EPISODE 3.18

DOUBLE OR NOTHING

Written by: David H. Goodman

Directed by: David Grossman

A Turning Point

With “Forgiving” season 3 reached a turning point.  From the beginning it has been driven by the conflict between Angel on the one hand and Sahjhan and Holtz on the other.  And as that conflict progressed it increasingly focussed on Angel’s son.  Now Sahjhan and Holtz have disappeared from the scene - literally.  And so too has Connor.  The conflict has quite suddenly evaporated.  That in itself would normally raise the question: where does the season go from here?  But the events we have witnessed raise an even more fundamental issue, an issue that is summed up for us in the following exchange between Angel and Cordelia:

Angel: “You think you know something about living, cause you have this really long past. And that's really all you have, in my case anyway. Then one day you wake up and you have something else...”

Cordelia: “A future.”

Angel: “I had a son...”

For Angel, Connor was in every sense a unique opportunity.  Not only was he an unrepeatable phenomenon in his own right – he also represented irreplaceable possibilities for Angel to gain a connection with the world in which he lived but had never been able to be really a part of.  Even an episode as wretched as “Provider” gave a strong sense of what being a father meant for Angel.  And now not only is Connor gone but so too are the possibilities for Angel to have the future of which he dreamed.

And the devastation that this has wrought in Angel’s life is summed up by the picture of him standing watch over his son’s crib.  The surrounding wreckage of the room symbolizes the wreckage of his life.  The fact that he is alone also symbolizes the extent to which he has cut himself off from everyone.   Even when Cordelia arrives, he doesn’t talk at all at first and when he finally does break his silence he isn’t communicating with her really.  Rather he is thinking out loud.  This is a creature cut off from everyone because he has lost everything, or at least he thinks that he has.  Not unnaturally therefore this leads us to ask: where does Angel go from here?  What future has he?

Future, What Future?

And here we come to the parallel around which “Double or Nothing” revolves,  namely that between Angel and the Gunn who, seven years previously, also thought that he had no future.  We get a fairly clear picture of his frame of mind in a few well chosen and well executed scenes.  We see him striding fearlessly into Jenoff’s domain, refusing to be intimidated by anyone – even the Soul Sucker.  This is indeed the:

“Man of the streets, protector of the young and innocent. “

And he wants something.  Or rather he needs something.  We don’t see immediately what this is but it is later revealed to be the pick-up truck that is to become his principal weapon in his war against the vampires.  And indeed this neatly fits Jenoff’s description of what he offers:

“I don't traffic in "wants", I supply needs. Kinda things you gotta have right now or you'll die. They tend to be more valuable.”

For Gunn the war is everything.  He has no purpose in life outside that war.  It is a war he doesn’t expect to survive.  So, what is the harm in trading away something that he sees as essentially worthless – his future – for something that can be such a practical help now?  So we see only despair both in the Gunn of this period and in Angel.  But  the central message of this episode is that no matter how deep the despair and no matter what its cause, life does go on.  Angel himself says as much:

“You live as long as I do, eventually you lose everyone. It's what happens. I'm not sayin' you get used to it but you expect it, you deal.”

But it is left to Cordelia to sum up the philosophy of this episode:

“I'm not gonna sit here and pretend that I know what you're going through, or that I could begin to understand what it is you're feeling. The last thing you need right now is someone saying that given time, things will get better. The hurt will go away. Because things won't get better. And the hurt's never gonna go away. He looks at her. The truth is, if you lived another two hundred years, you'd never forget how Connor was taken from you. And you shouldn't. You loved your son, Angel. And you're gonna go on loving him. And missing him. And you'll go one living. You'll do that, too.”

And we find an even more significant testimony to this philosophy in the life of Charles Gunn.  Jenoff had sent the Repo-Demon after Gunn because something in him had changed:

Demon: “You're planning on giving your soul to another, aren't you?”

Gunn: “What are you talking about?”

Demon: “Some broad, you're fallin' for her hard...”

Gunn doesn’t deny it.  And indeed, when he is reminded of his bargain with Jenoff, his reaction is:

“I'm not... I'm not the same person I was back then.”

