EPISODE 5.17

Underneath

Written by: Sarah Fain and Elizabeth Craft

Directed by: Skip Schoolnik

Layers upon layers

The central theme of “Underneath” is best illustrated by the nature of the Wolfram and Hart “holding dimension” in which Lindsay is trapped.  Gunn explains it as their version of the penalty box.  Eve talks about its purpose in the following terms:

“They would want him to suffer horrors. Lindsey is in some hideous...awful hell.”

But as soon as she says this we cut to Lindsey lying in a bed of luxurious red patterned sheets, kissing a beautiful blonde woman.  We are then introduced to his "son".  And all three of them seem happy and very much to love one another.  In fact, we quite quickly discover that Lindsey appears to be leading a very pleasant suburban life.  If anything the juxtaposition of this scene with Eve’s predictions of hellish torment emphasizes just how idyllic Lindsey’s circumstances are.

But as the title suggests “Underneath” is built on the proposition that everything is not as it seems on the surface.  Eve says:

“There are layers upon layers at Wolfram & Hart, Angel, things you'll never understand.”

And when Lindsey is helping his “son” study for a test, the subject is the layers of which the earth is made: the crust, the mantle, the outer core and the inner core -   each one underneath the other.

In fact the signs are all there that the holding dimension isn’t all it seems.  For a start everything is just too perfect and that alone makes it very different from any reality we know.  Then, when Lindsey goes to collect his newspaper from the driveway we see that every house in the street is identical.  Indeed at exactly the same time as Lindsey collects his newspaper, everyone else on the street does the same thing.  This is not natural.   Someone or something is creating an illusion.  And an illusion is something that masks a reality.  In other words there is something underneath this façade. 

And that something is literally and not just metaphorically underneath.  When Lindsey’s wife asks him to go down into the cellars to fetch a replacement for an oven light he is curiously unwilling.  The combination of his wife’s insistence and his reluctance suggest that there is something down there that he is afraid of and that he must be persuaded to face.  We do not see what he is afraid of immediately but we eventually learn.  When Angel, Spike and Gunn arrive in the holding dimension to rescue him, all four are forced down into the cellar and we can now see that it is in fact a torture dungeon.  Not only that, we also learn that every day Lindsey has had his heart literally ripped out from his chest in that dungeon.  These are the layers.  This is the Hell beneath the surface ideal.

Wolfram and Hart have created a pleasant suburban environment not because it pleases Lindsey but to control him, to make sure that he continues to play the part that they have mapped out for him and that he delivers himself into their torture chamber at the appointed time very day.  And the wife and son that he seems so happy with are simply his jailers – and murderous ones as well, judging by their attack on Angel and the others.  So, it is only by probing through these outer layers that we can get at the truth.

But it is not in Lindsey’s case that we see the real relevance of this truth.  The episode opens with a shot of Angel sitting in his office.  All the trappings of power are there: a conference table at which important decisions are taken, a speakerphone connecting him to a  secretary to do his bidding and a sheaf of folders with assignments for people (complete with bullet points – I LOVE bullet points).  But these superficialities belie he reality underneath, a fact we become aware of when Angel wonders why no-one has turned up to the meeting he has evidently arranged:

Harmony: “I know! I called everyone. They're just...”

Angel: “…not here. I can see that. If they were here, I wouldn't be alone. Why am I alone?

And even when Spike turns up – late – he treats Angel with scant respect, making fun of all the paraphernalia with which Angel is now surrounded.  He even produces beer out of his briefcase and proceeds to drink from it while his CEO is talking – which is pretty much the ultimate no-no in any office. 

The illusion of being powerful and important hides the reality.  And that reality is illustrated by the reason for everyone else’s absence:

There, told you how much I loved bullet points.  Fred was immensely important to everyone.  Yet none of them were able to help her, even with all the power seemingly at their command, and all are now traumatized by their collective and individual failure.  Even Angel cannot help but recall mockingly Fred’s very first words to him:

“Handsome man, save me from the monsters.”

Ultimately, he couldn’t.  As he later says himself:

“Spend every day lying to myself about making the world a better place.”

Angel has therefore seen beneath the surface illusion and understood that it was a lie. And here too we see the parallel between his situation and that of Lindsey.   Just as the latter could not escape from the holding dimension until he first escaped the illusion of normality created for him by the amulet that he was wearing, so Angel could not escape from Wolfram and hart's other prison until he did the same thing.  Of course Lindsey’s realization was only the first step to escape.  Neither he nor any of the others would have got out of the cellar if Gunn hadn’t understood the nature of the Holding Dimension and how it worked.  When Angel sees Gunn put on Lindsey’s amulet he is horrified:

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 here. Wolfram and Hart does. If one leaves, one has to stay. A void is impossible.”

