Angel Season 5 - Episode 17 - Underneath (part 2 of 2)
Part 2 (of 2)
Lindsey comes downstairs, fully immersed in the daily to-do of domesticity. He doesn’t recognise the boys and the name Wolfram and Hart means nothing to him. He thinks the things his visitors are telling him are some kind of practical joke. It is not until Angel removes the distinctive pendent from around Lindsey’s neck that he is released from the enforced fantasy. Lindsey’s wife returns to the lounge room, still full of smiles, only now she is packing heat. Chaos ensues. She shoots repeatedly at the intruders causing them to make various attempts to escape but mostly they just take cover behind the couch. Everything that was nice and seemingly innocent has turned nasty; the wife, the postman, the ice-cream van; even the kid. There’s no escape. They question Lindsey about the whereabouts of ‘the wrath’ but he has no idea of what they are talking. Gunn suggests trying the cellar:
Lindsey: No! We can’t go down there. Not the cellar!
Spike: Cellar it is then.
Once in the basement the hidden reality, the seedy underbelly of this picture-perfect house is revealed. The cellar is dark and dirty and furnished with instruments of torture. And there is a bloody pile of human hearts amassed by a long, thin table.
Spike: A heart? Whose are these?
Lindsey: Mine.
No wonder Lindsey was reluctant to go down there. Here we see the mastery of Wolfram and Hart. They have devised a holding cell in which the prisoner goes down to a room of torture by their own volition (albeit with some reluctance) to have their heart cut out on a daily basis. Its pure genius; it allows us to sneak a peek at the layers of the firm that exist, hidden by the deceptive surface view. It helps us understand without fully comprehending the power of the Partners. They are pervasive, almost to the point of omniscience, devious and stealthy. This is the institution Angel and his dwindling team is trying to fight against. This is who they must beat in order to escape.
The boys start looking for a way out. Angel points out a locked grate behind which a furnace blazes. He tries to open it but the door is locked by magic. This is the wrath they’ve been looking for. As they wonder how to get it open a big burly demon emerges from the shadows and attacks. ‘He knows, he always knows’ Lindsey mutters. This is his resident torturer. The demon is strong, more than a match for Angel and Spike, though it doesn’t stop them trying. The fight is going nowhere good until Gunn ties Lindsey’s pendent around his own neck. As soon as he does the monster stops attacking and the door to the wrath swings open.
Angel: Gunn, no! What the hell are you doing?
Gunn: What needs to be done.
Angel: I’m not leaving you here.
Gunn: You don’t make the rules, Wolfram and Hart does. If one leaves one has to stay. A void is impossible.
Gunn knew the rules of this place, knew what he was going to do before he even stepped into Angel’s office with the information. He is going to make use of this Wolfram and Hart resource to punish himself for his part in Fred’s death. Angel gets that. He quickly accepts Gunn’s decision. Spike doesn’t. “You’re not bloody serious!” he spits at Angel for agreeing to abandon a member of the team, or is it at Gunn for willingly putting himself in the hands of a beast that will cut his heat out each and every day? That’s not his brand of atonement. And really, what does it achieve? Sure, it allows him to hide from the world, kinda forget what he’s done and fulfil his own need to be punished but it’s hardly a constructive approach to acceptance and change.
Gunn won’t be argued with:
Gunn: When I forget, the door closes. Go. You have to.
So they grab Lindsey and bundle him through the door into the fire leaving Gunn behind. His memory of why he’s there in the basement quickly evaporates leaving him thinking he’s where he’s meant to be, he’s where he belongs…
While the boys have been busy in the holding cell, Lorne and Harmony have been babysitting Eve. The well dressed man is on her trail. He makes his presence felt by punching his fist clean through a security guard that tries to get in his way. Harmony offers herself as a decoy while Lorne and Eve head to the carpool to make a getaway. As they prepare to drive off Angel, Spike and Lindsey fall out of nowhere onto the bonnet of the car. After recovering from their shock arrival Eve greets Lindsey enthusiastically while Lorne tells Angel about the man who is chasing them. Then he realises someone is missing:
Lorne: Where’s Gunn? Angel?
Angel: He, uh- he stayed behind.
Lorne: Stayed behind? But you never leave a- or…I guess we do. That’s what we do now.
You never leave a comrade behind in combat. Lorne is shocked by this new development in the way they do business but he doesn’t argue; he just re-glues his happy face, rolls with the punches and pretends to embrace the changes as they come.
