vision" of which you speak?’
But back to my main gripe, that everything in this episode is painfully deliberate. Like the title. Nothing ambiguous about that. Or Gunn’s decision to take Lindsay’s place in the Basement of Prometheus. The only way that particular plot twist makes any sense is if it’s an externalisation of the punishment that Gunn is inflicting on himself following Fred’s death – he’s wallowing in it, paralysed by guilt, going over and over and over it in his mind. It’s understandable, even necessary, but it renders him useless to the team, just as Angel had to preach at him about atonement before he could summon up the will to help him look for Lindsay. I’ve seen comments on other ljs that being trapped in Pleasantville means Gunn doesn’t actually remember what it is he’s atoning for, but that’s not the way I read the scenes of Lindsay’s fantasy life. As soon as his wife mentions the cellar, he starts to wake up a bit – he’s clearly loath to go down there, trying to find excuses for not going, and when she insists, he pauses at the door and looks at her in a way that shows he knows there’s something horrific down there. I’d bet that once he’s down in the cellar he remembers everything –after all, the Senior Partners aren’t going to get any satisfaction out of torturing a man who doesn’t understand why he’s being tortured. Unlike Prometheus, Lindsay/Gunn doesn’t get his liver torn out, instead it’s his heart, the seat of the emotions, the place where love lives. You can’t tear out a metaphorical heart if the heart’s owner doesn’t remember loving. No, down in that basement is the truth, the end of the amnesia. Gunn will remember Fred all right, he’ll remember why he’s there, but then, because this isn’t hell but purgatory, he’ll get the blessed remission of forgetting, at least for a few hours before it starts all over again (kind of like contractions, except the pauses in between are longer ;-)). It’s quite a powerful image, if a little clunky, but the reason why I say that it only makes sense as a metaphor is because in plot terms it’s way undermotivated – not so much that Gunn chooses to make the sacrifice, but that Angel would let him stay. After all, it’s not as if they need Lindsay to save the world (or at least they don’t know that yet). They set off after Lindsay because they’re pursuing a line of enquiry. Angel has finally decided Something Must Be Done about the Senior Partners, but he doesn’t yet know what. Spike’s got a feeling his urine – or his rheumatic knee, or whatever – that something bad is coming, but he doesn’t yet know what either. Eve claims that only Lindsay knows what the Senior Partners are up to and hence he must be rescued, but as Spike points out, she would, wouldn’t she. Under those circumstances to trade in a member of the team for Lindsay just isn’t credible, especially since Angel doesn’t even promise Gunn they’ll come back for him (though I’m sure they will – he didn’t get a big enough goodbye for this to be a permanent sacrifice). Spike and Lorne make token noises of protest and outrage, but subside immediately afterwards. At the level of plot and characterisation it simply makes no sense to trade Gunn for Lindsay.
Continuing with my own whingefest (nearly over, I promise) I found the humour in this episode very jarring. Again, the problem is lack of motivation, stuff happens just for the sake of raising a laugh, it doesn’t manage to be simultaneously funny and functional. Take the Smurf line – why would Illyria home in on that one insult when Wes must have used plenty of others? The group scream shot was funny, but out of place given that at that point the sharp-dressed man was still supposed to be scary. Spike and Angel screaming at the sunshine – again, funny, but it jarred, because it was so clearly an OTT reaction inserted for humorous effect. It’s not like the plot required them to be immune to sunlight, they could perfectly well have got into the house under their coats.
Whew, now I’ve got all that off my chest I can try to look past these flaws in execution and get to grips with the concept. What was the point of this episode? There’s a lot of stuff about layers. I have to admit that I can’t yet get a handle on this. it’s like A Hole in the World. I got the point that Fred’s death left a hole in the world, I got the point that the mindwipe has left a hole in the MoG’s memories, but I got nothing out of that great big physical hole running through to NZ. I have yet to be convinced that all the layers imagery is anything other than spin, designed to make the central conceit seem more eerie and significant, because when you poke at the imagery, it all seems to unravel. There’s the obvious notion that things are not as they seem, scratch the surface and you find a different reality, the one that was lost to the MoG and to Connor by the mindwipe. But that’s only one layer that needs peeling back, not layers plural. Why does Dream Fred accuse Wesley of never having been deep inside her (kind of a yucky thought, really)? Is she accusing him of never having seen the real her or is it just one more mention of the Theme? I’ll be charitable and ignore the singular/plural distinction and say that what we’re being shown over and over again is that unpleasant truths lurk beneath the surface of life. Underneath the surface of Lindsay’s suburban paradise is a cellar with a horrible secret; underneath W&H is a basement with a ‘failsafe’ in it (you have to wonder what was actually in that container thingy, because we were very carefully not shown the contents); and it was in a basement that Spike was forced to confront the truth about himself. It’s not just basements, either. Since AHITW, Fred is all surface, everything inside is Illyria. I get all this. What I don’t really get is the shells and walls stuff Illyria keeps spouting, beyond the obvious fact that she’s inhabiting Fred’s shell. It *sounds* as if it’s saying something profound about this central metaphor, but I can’t see what it’s actually contributing.