The despair that led him to lose any sense of the value of his future has now been replaced by his love for Fred.  The sort of future that the pair of them could look forward to now was illustrated by an elderly demon couple – the Frzylckas -whom they interviewed about a demon squatter problem they had.  The  Frzylckas had been together 300 years and it showed:

Gunn: “Man. You hear those two?

Fred: “It's beautiful. All that time and they're still in love. The way they finish each other's insults, it's so...beautiful.

This illustrates the depth of the connection between them.  And indeed Fred and Gunn now seem well on their way to developing just such a rapport.  When Gunn tries for the one last day of perfect happiness together Fred senses something is wrong.  Gunn, for his part, knows her too well to believe that she would accept him losing his soul to Jenoff.   So, he tries to break up with her in as deliberately cold and harsh fashion as he can manage because he knows that, if she tries to interfere, then she risks her own soul as well.  But Fred isn’t fooled and goes straight to Angel:

Fred: “I know I said he said those things to me, but he would never say those things to me!”

Cordelia: “Those things he said?”

Fred: “Exactly! That's how I know he's in trouble!”

That each of them know and understand the other so well is a testament to the strength of the connection that they have made.  And in a way that is very typical for ANGEL as a series we are I think intended to see that, for Gunn, it is this connection that he has forged with another human being that is the really important thing in his life.  This connection is his future, though not in the sense that he can expect 300 years of happiness with Fred.  As Cordelia said

Cordelia: “You and Fred have your whole big bright futures ahead of you and I'm here to tell you, it's all right to enjoy it. Life goes on.

Gunn: “I should enjoy my future.”

Codelia: “I'm just sayin'. If there's one thing I learned living on a hellmouth: every day is precious, you never know when it may be your last.”

No-one is guaranteed anything.  We none of us have control over what will happen to us in future any more than Angel could control what happened to Connor.  But we cannot allow the possibility of bad things in the future to destroy the meaning of what we have here and now.  And equally we cannot allow the circumstances we presently face – no matter how grim  - to deprive us of our hope of something better.  So long as Gunn refuses to despair, so long as he remains open to the possibilities of a connection with others, then he has a future.  Where he went wrong seven years ago was in his willingness to abandon that hope because, even though he did not know it at the time, he had a future.   It was his own act of despair in making the bargain with Jenoff and not the grim circumstances in which he found himself that eventually threatened to destroy that future.

And what was true of Gunn seven years ago is equally true of Angel now.  As Cordelia pointed out to him nothing can assuage the grief that he feels.  The loss is irreplaceable and the pain of it is too extreme.  But that does not negate Angel’s life.  There are others in his life and he has feelings and responsibilities towards them.  These present connections and the prospect of others continue to give meaning to his life.  And he himself demonstrates that by the way he raises himself from his stupor when he learns of Gunn’s peril with his admittedly heavy handed promise:

“We are not losing another member of this family.”

The prospect of losing Gunn forced Angel to re-evaluate his situation.  In doing so he realized that his future was not defined solely by his son. He had other responsibilities – responsibilities to the other members of his little “family”.  Those ties continued to exist and were as important as ever.  His loss was, therefore, no basis for despair; for thinking that nothing mattered.  Indeed so much did Gunn's own peril matter that  he, Cordelia and Fred (and even Groo) were all prepared to put their lives on the line by going to the Casino and to make the “Double or Nothing” bet.   And Angel's recognition of all of this also led to a further recognition: that he had a future after all – a future with this family.  So long as he had people in his life who meant this much to him then there was no reason to despair.  Thus we had the final scene of the episode – the dismantling of the crib.  While Angel remained in isolation with the crib and the wreckage of his room, he was stuck in the past – mourning for what he had lost.  And this mourning was not only for his son but what he son represented – his future.  The dismantling of the crib implied not the end of his grief but of his refusal to let go of the past.  It was a recognition that he had after all a future, even if it was one without Connor.  That future lay in his responsibilities to the other members of Angel Investigations.

