EPISODE 4.02

GROUND STATE

Written by: Mere Smith

Directed by: Michael Grossman

A Matter of Electricity

A ground state is the state of least possible energy in a physical system.  And here the term is used as a metaphor for someone’s feeling of being lost.  That word is used several times in the episode, especially by Angel, to denote a feeling of no longer being in control, of being confused as to personal identity or direction.   But, as we shall see in due course, this episode isn't really about this feeling as such.   Rather it is about why a person has the feeling in the first place.

The metaphor of the ground state has its origin in Gwen, a woman with a range of extraordinary powers over electricity.  At one point she explains her ability to bend laser light in the following terms:

“Technically? I'm exciting the subatomic particles with electrical energy and then bouncing 'em off each other before they hit ground state.”

But while Gwen can electrically excite things that she encounters, emotionally she herself is also at ground state.  We first meet her in 1985 as she is in effect abandoned by her parents.  She is wearing a thick red snowsuit, complete with mittens and boots to match. Even her head is covered with a hood and only her face is showing.  She stands in front of her parents but she has no physical contact with them.  Nor do they say anything to her.  They simply and silently leave her to Mrs. Thorpe and her Academy.  And when Gwen tries to take Mrs. Thorpe's hand she is coldly rebuffed.  We next see Gwen sitting alone while the other children at the Academy play.  Only one boy approaches her and tries to make contact with her by offering her his toy car.  The result is disaster as the boy is both shocked and repelled from her, perhaps even killed.  The gift he tried to present her with is destroyed.  Everything we see here is intended to emphasize (albeit in a pretty heavy handed fashion) Gwen’s state of complete isolation from anyone else. 

The Importance of Being Rich

The next time we see Gwen she is making a business arrangement in a bar with a man called Elliott.  As she approaches him we see she is wearing red leather pants (presumably the red leather pants of moral ambiguity), black boots, a sleeveless, low-cut red leather top and long, black gloves.  She has an unmistakable attitude to go with her outfit.  She is very attractive and she knows it.  Indeed, as she walks by, all the men at the bar look at her.  She is not there, however, to meet Elliott or anyone else socially.  There is one thing and one thing only on her mind – money.  She and Elliott have a business arrangement.  She is going to steal a mystical object for him.  It’s her profession. She evidently isn’t bothered by the fact that she is stealing and has no concern about getting caught.  But at the moment she isn’t happy with the terms of the arrangement:

“You're screwing me. The Axis of Pythia is worth 33 million dollars. You told me it was worth six.”

Elliott wants the Axis for his private collection.  But for Gwen everything else is irrelevant except the money:

Elliott: “Make the delivery to a private high rise downtown. I'll be waiting in the penthouse, and then we'll transfer the balance of your fee.”

Gwen: “Which we both know is gonna have a lot more zero's on the end of it, right?”

The connection between a woman with this system of values and the little girl sent to the Thorpe Academy twenty years earlier isn’t hard to make.  Her parents are probably still alive but, if they are, they cannot have any relationship at all with their daughter.  After all they were clearly well-off and I cannot imagine that she would have turned to burglary if she had much contact with them.  And it isn’t hard to guess that, given the disastrous way that the little boy’s attempt to make friends with her ended, she doesn’t have much else in the way of human contact.  Indeed her disdain for such contact is evident.  When she isn’t happy with Elliott’s attitude, she relieves him of his watch, zaps it and tosses it on the table in front of him. Its metal is now twisted and deformed, like the toy car the boy tried to give her.  Unlike that accident, this was deliberate.  Yet far from exhibiting any regret over this because of its resemblance to that earlier incident, Gwen makes a joke about the fate of the watch.  We are intended to understand from this just how hard hearted she has become. 

And when she confronts Angel over the fate of the Axis of Pythia, she is equally unsentimental and equally unsympathetic.  He tries to tell her what the Axis means to him:

Angel: “I'm trying to find someone. Someone very important to me, and the Axis there, it's my only shot.”

