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EPISODE 5.14 Smile Time Written by: Joss Whedon and Ben Edlund Directed by: Ben Edlund
Self-Esteem is for Everybody I do not propose here to revisit in any detail the development of Angel as a character. But I cannot avoid, at the start of this review, reminding myself that Angel has never thought very much of himself as an individual. As Liam he felt that he could never live up to his father’s demands so instead he chose to live down to his expectations. Even as Angelus it appears that it was a need to demonstrate to his now dead father that he could excel at something which drove him to his excesses of cruelty. As the re-ensouled Angel he kept himself apart from humanity because he couldn’t trust himself not to become a killer again. As he said to Buffy in the BTVS episode “Amends” “Look, I'm weak. I've never been anything else. It's not the demon in me that needs killing, Buffy. It's the man.” As I have previously pointed out, at one stage of season 3 he looked to be on the brink of changing all of that with a son and a budding romance with Cordelia. Not only did he have a chance to find personal happiness and fulfillment; he might actually come to believe that he was worthy of them. But then in season 4 he found out firstly that he had been manipulated into fathering Connor and secondly that his whole romance with Cordelia had been engineered to help further Jasmine’s agenda. Furthermore, the repercussions of that season included Cordelia’s descent into an irreversible coma and such a strengthening of Connor’s self-destructive tendencies that Angel had to buy him happiness by entering into a Faustian pact with Wolfram and Hart. Ironically finding out that he had been a puppet in Jasmine’s hands simply led him to become a puppet in the hands of Wolfram and Hart. So, not only did season 5 see the destruction of his faith in his destiny, it reinforced the idea of his own personal worthlessness, in particular the idea that whatever he tried he could never get away from his past. The evil that he had done would haunt him forever, blighting any hopes he might have had for personal fulfillment. So here in brief we have a picture of someone who is a classic introvert, someone who always turns in on himself. His preoccupation is with himself and his history and it is these rather than the practicalities of living or the views of others which govern his behavior and his reaction to others. And the evidence for his continued introversion is to be found in his reaction to Nina in this episode. When he begins to feel an attraction to her and she in turn begins to show signs that she has an attraction to him, he becomes very defensive. When Nina turns up at the Offices of Wolfram and Hart for her monthly imprisonment, there is really no need for Angel himself to show her to the cell. But he volunteers. There then follows a very awkward exchange: Nina: “Anyway, I was thinking... I mean... What are you doing for breakfast tomorrow?” Angel: “Oh, you know—Drinking blood.” Nina: “Right, yeah.” Then he backs out with an embarrassed: “Uh, see ya.” As a comment on Angel’s present attitude towards Nina, this scene pretty much speaks for itself. In particular I like the visual illustration of Angel's mindset when he literally closes the door on Nina. There is an interest there - but it frightens him and he backs away from it. Of course just in case we missed the signals, there follows a scene between himself and the other King of Emotional Denial in residence at Wolfram and Hart. I am of course referring to Wesley. And let’s face it if anyone can recognize the symptoms Angel has been suffering from it’s Wesley. In fact Angel himself readily admits the truth: “Nina's down there right now, turning into a werewolf and liking me. I don't…can't… I have no time for that kind of…I have no right.” But initially at least he comes up with the same tired old excuse to justify his willingness to keep his distance: Angel: “We all know what happens if….” Wesley: “If what? If you achieve a moment of perfect happiness?” Angel: “I turn back into Angelus, and we don't want that.” But Wesley is having none of that and scoffs in Angel’s face. “99.999-ad infinitum percent of the best relationships in the recorded history of the world have had to make do with acceptable happiness.” It’s only then that the real truth comes out. A relationship between himself and Nina isn’t going to happen because in Angel’s own words: “I'm not that guy. That guy is charming and funny and... emotionally useful. I'm the guy in a dark corner with the blood habit and the 200 years of psychic baggage.” So there we have it, Angel’s inner torment is not only about the choices he has been making but about the sort of person that he is. And the unspoken but obviously keenly felt addendum is that he cannot change - because that is his experience. He thought things could get better with Cordelia and Connor. Indeed that was the theme of “Waiting in the Wings”, the episode in which Angel convinced himself that he could have a romance with Cordelia without bringing disaster down upon everyone’s head. But he now obviously believes that the events of season 4 have demonstrated otherwise.