I did actually like Lindsay’s Pleasantville purgatory (though the cross-cut from Eve wailing about unspeakable tortures to him cuddled up with his ‘wife’ was so clunkingly obvious that the entire audience must have known the next shot would show him wallowing in happiness). It was about the only thing in this episode that provided some genuine sub-text. It can be seen as a reference to the fake life that Angel has created for Connor, where all the angst and the bloody memories have been paved over, leaving a surface that is sunshine and puppies and ultimately unreal, because an essential part of Connor’s self has also been walled away. And it was also the most convincing image yet of life at W & H, with the proviso that Angel has always known, all along, that the sunshine wasn’t real. Right from the start he’s been torn: on the one hand he’s tried to believe that the deal wasn’t a zero-sum scenario, that he really can pull a fast one on the Senior Partners, that he can live in Pleasantville with his cars and penthouse suite and otter blood, and still take on the monster in the basement; on the other hand he’s been progressively losing faith in his own ability to do just that, to fight the fight and be a hero. Gunn, by contrast, really bought into Pleasantville. He looked at all the goodies working for W&H brought them (chief among them the mental upgrade) and repressed as best he could all thoughts of the monster in the basement. And of course because Gunn also clung on to his own self-image as a good man, someone who was doing more good than evil in the cosmic scheme of things, he was also in denial about his own monster, the one in the basement of his psyche, the one that was prepared to cut a deal with Sparrow to get his upgrade back, even though he knew there’d be fall-out for someone. It’s fitting that Gunn’s (self-) punishment consists of an eternal cycle of denying and then facing up to that monster. (The mechanics of his purgatory dimension don’t really bear close investigation. The identikit dream wife and child are not mental projections of his own desires, yet the amulet clearly does do some kind of mental programming since Gunn was following exactly the same script as Lindsay. Since the wife and kid aren’t mental projections but guards, you’d think they would get bored of this particular form of eternal recurrence (or maybe it’s a little temporal loop that only gets interrupted when the amulet is removed?) – anyway, I’m not really complaining, because it was worth any amount of wonky engineering for that shot of the chubby-faced kid blasting the hell out of Our Heroes with a machine gun, followed by the slo-mo of them leaping behind the couch. That was satisfyingly bizarre).
So, two soldiers down. Angel is losing his friends, one by one: Fred is gone, Gunn is gone, Wes is dysfunctional, Lorne’s not much better (I get the feeling that Lorne’s sense of inadequacy has been building up ever since they arrived at W&H, simply because in this new environment he has almost nothing to contribute. He threw himself heart and soul into running the entertainment division, but that contributed precisely zilch to the fight against evil. Quite the contrary, he was the one rubbing shoulders with ghastly demon lords. The tremendous efforts he made to ensure the Halloween party was a success – a party to which none of the MoG was planning to come - must have made Lorne feel really useful – take on in retrospect more than a hint of desperation. It’s the action of a man who throws himself into his work to avoid facing the fact that his work is pointless (or worse still, evil – I’m reminded of those Nazi bureaucrats carefully adding up lists of names and making sure the cattle trucks were filled with maximum efficiency, focusing on the job at hand to avoid having to think about the implications of that job)). And oh, look, at the meeting in the opening scene nobody showed up except Spike. Foreshadowing or what? At the moment, Spike is the one who’s got Angel’s back, and moreover he’s accepting Angel’s decisions (like leaving Gunn behind) even when he isn’t happy about them. I can’t believe this state of affairs will last, not just because this is the Jossverse but because it would be awfully boring if Spike’s role turned out to be Solid, Dependable Sidekick, so there must be some renewal of the Angel/Spike tension in the offing. And since we know from the promo that Dru will be back I’m very hopeful that her presence won’t be solely confined to flashbacks. Drusilla is Spike’s big unresolved issue, the one link with his evil past that is also an emotional connection, and as such she has the potential to cause significantly more conflict between Angel and Spike than even Buffy could. Moreover, the fact that Lindsay was wearing, of all things, an amulet immediately brings to mind that other amulet, the one which turned up in the very first episode. There are a lot of questions related to that which still haven’t been answered. Assuming that the SP had expected Angel to wear the amulet, why did they bother to bring Spike back? If being returned to W&H was all part of the amulet package, why did they bother to recorporealise him once he’d arrived? (I’m assuming that Lindsay wasn’t behind the flash-in-a-box, because I’m not convinced he’d have the resources, thought I have a better grasp of his motivation for wanting Spike recorporealised than I do for the SPs). If it was Lindsay who did that, and Spike’s return is merely the product of a series of coincidences, why reintroduce the idea of an amulet at just this stage? I’m very hopeful that this new amulet reference means that these issues will be addressed.