Making the Connection

As I have already said, this approach is very typical of ME productions.  It almost expresses a core value: the centrality of human relationships to life.  But at times I can’t help thinking that ME adopts a too simplistic and absolutist approach to this theme.  The need for a connection with other human beings and the implications of having such a connection are truly universal values.  They exist in all of us and are equally important to all of us.  But obviously the writers of ANGEL must use specific examples to illustrate these universal truths.  And the examples they most naturally turn to are the central characters in the story – Angel especially but also his companions.  They are the characters whose developing story we are watching.  They are the characters we are most familiar with, the characters with whom we ourselves may be expected to have developed an interest and sympathy.  And they are the characters most in need of redemption.  Indeed ANGEL as a series is essentially about the journey of its damaged and dysfunctional core characters towards redemption.  So those they help on the journey and the dilemmas and difficulties they face in doing so illuminate and illustrate for us the strengths and weakness of our core characters and the course of their internal struggles towards achieving this goal.

But the fact that here we are, for example, intended to see the centrality of human relationships to our search for a future through the parallels between Angel and Gunn does not mean that these characters are uniquely important – that their lives, their connections or their future are more important than anyone else’s.  Indeed to suggest that is to betray the very idea of the universality of the themes the writers are dealing with.  More particularly, it would undermine the very notion that here we have a group of damaged people who find their own salvation in helping others.  It is one thing to focus on how the struggle to help others affects them.  It is an entirely different matter to allow the show to suggest that the group as a whole or any individual member of it is more important than their responsibilities to others.  And that is a line that was clearly crossed here.

As we have seen Angel was caught in the mire of self-pity and regret.  He pulled himself out because Gunn was personally important to him.  But what about everyone else he had promised to help?  Jenoff’s trade was no secret to him. Were Jenoff's other victims not worth saving also?   Indeed, just before Gunn’s second visit to the Casino we see the fate of one such victim.  Did he not have a family or anyone else who cared about him?  What did he seek in return for the promise of his future?  What desperation drove him on; or was it greed or ambition? Does that make him more or less sympathetic as a character than Gunn?  The writers have no interest in telling us.  Indeed the only interest they have in this unnamed and unknown victim was to show the fate that was in store for Gunn.  Otherwise he was intended to be as meaningless to us as he was anonymous.  Worse still, the only other time the episode made any point about Jenoff's other victims was when the writers signed them up to the role of saving Gunn. 

And not even that is the end of it.  It is strongly suggested at one point that, if Jenoff won his bet with Angel, the latter would lose his soul and Angelus would be reborn.  As Fred pointed out:

"But if you lose your soul, won't you go evil and start killin' everybody including us?"

Of course, accepting that Angel and Cordelia intended to cheat from the very beginning, it might be argued that they didn’t expect that this would happen.  But it was surely still a very serious risk because they had no way of guaranteeing that their cheat would be successful – as indeed it initially wasn’t.  Now of course the writers had to show that Angel was prepared to risk a lot; otherwise there would be no way of gauging just what his “family” connection meant to him.  But this was a risk that went well beyond Angel, or even those present in the Casino.  This was a risk that involved sacrificing the safety of all those Angel was promising to protect.  How can that be justified?

So long as Gunn survives, the fate of all of Jenoff's victims doesn’t matter.  Is this what we are meant to take from this episode?  I ask this question because it is quite difficult to take any other meaning from it.  So what then becomes of the importance of hanging on to a hope for the future, when we are invited to ignore the futures of all of Jenoff's other victims?  More importantly what is the point of Angel Investigations?  Is it nothing more than a tight knit family group intended to protect one another or is it intended to serve a higher purpose  - helping others.  And if it is then isn’t that the path to redemption for all of them rather than simply establishing and maintaining this family bond?  If it is then surely Angel’s future lies in helping all Jenoff’s victims, not in rescuing members of his family.  For an episode that was supposed to be about putting Angel back on the right path after the trauma of losing his son, “Double or Nothing” seems to take a distressingly narrow view of what that path is.  And it is a path that seems to be reserved for members of his own “family” and to have little space for the world in general. 