Angel- The Extrovert! But we see a turning point when Angel is turned into an actual puppet, rather than simply being a metaphorical one. As a vampire he suffered from a lack of self-belief and a related loss of purpose, both of which combined to deprive him of the capacity to act effectively. But in another irony, as an actual puppet, he regains both the self-belief and sense of purpose on the one hand and his capacity for effective action on the other. The first clue to his transformation comes when he begins to harangue Wesley and the others about the seriousness of the situation when he suddenly breaks-off in mid-sentence for an apparently trivial reason: “Come on, guys. This is a serious situation. I'm a puppet, and there are children's lives at... Hey, it's Smile Time!” The explanation for this rather eccentric behavior is soon forthcoming: Wesley: “This transformation may have altered your stress-response mechanism.” PuppetAngel: “What?” Gunn: “He's saying that you have the proportionate excitability of a puppet your size.” Puppets are by definition extroverted. An extrovert in this sense is far more than a happy person who enjoys being with other people. An extrovert is one who is concerned more with external realities such as the practical problems of living rather than with their inner thoughts and feeling. That is why they are often emotional, impulsive (doing something suddenly based on an urge), confident about themselves in social situations, and are involved in the lives of others. A classic manifestation of this tendency is in fact provided by the scene in Smile Time that Angel now watches: Puppet Dog: “Aw. Looks like Polo has a case of the grumpies." Puppet Girl: “Yeah, he sure does, Groofus. That mean old Mr. Fish-and-Chips said that Polo won't win the race tomorrow, no matter how hard he tries.” Polo: “Uh-huh, and I feel just awful. Well, what if Mr. Fish-and-Chips is right?” Because Polo, as a puppet, is so open to others, he was initially very discouraged by the negativity of Mr. Fish-and-Chips. But he didn’t brood on it. Instead, the problem was solved with a song: “Self-esteem is for
everybody That was because the same openness to others led Polo to take the positive message from the song to heart. And we can see the same vulnerability and openness in PuppetAngel. When watching “Smile Time” he wants to launch a jihad against the studio. PuppetAngel: “Wes, put the special ops team on red alert.” Wesley: “Red alert?” PuppetAngel: “I want helicopters and tear gas.” Gunn: “Angel…” PuppetAngel: “This is war!” When Nina almost sees him in his new state he feels humiliated and hides under the desk. When Spike calls him a “bloody puppet” he launches himself furiously at him and knocks him through the office window into the lobby. Accordingly his very impulsiveness actually leads to the disclosure of the secret he wanted so much to hide. And, albeit in a different way, his impulsiveness leads him to make an even more difficult disclosure later on. When he went to see Nina and apologize for his earlier behavior, I’m pretty sure he didn’t intend to tell her about his condition. But he did in response to her own emotional vulnerability: “You've got this whole, complicated, important life going on, and... the last thing you need to deal with is a crush from monster girl, some charity case you were nice enough to…” It is at this point that he revealed not only that he was a puppet but also how embarrassing that was for him: “I'm made of felt...and my nose comes off.” In the same scene Angel admitted “I've spent so much time worrying about the past and the future and my very complicated life... it's been a while since I looked up and really saw what was going on around me. It's not my strong suit, you know? But I'm working on it. I'm paying better attention to…” Of course he then gave the lie to that by being so wrapped up in his confession that he completely ignores the fact that Nina was changing into a werewolf. But the point was that whereas Nina saw the outward reality of what Angel was: “You're this... I mean, God, you're an actual hero, and, I don't know, this may sound cliché coming from an art-school chick, but... the vampire thing's kind of sexy.”, Angel didn’t; he was only concerned with his own internal thought processes: “It all sounds good, but that's not how I feel.”