The well-dressed man catches up with them. He wants Eve to sign some papers. He introduces himself as Marcus Hamilton, the new liaison to the Senior Partners. Eve has been trying to avoid signing over her duties and her immortality to him. The Senior Partners have a new guy on the job - one not so easily distracted and without the annoying personal agenda of Miss Eve, one who is truly ‘their’ man.
Hamilton: …Oh, I have some excellent ideas I can’t wait to share.
Angel: This is my house. The only ideas that matter are mine
Yeah, sure; keep on deluding yourself Angel. He’s still not getting it - that he is in control only on one very slim level and even then only because it suits the Senior partners to have it that way. But it’s only a façade. The power, schemes and machinations of Wolfram and Hart are deeper, more complex and more layered than Angel could ever imagine.
Hamilton: Absolutely. That’s the policy. The Senior Partners are behind you one hundred percent.
Angel: I doubt that.
Hamilton: I’m looking forward to working myself into the mix. Angel… Spike, welcome to the team.
So, Spike is now officially on the Senior Partners’ radar. The second vampire with a soul and through Hamilton they officially welcome him to the team with open arms. What fortuitous luck - to have the second one, the complication, literally fall into their laps. What better way to keep him in their sights, monitor his impact on the prophecy than to bring him into the fold?
Angel wants to know everything Lindsey can tell him about the Senior Partners, about the apocalypse, about their plans for him. And while he’s at it, Spike wants to know what ‘welcome to the team’ means too.
Lindsey: You know what I know. Look around, the world’s a cesspool…full of selfish and greedy beasts. We live, we die.
Angel: Yeah, hell on earth. Holland Manners tried to sell me that line three years ago.
Lindsey: Did you ever prove him wrong?
…
How bout this? It’s here. It’s been here all along. Underneath. You’re just too damn stupid to see it.
So Angel gets told he’s soaking in it, the apocalypse, no not an apocalypse, THE apocalypse and some harsh reality too:
Lindsey: What’d you think, a gong was gonna sound? Time to jump on your horses and fight the big fight; starting pistol went off a long time ago boys. You’re playing for the bad guys. Every day you sit behind your desk and you learn a little more how to accept the world the way it is. Well, here’s the rub…heroes don’t do that. Heroes don’t accept the world the way it is. They fight it.
Finally Angel sees the truth; sees that the hunting of his head by Wolfram and Hart was designed to keep him distracted, to keep him from looking underneath, at what’s happening below the surface and to handicap any efforts he and his team make in the war against evil. Sure they’ve had their victories since taking over the branch; they’ve defeated a few bad guys, set up some initiatives and done some real good, but these accomplishment, as impressive as they are, are just small fry in the scheme of things. In the enormity of Wolfram and Hart and their layered, deeply stratified dealings the sad truth is that whatever Angel does at the firm, however he wields this powerful weapon, it doesn’t really matter, it’s all just meaningless busy work to keep him occupied while the Senior Partners go about business as usual. He is the figurehead of a tiny droplet in an ocean bigger than comprehension.
It’s a harsh lesson, yet another swift kick in the gut. Angel is ashamed to admit that he fell into their trap so easily. He forgot the words Lindsey told him years ago about not dancing to the Senior Partners tune and now he finds he’s been doing exactly that all along and damn, it would have to be Lindsey who’s telling him the god-awful truth.
Lindsey: The world keeps sliding towards entropy and degradation and what do you do? You sit in your big chair and you sign cheques just like the Senior planned. The war’s here Angel and you’re already two soldiers down.
Is it only two? Feels like more; Connor, Cordelia, Fred, Gunn…
Back at the suburban dreamland Gunn sits in the kitchen quizzing young Zach about the layers of the earth - exactly the same way Lindsey did, layer upon layer upon layer. Not surprisingly, Trish, the wife asks him to get a little light bulb from down in the cellar. She’s needs him to get it now. She needs him to go down, underneath, to the layer below, to where untold horrors await.
Oh yeah, it’s all about layers.
This episode tells two stories though. The main attraction is of course Angel’s long overdue realisation of exactly why the Senior Partners co-opted him to work for Wolfram and Hart. In the supporting story we catch up with Wesley and Illyria.
Wesley, as is to be expected, is finding it difficult to cope with Fred’s death. He’s drinking a lot and sleeping erratically. He dreams cryptic dreams of Fred; this is only the first layer. Does he want to see how deep she goes?
Dreams turn to nightmares as he wakes and Illyria is there, standing in Fred’s stolen body, a constant cruel reminder of his loss. And it/she is a twit! He has no respect for the hell god despite its power. He’s not afraid of it. Wesley tries to get Illyria to leave. It would be so much easier to grieve without it around as a constant reminder of what he’s lost. It makes sense, why would the great Illyria who can command time and dimensional travel be confined to this one plane of existence when there are so many alternative layers to choose from?