In the same way, in order to escape from the predicament that he currently find himself in – a situation in which Wolfram and Hart also seem to make all the rules – Angel must understand the truth about them and what they are up to:

Angel: “I have to do better. The Senior Partners have a plan. “

Spike: “Yeah, the prophecy. That ever-lovin' apocalypse you keep going on about. “

Angel: “Yeah, which apocalypse— the one last year or the year before that? No, the senior partners are up to something now, and I'm not waiting for them to spring it on us. We're through operating in the dark. “

A Hell on Earth

Ironically though, just as Angel revealed the truth to Lindsey about the illusory life he was leading, it is Lindsey who reveals the truth to Angel about the Senior Partners’ plans for the world.  These were in fact foreshadowed by Spike at the very start of the episode:

We all paint on our happy faces every day, when all we really wanted is to pound the neighbor's missis, steal his Ben Franklins, and while we're at it, not think about the third of the world that's starving to death.

Lindsey echoes this when he says:

“The world's a cesspool... full of selfish and greedy beasts. We live, we die.”

And it is in this context that he goes on to talk about the Senior Partners’ plans:

Lindsey: “It's here. It's been here all along. Underneath. You're just too damn stupid to see it.”

Angel: “See what?”

Lindsey: “The apocalypse, man. You're soaking in it.”

Spike: “I've seen an apocalypse or two in my time. I'd know I one was under my nose.”

Lindsey: “Not an apocalypse. The Apocalypse. 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.”

Angel: “You're saying everything we do... it's a distraction... to keep us busy from looking under the surface.”

Lindsey: “Ding! We have a winner! The world keeps sliding towards entropy and degradation, and what do you do? You sit in your big chair, and you sign your checks, just like the senior partners planned. The war's here, Angel. And you're already 2 soldiers down.”

The interesting thing about this aspect of the episode is that structurally it creates a very nice parallel between the world on the one hand and the Senior Partners’ plans for it on the other.  Spike describes society as being layered with seemingly decent normal behavior on the surface and the nastier underbelly beneath it.  And of course this mirrors very nicely Wolfram and Hart’s own holding dimension.  And while this is going on Angel and his cohorts are lulled into a false sense of security by being persuaded that they are actually doing some good when their involvement with Wolfram and Hart prevents them from doing anything really effective to combat the seismic shifts going on underneath them.  Again the surface is the illusion that hides the deeper reality.  And another nice thing about this picture is the way that it picks up a number of threads from earlier on.  For example, “Shells” also emphasized the difference between an outer layer and the reality contained within it.  "Underneath" in fact ties up very neatly all the themes that have emerged since “You’re Welcome” and gives us some solid evidence of how much progress Angel has made.  First of all there was his little pep talk to Gunn:

"You know, the thing about atonement is, you never run out of chances... but you gotta take 'em. You can't hide in some hospital room and pretend it's all gonna go away... 'cause it never will. "

Here he could very well be addressing the same words to himself.  He has blown his fair share of opportunities for atonement but he too is now determined to take the next one that comes along.  And this emphatically does not mean compromise with the Senior Partners.  So when Hamilton, the new liaison says

“I have some excellent ideas I can't wait to share.”

His reply is very telling:

“This is my house. The only ideas that matter are mine.”

The fact that Angel went out looking for answers to his questions about the Senior Partners’ plans also illustrates, in Lindsey’s words, that he was:

“... the Angel of yore. Takes no prisoners, suffers no fools.”

This is someone who again has the confidence to decide what was right and what was wrong and to go all out for principle rather than someone so uncertain of himself that he was left swinging in the wind of compromise and rational calculation.

And finally, the Apocalypse Lindsey describes echoes the conversation between Holland Manners and Angel in “Reprise”.  Not only that but it gives a very interesting twist to an idea that is something of a Fantasy cliché.  There have been so many occasions on which an Apocalypse has been threatened that it is hard to continue to take them seriously, let alone make them interesting.  However the idea of an Apocalypse not as a single cataclysmic battle between the forces of good and evil but rather as some sort of slow degeneration of human values leading to a world where pride, envy, gluttony, lust, anger, greed and sloth predominate is different.  Pride means more than self-respect.  It is obsessed with comparisons – with being better than other people.  Envy is not just coveting your friend’s car or job, but being discontent with what your own labors have brought you and wishing ill on what another’s labors have justly brought them.  I could go on, but I don’t think that it is necessary because the common thread is that people put themselves at the center of the universe, adopt a wholly distorted system of values and  give a wholly unjustified and excessive priority to the meeting of their baser wants.  And again the idea of layers in which the surface masks the reality occurs.   In the Wolfram and Hart Apocalypse everyone will be out for their own happiness and life may appear normal, even ideal.  But as Spike points out there are thousands of types of Hell and a society modelled along these lines will be truly Hell on earth.

Moreover this version of the Apocalypse does have a rather greater power to make us think than an Apocalypse in which some great horned Monster appears from under the earth and starts destroying things.   After all what we see here is simply an interpretation of our own world, albeit a somewhat simplified and exaggerated one.  It is a perfectly legitimate question to ask whether the world we are currently living in really is going to Hell in a handcart and this episode asks it.