Wesley on the Outside

And this brings me to Wesley.  In my review of “Forgiving” I complained that the writers seemed to be exonerating Wesley from any real culpability in Connor’s kidnap.  That seemed to me to undermine the whole theme of the episode which depends upon there being moral blameworthiness which must be forgiven. Well, that is still a problem with “Forgiving” but it is one that is admirably corrected in "Double or Nothing".  Everything was right about the scene between Wesley and Fred in this episode – the protagonists, the setting and the arguments.  First of all it is important that it was Fred who calls Wesley to account.  Fred was the person most likely to take his part. From the start of “Forgiving” she was the one most actively looking for evidence to exculpate him. She was the one who found that evidence of the prophecy and used it to explain his behavior.  And at the start of this episode she was so distressed by a reminder of what he had done that she couldn't even bear Gunn to make a reference to it.  She is not therefore prejudiced against him simply because his efforts to help backfired.  But this fact simply serves to highlight the moral clarity that she brings to bear on the way he acted.  She understands what Wesley did and she cannot justify Angel’s retaliation:

“Gunn and I found your notes about...the baby. The prophecy. You took him away 'case you thought Angel was gonna kill him. You were trying to protect him. Both of them. I just wanted you to know I understand that. I also wanted to say -- what Angel tried to do to you was wrong, and I'm sorry.”

But she puts her finger on where he was blameworthy:

“You should've come to us. You should've trusted us instead of going to Holtz behind our backs. You were supposed to be our friend and you didn't even…”

And when she is telling Wesley all of this he is lying silent and helpless in his bed.  He has no answer because there is no answer.  More importantly we see that this is no dialogue, no attempt to reach an understanding and no offer of reconciliation.  There is in short no forgiveness.  Instead there is a very visible and clear parting of the ways.  Fred delivers to Wesley all that belonged to him from the Hyperion.  Again the fate of a person’s physical goods symbolizes their situation.  Wesley is now completely cut off from the rest of Angel Investigations.  When the doctor asks him if there is someone to take him home, the answer is eloquently provided by the shot of him entering his deserted apartment.  He is now truly alone.

As we have seen “Double or Nothing” is about the importance of the family connection.  So, at first sight it might appear as though Wesley is being treated differently to Gunn without good reason.  Both had acted unilaterally, even though the interests of other members of the group were at stake.  In Wesley’s case, it was the future of Angel and his son.  In Gunn’s case, it was Fred’s future.  Neither had been particularly honest.  And despite their good intentions both succeeded only in hurting people they were supposed to be trying to help.  Yet, in spite of these similarities the Group literally risks everything to save Gunn and coldly casts Wesley out.

But ultimately there is a difference.  Any human connection is built on trust. The reason for Gunn’s unilateral action, even his deception of Fred, did not lie in a lack of trust in her or other members of Angel Investigations.  In fact quite the opposite.  He knew that they would willingly risk themselves for him and that is what he actually wanted to prevent them doing.  With Wesley, it was the complete lack of trust that proved his undoing.  He did not think that he could rely on Angel, Fred or Gunn.  In fact he trusted his mortal enemy Holtz more than he trusted his own friends.  It was therefore Wesley who broke the family bond.  And here we see the real connection between Wesley’s story on the one hand and that of Gunn and Angel on the other.  If the connection that Gunn and Angel have to one another and to everyone else in Angel Investigations is their “future” then Wesley’s symbolic return to his empty apartment is, I think, intended to show that he has none and will continue to have none until he stops being alone.

The Plot

Perhaps the single most confusing part about the episode lay in the answer to the question: what exactly did Gunn agree to surrender to Jenoff?  At one point the latter tells the Repo demon:

“It’s time to collect his soul.”

And the ostensible reason for Jenoff to seek to repossess Gunn’s soul was the relationship he was forming with Fred:

Repo Demon: “You're planning on giving your soul to another, aren't you?”

The same demon even talks about the soul being “transferred”.  But when the bargain is first made Jenoff refers to the deal in a very different way:

“It's nothing you have to pay now, but one day you will. The cost, Mr. Gunn, is your future.”