Wesley and Gunn The interesting thing here is that Angel isn’t the only one with difficulties in this area. I have already mentioned the conversation that Wesley had with his CEO and the excellent advice that he tried to give to him then. Wesley himself sees the signals that Nina was putting out for Angel, discusses them with the female employees of the firm, trusts their judgment and tells Angel. He refuses to accept Angel’s lame excuses and emphasizes to him that he needs to do something about it: “Angel... if there's a woman out there... who you find truly attractive, who you think about, let's say, most of the time, who represents even part of what you think makes the world worth fighting for and who doesn't view you as an entirely sexless shoulder to lean on...you have to do something about it.” But as even Angel guesses his words here could equally apply to himself and his unwillingness to be open with Fred about his feelings for her. Fred has for her part closed the door on Knox’s hopes and is clearly herself sending out signals to him. When she and Wesley are alone in the lab and Knox interrupts, she and not Wesley is the one who sends Knox home. And when she told him that her car was in the shop again, her motive was transparent. After all as head of a Department she could have got a car for herself. But instead of taking the hint clueless Wesley simply orders her a chauffeur. Like Angel, Wesley too suffers from a lack of self-esteem. I will not bore you with unnecessary repetition. Suffice to say his early experiences with his father (for long hinted at and clearly drawn out in “Lineage”) helped create someone who desperately wanted to be valued and respected but felt that he never would be. And like Angel he too has been hurt. This was most noticeable was when Fred first chose Gunn over him. Perhaps now he simply cannot believe that someone like Fred would find himself attractive. Perhaps he doesn’t want to risk believing it since he will have convinced himself that it can only end in disaster and he doesn’t want to be hurt again. Perhaps it is a little of both. So he rationalizes away all the signals that Fred has been giving him. Instead of seeing someone looking for a ride in his car, he chooses to see someone who simply wants a way of getting home. Instead of concentrating on the fact that Fred engineered a situation where she could be alone with him, he takes a throw away line and builds it into a rebuff it was never meant to be: Fred (talking about Knox): “He doesn't make me laugh at all. I mean, he tries, but...” Wesley: “I see. You're looking for someone funny.” Fred: “A...certain kind of funny. Yeah. But...I'm not really looking for so much as looking at…” And then there is Gunn. Again I will not waste time on going over old ground. Suffice to say, he was for long thought of as simply muscle, an uneducated street thug. He was more than that of course. In fact he often proved himself the most accomplished practical problem solver in the group such as when he figured out how to find Darla in “Reunion”. And, as was pointed out in “Unleashed” by Gunn himself:
But he was never convinced that others saw him in that way. That was why he felt undervalued, perhaps even superfluous. That was also why the brain upgrade was so important to him. Now for the first time he was making a contribution that no-one else in the group could, not even Wesley or Fred, with: “The law, the languages, the strategy.” And now he was losing it. So important had they in fact become to him that he decides: “I can't lose this. This power, these skills, they've…they've changed me, given me...” The doctor finishes the sentence for him “Meaning? And to have it taken away, it's... heartbreaking.” He calls this “the Flowers of Algernon syndrome.” And it is this reference that helps us understand what the point of the episode is.