Wesley: Why don’t you go? You can go! Why don’t you go?
But Illyria doesn’t take kindly to this suggestion. It gets angry, grabs Wesley by the throat and throws him aside then begins to panic. This world is too small, it can’t breath, its face is not its face and it doesn’t know what it will say next. Wesley takes Illyria to the rooftop, above the city, out of the claustrophobic enclosures that humans insist on locking themselves inside. The walls don’t press as hard when you can’t see them; but they’re still there.
It all comes back to layers. Willingly confining ourselves to one layer that we strive to understand and be comfortable with while ignoring, forgetting or being genuinely ignorant of the existence of others that press upon our own little cell. Just because they are unacknowledged or unknown doesn’t mean they are not there. Illyria, who has lived seven lives at once, was the power and ecstasy of death, was God to a God understands this but chooses to stay.
Illyria: All I am is what I am.
And now it is trapped inside the skinny, feeble shell of a human female and would be easy prey for it’s contemporaries in other, less accommodating realms. She cannot go anywhere.
Illyria: Your world is so small and yet you box yourselves in rooms even smaller. You shut yourselves inside…in rooms, in routines
Wesley: There are things worse than walls. Terrible…and beautiful. If we look at them for too long they will burn right through us. Truths we couldn’t bear, not every day.
So Layers have another, less sinister purpose. They protect us from unbearable truth. Remove the layers and all you’ve got left is truth and truth is not always kind. Truth can be cruel. Truth can bring misery. Truth can make you feel insignificant. Truth hurts. The layers are necessary to keep us sane. Remember Cordelia in ‘To Shanshu in L.A.’ when she was cursed to see nothing but the truth and it hurt; she was in agony. The price of pure clarity was pain. Of course, Wesley also has some ‘truths’ that he’s been living without. His own mind has been artificially layered, cutting off access to array of memories some of which are terrible and painful. They’ll burn him if the segmentation is ever dispelled.
Connor too was placed in a real version of that suburban dreamland, with a real, honest to goodness nuclear family and a mind full of happy memories manufactured to bury the pain of his former existence deep, hidden…underneath. It’s all about layers.
Lindsey comes downstairs, fully immersed in the daily to-do of domesticity. He doesn’t recognise the boys and the name Wolfram and Hart means nothing to him. He thinks the things his visitors are telling him are some kind of practical joke. It is not until Angel removes the distinctive pendent from around Lindsey’s neck that he is released from the enforced fantasy. Lindsey’s wife returns to the lounge room, still full of smiles, only now she is packing heat. Chaos ensues. She shoots repeatedly at the intruders causing them to make various attempts to escape but mostly they just take cover behind the couch. Everything that was nice and seemingly innocent has turned nasty; the wife, the postman, the ice-cream van; even the kid. There’s no escape. They question Lindsey about the whereabouts of ‘the wrath’ but he has no idea of what they are talking. Gunn suggests trying the cellar:
Lindsey: No! We can’t go down there. Not the cellar!
Spike: Cellar it is then.
Once in the basement the hidden reality, the seedy underbelly of this picture-perfect house is revealed. The cellar is dark and dirty and furnished with instruments of torture. And there is a bloody pile of human hearts amassed by a long, thin table.
Spike: A heart? Whose are these?
Lindsey: Mine.
No wonder Lindsey was reluctant to go down there. Here we see the mastery of Wolfram and Hart. They have devised a holding cell in which the prisoner goes down to a room of torture by their own volition (albeit with some reluctance) to have their heart cut out on a daily basis. Its pure genius; it allows us to sneak a peek at the layers of the firm that exist, hidden by the deceptive surface view. It helps us understand without fully comprehending the power of the Partners. They are pervasive, almost to the point of omniscience, devious and stealthy. This is the institution Angel and his dwindling team is trying to fight against. This is who they must beat in order to escape.
The boys start looking for a way out. Angel points out a locked grate behind which a furnace blazes. He tries to open it but the door is locked by magic. This is the wrath they’ve been looking for. As they wonder how to get it open a big burly demon emerges from the shadows and attacks. ‘He knows, he always knows’ Lindsey mutters. This is his resident torturer. The demon is strong, more than a match for Angel and Spike, though it doesn’t stop them trying. The fight is going nowhere good until Gunn ties Lindsey’s pendent around his own neck. As soon as he does the monster stops attacking and the door to the wrath swings open.