She doesn’t disbelieve him.  But she doesn’t take him at all seriously either.  In fact she is quite mocking about him:

Gwen: “Two questions, then. One: do you really love her?”

Angel: “Yeah, I do.”

Gwen: “Two: on a scale of one to ten, exactly how stupid do you think I am?”

Indeed her whole attitude can be summed up in something she says to him later on:

“You're really gonna use that Axis thing to find her, aren't you? It figures. Anyone that bad at stealing stuff has got to be doing it for love.”

For her, love isn’t something important or worthwhile.  It is something that makes people do stupid things.  She, on the other hand, is a professional.  That means she does things for something that really does matter – money.  The conclusion that we are intended to draw from this is, I think, obvious.  But just in case it escapes us, the writers provide us with a further clue.  The boy who was electrocuted asks Gwen if she is a freak.  A freak is someone who is markedly unusual or perhaps even deformed.  It is someone set apart from everyone else.  Gwen herself from time to time echoes the boy’s question when she refers to herself as a freak.  She uses the term to indicate she has special abilities.  But she objects when others us it:

“What I don't appreciate, Elliott, is being called a freak! That's my word. And I get cranky when people like you use it.”

She is therefore pretty sensitive about the term after all, perhaps because it reminds her that she is different – and alone.

And In Love

But we are also intended to get an insight into Gwen’s state of mind from the others in the episode who find themselves alone or are threatened with being left alone.  Take Fred as an example.  Gunn refers to her as:

            “Large and in charge. OK, teensy-weensy and in charge.”

Angel is equally complementary:

“It's amazing how she stepped up when I was gone. Kinda reminds me of Cordy.”

But Fred doesn’t see it this way.  What she sees is the fact that Connor so successfully deceived her.  That is why she is angry at him.  She has no idea where Cordelia might be – hence her outburst at Phantom Denis.  And finally her presentation is completely upstaged by Angel.  She, therefore, feels under pressure.  And at the thought of Gunn being killed, she simply falls apart:

Fred: “I thought it would get better when Angel came back. I…I thought I would finally be able to breathe again.”

Gunn: “Fred, no one forced this responsibility on you…”

Fred: “Well, who else was gonna do it? Who else was gonna hold everything up after you left me all alone? You died and left me all alone! “

Or, there is Angel.  When we first see him he is in Cordelia’s apartment, trying to figure out what to do next and failing miserably.  He doesn’t have the first idea where to go or what to do.  In the end he has to turn to Wesley to guide him.  Given the recent history between them this is a clear measure of his desperation.  But even here he is clearly clueless as to how to approach his former friend and ally.  He starts of with a very feeble attempt at praise and thanks:

“Running your own game now, huh? I never got the chance to thank you. Finding me. Bringing me up. Must've been hard for you. No map. All that water. Look what…what went down between us... I had a lot of time down there…to think. You know, about the way things went, the way they could've gone. I just want you to know, as far as I'm concerned, we're OK again.”

Of course he is so transparent that Wesley has no difficulty guessing his true motives.  But while he coldly rebuffs the attempt at a reconciliation, he does help Angel out by referring him to the Dinza.  She is described as a demi-Goddess of the lost and indeed she herself refers to Angel several times as being lost:

“I know you were lost. I know all the lost things.”

And although she is also described as not being remotely trustworthy, she actually does answer Angel’s question truthfully and accurately:

 “She is far from you, champion, and needs you no longer.”

And he for his part answers by saying:

 “I need her.”

So, there we have in a nutshell, the starting point of the episode and the importance of the feeling of being lost.  Both Angel and Fred are under pressure and uncertain about what to do next.  And in their uncertainty they need to feel a connection with another human being.  Now, it would be nice to discuss this in terms of the thematic development of season 3 – Angel’s need to connect with other human beings in order to help understand and save others.  Sadly we cannot do so because what Angel and Fred fear losing is a very specific type of connection.  They are threatened with the loss of their “soulmates”.  I hate using that word.  It is one of the few points on which I will give this episode credit that the writers avoid it.  But that is what the writers clearly have in mind.  Angel still has his son.  He still has Fred and Gunn.  He even has his mission, though you would never know it from the episode. Similarly Fred has her parents and Angel.  And, in Angel’s absence, she has been a rock for everyone else.  But in spite of all this, both are vulnerable because of the loss of Cordelia and the threatened loss of Gunn respectively.  Therefore we must conclude that this episode is about the loss of a romantic interest, a relationship with one other human being that transcends any other, the other half of ourselves and the one person who can help you see and achieve what your life’s goal is.