Flowers for Algernon “Flowers for Algernon” is a book which tells the story of a 32 year old man named Charlie Gordon. Charlie was intellectually impaired but in the course of events rapidly achieves high intellectual abilities and then equally rapidly regresses. The story largely takes the form of journal entries and we can follow the progress and regression of Charlie by the standard of the grammar and spelling displayed therein. It was later made into a movie in which the part of Charlie was played by Cliff Robertson, hence Dr Sparrow’s comparison between the actor and Gunn. Essentially “Flowers for Algernon” is a classic man vs. himself narrative for, if Charlie is the protagonist, then the antagonist is his own intellectual ability. The conflict lies in his attitude to that ability and the resolution lies in how that conflict was finally settled. Charlie started out a simple kind of guy, easily pleased, good hearted, who basically only understood that people liked him when they laughed at him. But he realized that he was intellectually inferior to those around him and he wanted to overcome his handicap. So, when he was involuntarily committed to an experiment that would increase his intelligence level dramatically, he decides to take part in the experiment and do his own studies in the hope that it would make him “better” than he was. Along the way he falls in love with his teacher, Alice Kinnian. But Charlie’s initially warm-hearted and trusting personality is transformed as his intelligence increases. He grows cold, arrogant, and disagreeable. He gains perspective on his past and present. He realizes that people have often taken advantage of him and have been cruel to him for sport, knowing that he would not understand. Likewise, he realizes that when people have been kind to him, it usually has been out of condescension or out of an awareness that he is inferior. These realizations cause Charlie to grow suspicious of nearly everyone around him. Moreover, as his intelligence reaches genius level it distances him from people as much as his disability ever did. Charlie eventually convinces himself that he has lost feeling even for Alice Kinnian, one person whom he feels has never betrayed him and the only one for whom he has maintained a deep affection throughout his life. Feeling isolated from humanity, Charlie pursues a course of self-education and struggles to untangle his emotional life. He comes to feel that his mind contains two people: the new, genius Charlie, who wants to reach emotional maturity, and the older, disabled Charlie, whose actions are largely informed by the fear and shame his mother, Rose, instilled in him. But the old Charlie keeps on holding the new Charlie back from the fulfillment he seeks. When Charlie longs to make love to Alice, the old Charlie resurfaces, panics and distracts him—a sign that the shame Rose instilled in Charlie is still powerful, even if he cannot remember the origin of this shame. So here we see the two sides of the one coin. Although Charlie resents the mistreatment he endured while disabled, he harbors hostility toward his old self as well as to the mother who had treated him so badly. And, ironically, he feels the same lack of respect for his intellectual inferiors that many others used to feel for him. Both are a testament to the power that the past can have over the present. The central theme of the book is, therefore, one of self-understanding and self-acceptance. Although the situation in which Charlie finds himself is a bizarre one, with his rapid movement towards high intellect and an equally rapid regression, it gives him the mental capacity to analyze and articulate his need for achievement, acceptance and love. He is also able to fulfill these needs and then accept his regression in a philosophical manner, though after much suffering. The “Algernon” in the title is the lab mouse which has also been the subject of experimentation aimed at increasing his mental capacity. Charlie begins to notice the mouse acting erratically. The climax of “Flowers for Algernon” comes when Charlie discovers why. The effect of the “brain boost” was only temporary and Alegernon’s problem solving abilities were declining. The erratic behavior was simply the inevitable frustration that this caused. And Charlie sees in Algernon his own future of inevitable intellectual decline and frustration. But his intellectual curiosity is not sated, so he escapes with Algernon and works feverishly till he has the answer to the puzzle, that is, how the treatment has failed. With no hope of a future, but with the triumph of achieving his work goal behind him, Charlie seeks out his family and lays his ghosts by forgiving his mother. But his greatest conflict is his divided self. He finally accepts that the "old Charlie" will not go away, and the "new" one has a short life. He strongly feels that the "old Charlie" is a human being who has a right to live. With this understanding, he puts aside the temptation of death. After making peace with his past, he is able to reach Alice, at last, as a lover. They live together for a short time, until his regression takes over, but that is worth "more than most people find in a lifetime." Charlie sinks steadily but keeps his control and admits himself to a Home voluntarily. He concludes (in a reversion to the old ungrammatical and misspelled journal), "I’m glad I got a second chanse in life like you said to be smart because I lerned a lot of things that I never even new were in this world and I’m grateful I saw it all even for a littel bit."