Angel: Gunn, no! What the hell are you doing?
Gunn: What needs to be done.
Angel: I’m not leaving you here.
Gunn: You don’t make the rules, Wolfram and Hart does. If one leaves one has to stay. A void is impossible.
Gunn knew the rules of this place, knew what he was going to do before he even stepped into Angel’s office with the information. He is going to make use of this Wolfram and Hart resource to punish himself for his part in Fred’s death. Angel gets that. He quickly accepts Gunn’s decision. Spike doesn’t. “You’re not bloody serious!” he spits at Angel for agreeing to abandon a member of the team, or is it at Gunn for willingly putting himself in the hands of a beast that will cut his heat out each and every day? That’s not his brand of atonement. And really, what does it achieve? Sure, it allows him to hide from the world, kinda forget what he’s done and fulfil his own need to be punished but it’s hardly a constructive approach to acceptance and change.
Gunn won’t be argued with:
Gunn: When I forget, the door closes. Go. You have to.
So they grab Lindsey and bundle him through the door into the fire leaving Gunn behind. His memory of why he’s there in the basement quickly evaporates leaving him thinking he’s where he’s meant to be, he’s where he belongs…
While the boys have been busy in the holding cell, Lorne and Harmony have been babysitting Eve. The well dressed man is on her trail. He makes his presence felt by punching his fist clean through a security guard that tries to get in his way. Harmony offers herself as a decoy while Lorne and Eve head to the carpool to make a getaway. As they prepare to drive off Angel, Spike and Lindsey fall out of nowhere onto the bonnet of the car. After recovering from their shock arrival Eve greets Lindsey enthusiastically while Lorne tells Angel about the man who is chasing them. Then he realises someone is missing:
Lorne: Where’s Gunn? Angel?
Angel: He, uh- he stayed behind.
Lorne: Stayed behind? But you never leave a- or…I guess we do. That’s what we do now.
You never leave a comrade behind in combat. Lorne is shocked by this new development in the way they do business but he doesn’t argue; he just re-glues his happy face, rolls with the punches and pretends to embrace the changes as they come.
The well-dressed man catches up with them. He wants Eve to sign some papers. He introduces himself as Marcus Hamilton, the new liaison to the Senior Partners. Eve has been trying to avoid signing over her duties and her immortality to him. The Senior Partners have a new guy on the job - one not so easily distracted and without the annoying personal agenda of Miss Eve, one who is truly ‘their’ man.
Hamilton: …Oh, I have some excellent ideas I can’t wait to share.
Angel: This is my house. The only ideas that matter are mine
Yeah, sure; keep on deluding yourself Angel. He’s still not getting it - that he is in control only on one very slim level and even then only because it suits the Senior partners to have it that way. But it’s only a façade. The power, schemes and machinations of Wolfram and Hart are deeper, more complex and more layered than Angel could ever imagine.
Hamilton: Absolutely. That’s the policy. The Senior Partners are behind you one hundred percent.
Angel: I doubt that.
Hamilton: I’m looking forward to working myself into the mix. Angel… Spike, welcome to the team.
So, Spike is now officially on the Senior Partners’ radar. The second vampire with a soul and through Hamilton they officially welcome him to the team with open arms. What fortuitous luck - to have the second one, the complication, literally fall into their laps. What better way to keep him in their sights, monitor his impact on the prophecy than to bring him into the fold?
Angel wants to know everything Lindsey can tell him about the Senior Partners, about the apocalypse, about their plans for him. And while he’s at it, Spike wants to know what ‘welcome to the team’ means too.
Lindsey: You know what I know. Look around, the world’s a cesspool…full of selfish and greedy beasts. We live, we die.
Angel: Yeah, hell on earth. Holland Manners tried to sell me that line three years ago.
Lindsey: Did you ever prove him wrong?
…
How bout this? It’s here. It’s been here all along. Underneath. You’re just too damn stupid to see it.
So Angel gets told he’s soaking in it, the apocalypse, no not an apocalypse, THE apocalypse and some harsh reality too:
Lindsey: What’d you think, a gong was gonna sound? Time to jump on your horses and fight the big fight; starting pistol went off a long time ago boys. You’re playing for the bad guys. Every day you sit behind your desk and you learn a little more how to accept the world the way it is. Well, here’s the rub…heroes don’t do that. Heroes don’t accept the world the way it is. They fight it.