Angel is lost because he has lost Cordelia.  Fred would be lost without Gunn.  And that brings us back to Gwen.  when we first meet her she is equally clearly lost.  She has no-one and nothing in her life except money and, as we have seen, she takes a very jaundiced view of love.  It gets in the way of important things like making money.  But in the end there is evidence of a change in her.  After all, she lets Angel take the Axis of Pythia to search for Cordelia, something she was entirely unwilling to do earlier. What brought this about?  Well we can point to three things.  First of all there was “the kiss”.  This must have made an impression because, when Gwen thinks she is going to die she doesn’t talk about the fun she had being a cat burglar or the money she made or has just lost.  She mentions Angel’s kiss. Then there is the fact that Angel saved her life.  And finally there is the fact that she and Angel share something in common:

Angel: “So you're a freak. Boo-hoo. So what?”

Gwen: “Excuse me?”

Angel: “I think you've already figured out I'm not the poster-boy for normal. Sometimes, you gotta let go.”

Interestingly, Angel here uses the “F” word without Gwen objecting to him doing so, even in the mildest terms.  And there is a degree of irony in Gwen’s parting shot when she talks about Angel’s incompetence in burglary being proof he is in love.  The words, as I have already said, suggested contempt.  The tone told of a sneaking admiration.

All in all the evidence suggests that the major change in this episode was in Gwen’s attitude, not so much towards other people in general but rather towards Angel in particular.  And because of this change in her, she seemed now genuinely to understand the importance of romantic love.  Now, this is interesting. I have already argued that in general our attention in ANGEL must be with our core characters.  They are the people that we know best. They are the people who can be most fully developed as characters. They are the people who are therefore the most interesting and with whom we have developed the greatest sympathy. Our interest can best be engaged not so much by the help they give to others but the meaning of that help and the way it is given has for these central characters.  A “case of the week” is by definition transitory and nothing about him or her is of significance except insofar as it tells us something about our main characters or their situation.  But the change that overcame Gwen tells us nothing about Angel.  She learned the importance of romantic love but he was already aware of that.

Now, a change did overcome Angel.  After he got the Axis of Pythia he saw for himself Cordelia’s situation.

“All those months, under the water, I kept thinking to myself I gotta get home... to Cordelia. I get back and I find out that she's gone. I keep thinking, I gotta get Cordy back home. Finally I find her, and I realize she already is home. Where she belongs.”

This seems to have convinced him finally to let Cordelia go as a romantic interest for him.  There is nothing anywhere else in the episode which prepares us for or justifies the complete volte face which this statement represents.  In fact it is almost impossible to make sense of his decision if you take ersiously everything that we saw in the previous hour.  The episode is all about the importance of the romantic connection to fulfill a need within us.  Without that, even a “mission” isn’t enough.  In fact, as we have seen, Angel was told in terms by the Dinza that Cordelia didn’t need him (presumably because she was “home”) but Angel refused to accept this.  His single minded determination to get the Axis of Pythia was justified by his need not just to find Cordelia but to do so as a prelude to rescuing her.  Why then does he abandon that idea of getting her back into his life just because  the Pythia showed him what the Dinza had already told him?  And indeed, if he and Cordelia really were “soulmates” in the sense I have discussed above, she couldn’t be “home” anywhere away from him.  So why did he accept what the Axiz was showing him anyway?