Accepting Yourself The relevance of this for Angel is obvious. His struggle is, of course, different to Charlie’s. But it is directly comparable. His conflict is not with his intelligence but rather with his capacity for evil. And the sense of that evil within him keeps him isolated from everyone because it gives him a perspective on himself and on his relations with everyone else that is unique. He too is haunted by his past, a past represented by an earlier different and very threatening version of himself – Angelus. And that presence stands guard over any hope of future happiness that he might have. The catharsis for Charlie was, of course the realization that what he was striving for was inevitably going to be snatched away from him. That realization spurs him on to grasp what he can and to be satisfied with that. So he makes peace with both his past and the part of himself that represents the past. For Angel too the catharsis comes when he is confronted by a potential loss, this time of his vampire self. All this time he has hated what he was, a hatred symbolized by his answer when Nina asks him what he was doing for breakfast. The answer “Drinking blood” is an accurate description of what his food consists of but it carries implications, including the fact that he is a vampire and as such a killer. But more than that it implies an inevitability. He knows that he is going to be drinking blood because he has no choice in the matter. But when he was transformed by the Nest Egg into a puppet he began to miss what he had become. Nina knew he was a vampire. So did everyone in Wolfram and Hart. But he was ashamed to reveal to them that he was a puppet. Perhaps at this point something Gunn said was really just as applicable to him: “I can't lose this. This power, these skills, they've…they've changed me, given me...” The good Doctor (you understand I am being ironic here) finished the words for him: “Meaning? And to have it taken away, it's... heartbreaking.” Perhaps he also began to see the other side of being a vampire with a soul, the side articulated by Nina and quoted above: “You're this...I mean, God, you're an actual hero, and, I don't know, this may sound cliché coming from an art-school chick, but... the vampire thing's kind of sexy.” As we have seen a crucial part of this episode was the transformation of Angel into someone who was more extroverted and therefore more open to seeing himself through the eyes of others and taking account of the practical realities of life as opposed to being so introverted that he is driven by his own internal preoccupations. In this context there were two significant moments near the end of the episode. When Angel was fighting the leader of the demonic puppets – Polo – things don’t go very well at first. Then he overpowers Polo, pushes him to the ground and starts choking him. At this point Polo says: “So... you got a little demon in you.” This was an acknowledgement of where Angel’s ability to make a difference comes from. But even more significant was Angel’s response. He vamps out and says: “I got a lot of demon in me.” Here we have an explicit acknowledgement by Angel of how important the demon within him is; so it became something that was no longer only threatening but an essential part of whatever destiny he wanted to forge for himself. Then there was the moment when he asked Nina out to breakfast. She asked him: “What do puppets eat?” And he replied: “Let's find out.” Gone is the old sense of being trapped by the vampire within. There is a new sense of openness about what he might become.
A Deal With the Devil And the contrast is, of course, with Gunn. He is now obsessed by the intellect that he has been given. But unlike Charlie and indeed unlike Angel the realization that he might lose it doesn’t make him re-evaluate the importance he attached to his gift. But then unlike both Charlie and Angel, Gunn sees a clear and obvious way to retain what he feared he would lose: Doctor: “Currently, I
have a lot of capital sunk into a shipment that's being held up at customs.” Doctor: “Goodness, no. I make my own drugs. No, just an ancient curio, a collectible I hope to turn a profit on. If I was to give you the permanent upgrade, I'd say that, uh, you'd be more than able to cut through all of my red-tape problems.” Gunn: “I don't make deals with people like you.” Doctor: “And believe me, Charles, I don't make deals with people like you. Not the person you really are, the ignorant street muscle...the high-school dropout... I would, however, love to make a deal with Charles Gunn, Attorney at Law.” The language here is interesting. Like Angel and Charlie, it’s as if the old Gunn, the “ignorant street muscle”, was a character in his own right, different from the attorney. That character haunts Gunn as surely as old Charlie and Angelus haunt their counterparts. And that haunting presence seems to bar Gunn’s way to fulfillment. Charlie and Angel, in their different ways, however were able to make peace with the person they were. Charlie was left no choice. Angel began to see things from a different perspective and perhaps started to lose his fear of himself. Gunn couldn’t do the same thing because he was given a choice and because he continued to see the old Gunn, not for what he really was, but what he seemed to represent – the very thing about himself that Gunn most feared. And when Gunn was able to explain all about Gregor Framkin and his demonic bargain, we conclude that Gunn too has made his own deal with the devil. But the nature of that deal is a warning: Gunn: “Every contract signed with the lower planes is filed in the Library of Demonic Congress. You just gotta know where to look. Pretty tricky legalese, too. Framkin must have missed some of the fine print.” PuppetAngel: “Which allowed them to take over everything.” Gunn: “Including Framkin. These particular devils have a fairly distinctive M.O.” Framkin was in Lorne’s words a real rags to riches story. “Started out in a garage with a couple of used couches and a glue gun. He turned it into a puppet gold mine.” It was only when he suffered his own “Flowers for Algernon” scenario with declining ratings and threatened cancellation that he made his deal with the demonic puppets and ended up as a puppet himself, even being made to swallow his own tongue. We can perhaps see in him the ideals with which he started out in the way he chided Lorne and Gunn: “Gentlemen, I bring joy and laughter to children. You bring tax exemptions to nasty corporations, acquittals to the clearly guilty. Frankly, I doubt the world wants to hear from you.” But as Polo reminded Tommy the boy at the start of the episode: “You know Smile Time isn't free.” And that title then takes on a gruesome new meaning in the twisted smile on Tommy’s face, a smile that signifies the loss of innocence. That is the same innocence that Framkin lost . While Angel becoming a puppet helped him break free of the control his past exercised over him, Framkin’s deal with the demons turned him into their puppet. Are we seeing Gunn suffer the same fate?