Finally Angel sees the truth; sees that the hunting of his head by Wolfram and Hart was designed to keep him distracted, to keep him from looking underneath, at what’s happening below the surface and to handicap any efforts he and his team make in the war against evil. Sure they’ve had their victories since taking over the branch; they’ve defeated a few bad guys, set up some initiatives and done some real good, but these accomplishment, as impressive as they are, are just small fry in the scheme of things. In the enormity of Wolfram and Hart and their layered, deeply stratified dealings the sad truth is that whatever Angel does at the firm, however he wields this powerful weapon, it doesn’t really matter, it’s all just meaningless busy work to keep him occupied while the Senior Partners go about business as usual. He is the figurehead of a tiny droplet in an ocean bigger than comprehension.
It’s a harsh lesson, yet another swift kick in the gut. Angel is ashamed to admit that he fell into their trap so easily. He forgot the words Lindsey told him years ago about not dancing to the Senior Partners tune and now he finds he’s been doing exactly that all along and damn, it would have to be Lindsey who’s telling him the god-awful truth.
Lindsey: The world keeps sliding towards entropy and degradation and what do you do? You sit in your big chair and you sign cheques just like the Senior planned. The war’s here Angel and you’re already two soldiers down.
Is it only two? Feels like more; Connor, Cordelia, Fred, Gunn…
Back at the suburban dreamland Gunn sits in the kitchen quizzing young Zach about the layers of the earth - exactly the same way Lindsey did, layer upon layer upon layer. Not surprisingly, Trish, the wife asks him to get a little light bulb from down in the cellar. She’s needs him to get it now. She needs him to go down, underneath, to the layer below, to where untold horrors await.
Oh yeah, it’s all about layers.
This episode tells two stories though. The main attraction is of course Angel’s long overdue realisation of exactly why the Senior Partners co-opted him to work for Wolfram and Hart. In the supporting story we catch up with Wesley and Illyria.
Wesley, as is to be expected, is finding it difficult to cope with Fred’s death. He’s drinking a lot and sleeping erratically. He dreams cryptic dreams of Fred; this is only the first layer. Does he want to see how deep she goes?
Dreams turn to nightmares as he wakes and Illyria is there, standing in Fred’s stolen body, a constant cruel reminder of his loss. And it/she is a twit! He has no respect for the hell god despite its power. He’s not afraid of it. Wesley tries to get Illyria to leave. It would be so much easier to grieve without it around as a constant reminder of what he’s lost. It makes sense, why would the great Illyria who can command time and dimensional travel be confined to this one plane of existence when there are so many alternative layers to choose from?
Wesley: Why don’t you go? You can go! Why don’t you go?
But Illyria doesn’t take kindly to this suggestion. It gets angry, grabs Wesley by the throat and throws him aside then begins to panic. This world is too small, it can’t breath, its face is not its face and it doesn’t know what it will say next. Wesley takes Illyria to the rooftop, above the city, out of the claustrophobic enclosures that humans insist on locking themselves inside. The walls don’t press as hard when you can’t see them; but they’re still there.
It all comes back to layers. Willingly confining ourselves to one layer that we strive to understand and be comfortable with while ignoring, forgetting or being genuinely ignorant of the existence of others that press upon our own little cell. Just because they are unacknowledged or unknown doesn’t mean they are not there. Illyria, who has lived seven lives at once, was the power and ecstasy of death, was God to a God understands this but chooses to stay.
Illyria: All I am is what I am.
And now it is trapped inside the skinny, feeble shell of a human female and would be easy prey for it’s contemporaries in other, less accommodating realms. She cannot go anywhere.
Illyria: Your world is so small and yet you box yourselves in rooms even smaller. You shut yourselves inside…in rooms, in routines
Wesley: There are things worse than walls. Terrible…and beautiful. If we look at them for too long they will burn right through us. Truths we couldn’t bear, not every day.
So Layers have another, less sinister purpose. They protect us from unbearable truth. Remove the layers and all you’ve got left is truth and truth is not always kind. Truth can be cruel. Truth can bring misery. Truth can make you feel insignificant. Truth hurts. The layers are necessary to keep us sane. Remember Cordelia in ‘To Shanshu in L.A.’ when she was cursed to see nothing but the truth and it hurt; she was in agony. The price of pure clarity was pain. Of course, Wesley also has some ‘truths’ that he’s been living without. His own mind has been artificially layered, cutting off access to array of memories some of which are terrible and painful. They’ll burn him if the segmentation is ever dispelled.
Connor too was placed in a real version of that suburban dreamland, with a real, honest to goodness nuclear family and a mind full of happy memories manufactured to bury the pain of his former existence deep, hidden…underneath. It’s all about layers.