But put this together with the fact that Gwen (an apparent “case of the week” character) now becomes, through Angel’s example, open to the idea of love and a terrible suspicion is born.  Are the writers preparing to launch yet another romantic entanglement for Angel?  Is this why he accepts his separation from Cordelia?  And this suspicion is made even stronger by the heavy handed symbolism of “the kiss”. Gwen zaps Angel with electricity and we zoom into his chest where his still, silent heart becomes infused with life and starts beating. And when Angel feels his heart beat, he kisses Gwen passionately.  Now Angel has been physically dead of over 200 years.  So how can a burst of electricity bring his heart to life?  The fact that the writers try to make us swallow this improbability shows that it must be central to the episode. And the meaning of the symbolism seems pretty plain.  It is the spark between these two, that brings Angel back to life. 

But What About Everyone Else?

We seem, therefore, to be pretty firmly in soap opera territory here: romance apparently for the sake of it.  That is to say the whole point of the storyline is how the relationship between the two characters in question develops.  It is not used to advance plot or explore a theme.    And the only characterization that it develops (Gwen’s discovery of the importance of romantic love) seems to be for the purpose of advancing the potential romance.   Now, as I have said before I have no interest at all in soap opera.  So, whether Angel really loves Cordelia or is at the start of a new romance with Gwen is a matter of supreme indifference to me.  But even looked at in terms of pure soap opera “Ground State” doesn't work very well.  A basic pre-requisite for an episode dealing with romantic love is that it conveys the sense of two characters in love.  I may be jaundiced on the matter but I cannot get that sense here.

We recall that in “Tomorrow” Cordelia was persuaded to abandon Angel because she was a “higher being” with a higher being’s calling.  And in what little we see of her in this episode, she shows no concern for him or how he is coping without her.  In fact in the teaser we are reminded of her true state of mind:

“God, I am so bored.”

And at the end when Angel seems to have given up the search for her is reaction is:

“What are you? Deficient? Get me out of here!”

For Cordelia this is all about what she feels.  And if anything Angel comes across as even more self absorbed.  As we have seen, he is told by the Dinza that Cordelia is pursuing another path and he shows not the slightest interest in what that path is, how well she is doing or anything else about her.  His only comment is how much he needs her.  I cannot recognize in either of their reactions anything approaching genuine love.  At least on Angel’s part there is some sign of an intense feeling.  But it lacks that unselfish quality, that unconditional concern for the other that characterizes true love.  For most of this episode, Angel’s only thought is what missing Cordelia means to him.  And this is compounded by the ending.  When the Axis of Pythia reveals to Angel at least an approximation to the truth, he says:

“In some small way, maybe it even makes it easier, knowing the good she's doing up there. Even if I can't see her or talk to her, it's like...she's still on my side.”

Even here he cannot seem to get away from the idea that this is all about him.  But to the extent that we are intended to understand his decision to give up trying to get her back because she already is where she belongs, then it is so inconsistent with everything else that we saw in the episode and comes so completely out of the blue that it is simultaneously unbelievable and emphasizes even further how completely self-centered his motivation was earlier.  After all, as I have already said, the Dinza had already given him the Cliff Notes version of Cordelia’s new role.  He might have disbelieved her.  But that’s not what he said.  What he basically said was that it didn’t matter what she was doing now.  What mattered was what he needed.

Now, it would be nice to think that this was deliberate and that the writers intended us to see that there was something not right about the romantic love between Angel and Cordelia.  But the problem with that is that no-one calls Angel on his attitude throughout the episode.  And we have a very clear echo of that attitude in Fred.  Her statement to Gunn that he died and left her alone is somewhat short of sympathy for him and very long on self-pity.  She made poor Gunn’s near death all about her fear of abandonment.  How selfish can you get?

But the fact that "Ground State" depiction of romantic love between Angel and Cordelia rings hollow isn’t even my main problem with this episode.    Sadly, I have to return to the malign effect that a romance like this can have on a series like ANGEL, if not very carefully handled.  As I have pointed out before the raison d’etre of the series remains the mission and how Angel goes about it. I have no objection to seeing Angel making a connection with Cordelia or anyone else if it helps him connect with the world and if by doing that he is better able to save others’ souls.  But here, again as I have already said, what we see here is romance for the sake of it.  Worse, it is a romance in which the extent of Angel’s self-absorption leaves no time for anyone else or anything else.  Even Connor gets barely a look in.