Later Gunn justifies the trade he made by saying at the time he didn’t think that he had a future.  And indeed thematically trying to link Gunn’s situation with that of Angel requires us to construe his future as being at peril. But a person’s soul cannot readily be equated with their future.  Admittedly the Whedonverse has never been exactly consistent in its treatment of the concept.  My own preferred view is to see the soul as the spiritual and rational part of a human – the seat of its moral reason and its understanding.  But sometimes in ANGEL it seems to mean no more than the moral conscience of an individual.  An example of this is to be found in “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” where Ryan was a sociopath.  Here his lack of either a propensity towards good or a propensity towards evil was explained by his having no “soul”.  This certainly seems to suggest that it is perfectly possible to have a living human being who has no soul at all.  And the fact that, in this episode, Angel contemplates his losing his soul and turning back into Angelus seems to support this view.

Yet we did see a human being losing his soul in "Double or Nothing" and the result seemed to render him lifeless.  In this sense, “soul” seems to refer to the “life force” of the human being.  And certainly this is more consistent with the idea of the soul being a person’s future.  If Gunn lost his life force, then clearly he has no future.  Nevertheless the seeming disinterest of the writers in properly defining such a fundamental concept irks me.  I suppose that it can be said that they are more interested in the story or in the character.  And if in order to tell the story or explore the character it is helpful to modify metaphysical concepts such as the soul, it is a sacrifice well worth making.  I disagree.  I do not think that there is anything wrong with having to work within the disciplines you yourself have set.  And when you do not do so and your viewers become aware of that concepts such as the soul are variable constructs intended to suit your immediate purposes (as they would not be in  the real world) they are reminded that the story and the characters themselves are mere constructs - to the detriment of both.

Having said that, it must be acknowledged that “Double or Nothing” did serve pretty well its purpose as the fulcrum around which season 3 turns.  Having suffered the disruption of Wesley’s betrayal and the destruction of the hopes engendered by the earlier events of the season we are now seemingly put back on track with Angel Investigations reassembled (or almost reassembled) and ready to face the future once more.  Indeed it does more than that in the sense that it crystallizes the split between Wesley on the one hand and everyone else in Angel Investigations on the other.  Where this will lead to is anyone’s guess at the moment.  But it is I think hardly co-incidence that the same episode that sees Wesley cut adrift also re-established the closeness of the bond between the other members of the team.  Clearly the breach with the former Watcher is not meant to be quickly or easily resolvable.  Given this there seems only one direction in which the dynamic between Wesley on the one hand and Angel in particular on the other can develop.  The relations between them must now be essentially antagonistic.  And that must be good.  Wesley is a formidable opponent for anyone and the past history between these former friends (both the good and the bad) will add extra sharpness to any conflict.  But this itself does raise a question.  At the end of “Forgiving” we saw Angel having to be pulled off Wesley after trying to kill him.  What happened to this?  Did Angel calm down and realize that killing Wesley would be wrong?  Was he simply so distraught over the loss of Connor that, after the initial burst of anger subsided, he couldn’t summon up the will to do anything else?  I don’t know and there is nothing in the episode to explain it.  It’s as if the writers decided that the scene in the hospital had served its purpose thematically and that they were no-longer interested in pursuing the matter of Angel’s lack of forgiveness.  That may be fine thematically, but you can’t do that in terms of either plot or character.  It simply lacks believability in relation to either.

And on a related topic I can’t help but think that the catharsis for Angel over the loss of his son was reached too quickly and in too pat a way.  I know that this was probably inevitable given the demands of episodic television.  It would have seemed repetitious and boring to have Angel brood over Connor for an indefinite period afterwards.  Clearly it was far better to aim for Angel to come to a defining moment in which he finally realizes that there is nothing he can now do and that he must move on.  Hence we have the crisis with Gunn and the payoff involving the dismantling of the crib.   I am afraid, however, that human beings don’t work that way.  Closure of the sort envisaged here is a long and gradual process; I find it difficult to accept it taking the form of a single epiphany. This may be inconvenient for episodic television but  there it is.