Where Are We Going? My main criticism of the episode is that the season’s arc still seems stuck in neutral. This is the third episode in a row which is basically about Angel recovering his sense of purpose and gaining the motivation to change direction. More problematic still, it’s the second episode which specifically addresses his self-belief. As I have already observed if “I'm Angel. I beat the bad guys." in “You’re Welcome” meant anything, then it meant that Angel had once more found his own sense of self and rediscovered what his purpose was. And that sense of self was as someone who fought evil. Here too we see Angel finding a sense of self as someone who fights evil. In “You’re Welcome”, it’s Cordelia who shows the way through her belief in him. In “Smile Time” Nina helps him because she shows a belief in him. The only difference is that the emphasis on the burden from which Angel was freed changed. In “You’re Welcome” it was the ambiguity and uncertainty of the situation he found himself in that undermined his self-confidence. In “Smile Time” it was his history. Of course the truth is that one reinforced the other and it was certainly right that in the context of the season’s turning point all of these problems should be addressed. But having separate episodes deal with these issues in different ways simply spins things out too long and runs the risk of confusing thing. It suggests that they were indeed distinct problems that were susceptible of being addressed separately instead of being different aspects of the same problem which needed to be addressed together. Another problem I have is that there is a degree of artificiality about the way in which Angel was given an opportunity to take a different look at himself. First of all I don’t like the idea of real psychological problems – especially long standing and deep seated ones – being addressed by magical means. It’s something of a cheat. Secondly, Angel is still a puppet at the end of the episode when he asks Nina to breakfast. What is there to indicate that he will retain this extrovert personality when he does revert to normal? Won’t he just go back to being, well normal? Finally there is the fact that I just can’t follow the metaphysics. Why should being made a puppet physically have any effect on Angel psychologically? But I am a sucker for intricate literary parallels. And although I have my doubts about whether this was a story worth telling I can’t complain about the way it was told. The parallels between Charlie, Angel and Gunn were sophisticated. More importantly they were all close enough to be meaningful and there is no doubt about the strength, consistency and interest in the characterization we saw throughout the episode. I should add in fairness that I have not said very much about the Wesley/Fred interaction because it is far too close to a soap opera for my tastes. But I cannot close here without mentioning another aspect of the episode that I enjoyed very much. I notice the writing credit for this episode that goes to Joss Whedon. As we have seen, in order to save his show from cancellation, Gregor Framkin made a deal with the Devil. When he did so, a number of things happened. Everyone in the studio looses their individuality and power of independent thought. The same thing threatened to happen to Angel but he fought it off. When he did so“The Nest Egg” turned Angel into a puppet. The ostensible purpose of Smile Time was corrupted so that the apparently benign scenes on TV became the cover for more sinister actions intended to rob the audience of their innocence. Can we see parallels here between Whedon’s own experience with the WB and “Smile Time”? The Nest Egg is a thinly disguised metaphor for the importance of money – which drives everything, which subverts the true purpose of television shows and which turns anyone who comes within its influence into puppets. And if rumors are true the WB demanded and got certain changes to the series as a price for renewing it for the fifth season. Perhaps the very pointed nature of satire we see here owes something to how bruising a process Joss Whedon found this. If so then it’s just another example of how well ANGEL has done satire (as it did in “Sense and Sensitivity” and “Disharmony”.) It’s only a pity it didn’t do it more often.
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