You can hardly blame Angel for being annoyed at his son.  But I entirely fail to understand his actions in tossing him out into streets with which he is unfamiliar, with no money and no way of making a living.  He is after all still a minor.  And given his advanced abilities and his warped and twisted sense of values, this is a recipe for disaster and not just for Connor either.  The boy needs active intervention.  Lilah’s characterizes Angel’s strategy as

“This is that "guilt is it's own punishment" thing, isn't it?”

If that is true, it doesn’t even begin to address Connor’s problems. But even giving Angel the benefit of the doubt and assuming that there is method in this madness, he is clearly prioritizing Cordelia at his son’s expense.  The writers don’t even make a half-hearted attempt to suggest otherwise.  The one and only time Angel turns up where Connor is living is, as he admits, to see Lilah.

It is bad enough that, without Cordelia, Angel apparently now cannot find his sense of direction or purpose in his mission, as if all his good resolutions now mean nothing.  Has he forgotten:

“But now I just wanna help. I wanna help because people shouldn't suffer as they do. Because, if there isn't any bigger meaning, then the smallest act of kindness is the greatest thing in the world.”

It is worse that he has such a relentless focus on finding Cordelia actually leads him to ignore the plight of someone in trouble.  But when the person in trouble is his own son, then frankly I have no words to express my disappointment and annoyance at this turn. 

The Plot

Nor does the plot offer any redemption for this episode.  The principal focus throughout “Ground State” is Angel’s attempt to obtain the Axis of Pythia.  This object is at first sight a classic McGuffin.  It drives the plot.  It is the object that Angel has to compete with Gwen and eventually with Elliott to obtain.   To that extent it is what the episode is all about.  Only it isn’t.  The Axis has no intrinsic value.  Its only importance lies in its ability to help Angel find Cordelia.  The problem is that, as conceived by the writers, this particular McGuffin contravenes the basic rule for any McGuffin.  A McGuffin may be empty of meaning – indeed the best McGuffins usually are.  But it must give us something to care about.  The term was coined by Alfred Hitchcock.  In his film “Notorious”, for example, the McGuffin is uranium which itself is only a peg on which you can hang the real story of two men who love a woman and the lengths that each of them will go to prove their love.  Here Angel’s efforts to obtain the Axis must be the peg on which to hang the story of what Cordelia means to Angel and what he will do to get her back.  But in the end it actually does the opposite. Angel was told early on by Wesley that Cordelia wasn’t dead and by the Dinza that she was alright and was on her own path.  The Axis simply provided confirmation of both of these things.  And that was apparently enough to persuade him that he didn’t need Cordelia back after all.  So what was the previous hour all about anyway?

 Worse than that, the episode leads us to this empty conclusion without anything in the way of plot twists or turns for the audience.  We already know where Cordelia is.  We have seen her.  We also know that she is in no immediate danger.  Sure, we can hypothesize that there is something not quite right with the situation into which she has been drawn as Skip described it.  I don’t for a moment believe that Cordelia is a morally superior person chosen for some higher role.  And the fact that Cordelia seems to be mainly conscious of how bored she is seems to bear this out.  But the Axis doesn’t advance our knowledge about TPTB’s true agenda.  So there is neither tension nor even any meaningful exposition relating to Cordelia.

Which is yet one more reason to believe that the episode was really intended to serve as a means of introducing Gwen to Angel and the audience.  It may very well be therefore that the entire “Angel has to find Cordelia” plot was itself a McGuffin.  And if that is the case then the writers deserve some credit for their elaboration.  They absorb our attention on Angel’s search for his lost love simply in order to introduce us to his next one.