The real focus in terms of the plot of “Double of Nothing” is of course to be Gunn, or rather, Fred and Gunn.  Although thematically the centerpiece of the episode lay in the parallels between Gunn and Angel, in terms of plot the driving force was Gunn’s relationship with Fred.  It was that relationship that triggered Jenoff’s renewed interest in Gunn.  It was that relationship that determined Gunn’s response to Jenoff and it was that relationship that triggered Angel’s intervention.  So, in a way it’s a pity that the relationship drew such a negative reaction from me.  Now I have never been a great fan of the soap opera element of ANGEL.  But with any ME production, relationships are always going to take center stage and so inevitably romance will feature very heavily.  I don’t mind this in the least when the relationship is used to good effect in terms of examining theme or exploring character.  But when the relationship is displayed with such over the top, cloying sentimentality I draw the line.  Many may disagree.  And here I am reminded of something Abraham Lincoln said when he was asked his opinion of a popular novel of his time:

“For those who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they like.”

I can only echo his words.  But even those who like sugar with their sugar would have to acknowledge the complete lack of originality that the course of the episode took, at least up until the end.  Gunn’s original idea of having “one last perfect day” with Fred led to his equally clichéd realization that he had to break up with her to spare her feeling and perhaps even to save her life.  Then there was perhaps the biggest cliché pf all where Gunn willing gives himself up instead of trying to fight Jenoff, just for Fred’s sake.  The one interesting part of the whole scenario was where Fred actually managed to put things together and work out what was happening.  And it was actually rather clever and endearing that she was being so very inarticulate at the same time as she was being rather sharp.  Unfortunately, however, this all got lost in the mess that was the ending.

Now, I think that anyone who exploits the weakness and desperation of another to drive them to an unequal bargain which entails the loss of their life is evil.  I do not think that such a person deserves very much consideration.  So I have no problem whatsoever to our heroes lying to and cheating Jenoff.  The one moral problem I do have with their actions lies in their willingness to strike a bargain with him which gets Gunn off the hook but by implication at least leaves him to continue to kill others. 

But more particularly in this context I have a problem with the “twist” ending.  Clearly the intention was to present us with a seemingly insoluble dilemma and keep us guessing as to how it was to be solved.  The dilemma lay on the one hand in the imperative of rescuing Gunn and on the other the lack of any means to do so.  Sheer force of numbers seemed to preclude a rescue by force.  The initial solution – a turn of the cards – was of course too simple if Angel were to win.  So it was pretty obvious that he would lose.  That of course simply created the expectation that there would be a twist.  I think that what the writers tried to do was in principle quite clever.  They gave us a twist – Cordelia’s attack on Jenoff – which did take me by surprise for two reasons.  I didn’t expect Angel and Cordelia to cheat.  The fact that they were willing to do so was impressive enough.  Even better they failed, thus compounding their difficulties.  This was a case of so far so good;  but the problem with this strategy is that you need a back up that works.  And the solution the writers chose for me didn’t.  In principle there is nothing unbelievable about creatures who owed Jenoff seeing their chance and turning on him where he had been shown to have a vulnerability.  But he hadn’t.  He had in fact just survived a murderous attack by creatures who had cheated to take him by surprise.  And now they were helpless to deal with him – and they knew it.  So what is the difference between this scenario and that which existed when Angel  and the others first entered the Casino in search of Gunn?  If Jenoff could count on the loyalty of his minions then, why not now when he had in fact demonstrated how hard he was to kill? I am afraid for me the ending made no sense at all.

Overview (C)

The strength of this episode was that it provided a fulcrum round which the season now turns and heads in a different direction.  It did so by forcing Angel to turn from the past and embrace the future.  And the way he does this is by reinforcing his connection with others.  In general I do like this approach because it provides a clear sense of closure and a feeling of a fresh start.  But I have reservations about the way it was handled.  One relates to way in which this was portrayed in terms of a single epiphany.  I think this lacks realism but is probably inevitable.  Far more problematic is my concern over the way that Angel’s definition of his future suggests that his family connection is more important than this mission to help others.  Angel’s need to connect with the world is an underlying theme of the series but it cannot be seen as a purpose separate from and superior to his need to help others.  Rather the two must go together – helping others is his way to becoming more human.  And because his mission here is drawn with such a narrow focus on helping Gunn I get no sense of that.  Unfortunately that is by no means the end of the problems.  The writers seem to have muddled the concepts of “soul” and “future”.  The plot suffers badly from the mawkishness of the relationship between Gunn and Fred and the predictability of the way in which it drove developments.  And the ending was unsatisfying to say the least.  All in all this is not one of the season’s strongest episodes.