Of course, if that were the intention it would put a premium on presenting Gwen as a credible, interesting and sympathetic figure. And indeed there has been a considerable effort on this behalf. We get some backstory for Gwen which garners her some sympathy (albeit in a very heavy handed way).  We see a degree of moral ambiguity about her intentions clearly derived from her early experiences. She is tough and ruthless on the surface.  She is not afraid of violence and she is certainly highly motivated by profit. But deep down she clearly has a good heart.  We are also shown that she does carry about the guilt for having (presumably) killed the boy at Thorpe Academy and, when the chips are down, she cannot sacrifice the life of another human, even for profit.  There is in fact a very clear attempt to contrast her with Elliott.   Whereas she faces Angel in honest one to one combat, Elliott makes a cowardly sneak attack.  Whereas she was willing to save Gunn, even at the risk of losing the Axis, Elliott was prepared to kill for it.  Above all, the fact that Elliott’s attack clearly forces her to move from being Angel’s antagonist into his ally, with his talents complementing hers to enable them both to escape, firmly establishes her in the “White Hat” camp.  All in all we are intended to see in Gwen a character who is interesting because of these internal conflicts and sympathetic because of her good instincts and the origin of worst instincts.

I am afraid, however, that for my taste she is too much of a walking cliché:  a female burglar with a “badass” attitude on the surface and yet with a good heart; a woman who is not afraid to flaunt her sexuality and who is witty and smart with lots of snappy dialogue but who uses this to cover up a secret heartache of being abandoned and ignored as a child.  And then this woman bonds with a man over their joint status as outsiders, marked forever by their tragic past.   There isn't an original idea here.

Another problem is that the basic plot was a little obvious and the episode was somewhat light on tension.  We discovered very early on that both Angel and Gwen were after the Axis of Pythia and from that point onwards did anyone not expect that both of their attempts would take place at the same time and that Gwen would get there first and steal the object from under Angel’s nose?  Equally the initial set up between Gwen and Elliott just screamed “double-cross”.  So it was also only to be expected that Angel would find himself either caught in Elliott’s trap or have to come to Gwen’s rescue or both.

The fact that Gunn “died” even if only temporarily was a nice touch.  In one sense it can be seen as a bit of a cheat but I don’t really mind it.  We got a genuine moment of shock without any long term consequences and I think that is actually a good thing.  But aside from this, the only real element of tension injected into the episode lay in the battle between Gwen and Angel on the one hand and in Angel’s attempts to save her from Elliott on the other.  The solution to the problem of how to get out of the elevator was again a little obvious (she could blow the circuits but needed him to break the cover first).  But the danger of suffocation was a real threat to her so they were both working against the clock.  So, I thought the scene with the two of them trapped in the elevator did work very well.  But I am afraid that I found the earlier fight between Angel and Gwen more confusing than anything else.  Gwen’s ability to shock another can kill a human being, even one as large as Gunn.  And Angel has a known vulnerability to electricity, for example tazers.  Yet she cannot affect him with her powers?  On the other hand there is nothing previously to indicate that she had unusual physical strength.  But we see her trading blow for blow with a vampire.  I am afraid I cannot make sense of that.

 Overview (C)

For me “Ground State” didn’t work that well at any level.  First and foremost we have the fact that  Angel spent an hour complaining that he couldn’t really get alone without Cordelia only to see him discover at the end that he could after all.  This begs the question: what was the episode all about then? Was the purpose really to show how much Angel needed Cordelia or, as I suspect, to prepare the way for a new relationship between him and Gwen.  Either way, there is too much of a soap opera feel to the story.  Apart from the fact that I personally find this unappealing the episode’s depiction of the relationship between Cordelia and Angel is frankly a mockery of any idea of genuine love and interferes badly with what must be the real message of the series: the saving of other people.  It is of course far too early to say anything about a relationship between Angel and Gwen, even assuming that one is on the horizon.  But I am not particularly encouraged by the stereotypical, perhaps even melodramatic way that she has been depicted.  As for the plotting, the best thing that could be said was that it was workmanlike.  At the same time it was very predictable, lacking in any real tension and on one or two points strained my credulity too far.