And there is another way in which this view of the Apocalypse I think successfully addresses a hanging thread.  Since season 1 Wolfram and Hart’s interest in Angel has been predicated on the idea that he plays a pivotal role in the Apocalypse for good or evil.  It was always difficult to see how Angel could be persuaded to do evil knowingly.  But if we assume that Angel was in a position to help the forces of good but simply stood idly by, then that would indeed be to play a pivotal role in the triumph of evil.  As the old saying goes:

“In order for evil to triumph it is simply necessary for good men to do nothing.”

And indeed the sort of “good fight” that Angel resolved upon in the aftermath of “Epiphany” as an antidote to Holland Manners’ vision of the world is exactly the sort of world that is the opposite to the one described both by Spike and Lindsey:

Angel: ”Well, I guess I kind of worked it out. If there's no great glorious end to all this, if nothing we do matters... then all that matters is what we do. 'Cause that's all there is. What we do. Now. Today. I fought for so long, for redemption, for a reward, and finally just to beat the other guy. I never got it. “

Kate: “And now you do?”

Angel: “Not all of it. 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.”

Angel’s fight is for a world in which the human connection comes before material gain and others come before you.  And because of this it is the world in which  the Wolfram and Hart apocalypse would be impossible.

So, these are all reasons to be positive about “Underneath”.  But ultimately it left me feeling more than a little dissatisfied.  And the reason for this is best illustrated by Lindsey when he tells Angel what should have been obvious to him: the Apocalypse is here

“It's been here all along. Underneath. You're just too damn stupid to see it.”

And it is only when Angel hears and believes this that he realizes the real Wolfram and Hart agenda is offering him the post of CEO.  The nature of the Apocalypse is interesting but in story-telling terms entirely secondary to the real issue – what was the Wolfram and Hart plan and what should Angel do to combat it.  And the truth is that this has been obvious for a long time now.  In fact we were hit over the head with it – by the debate over what to do with Lucien Drake in “Soul Purpose”, by Angel’s frustration over Greenaway at the start of “You’re Welcome”, by his competition with Spike in “Destiny” and “Soul Purpose” and above all by Cordelia’s help in “You’re Welcome” and the sad case of Lawson in “Why We Fight”.  Indeed, as we have already seen, this episode stressed that Angel had already decided to give up messy compromises with evil and start doing the right thing because it was the right thing.  He did not need to know the precise nature of the Apocalypse to know this, just as he did not need to believe Holland Manners in “Reprise” to know how to behave in the aftermath of “Epiphany”.  The good fight is not an appropriate tactical response to a specific threat.  It is simply the right thing to do.  But apparently six episodes on from what I took to be the pivotal episode in this season’s arc Angel is still unsure about what he should be doing and quite frankly I find this both hard to believe and frustrating.  Instead of spending time on the actual resolution of the struggle between Angel and Wolfram and Hart, therefore, the writers have spent an inordinate amount of time on how Angel came to decide to fight back.  Moreover, in this context, they made a huge deal about the intrusion of Illyria into this world.  But the idea of her as a threat was wrapped up in one episode and now she seems to be used for no other purpose than to help Wesley resolve his own personal issues, especially those relating to Fred.  And while I think Illyria is a much more entertaining character than Fred I find it very difficult to account for this choice.

Little Boxes

However that does not mean that the scenes between her and Wesley are without interest.  Far from it.  They are among the bleakest in this episode and in their unremitting gloom they serve to provide us with further food for thought about the human condition that, if anything, strengthens our sense of the turning point that has been reached.

When we first see Wesley he is dreaming about Fred.  When she comes up behind him and announces her presence, he says:

            “I thought I was in isolation.”

She then asks him:

            “Whose fault is that?”

Wesley is cutting himself off, dreaming about Fred, torturing himself with regret and using alcohol to dull the pain.  When Fred asks for a joke, instead of something amusing or entertaining Wesley recounts this story:

“Two men walk into a bar. The first man orders a scotch and soda. The second man remembers something he'd forgotten, and it doubles him over with pain. He falls to the floor shaking.... and then through the floor and into the Earth. He looks back up at the first man, but he doesn't call out to him. They're not that close.”

The second man is obviously Wesley and the reference to him falling into the earth draws our attention both to the depth of his pain and also to his isolation.  And it is a self-imposed isolation.  It’s not that the first man doesn’t want to help or doesn’t hear.  It’s that Wesley won’t ask for help because – absurdly – the two aren’t that close.  It’s almost as if he were seeking an excuse to be left in his pain.  As Fred observes Wesley knows exactly where he is, what he is doing and why. 

But why won’t he try to come to terms with his loss by opening up to the others?  We get an answer to this when we realize that Illyria too is in self-imposed isolation.  She complains about how small the world is.  She cannot be herself.  She tells what she once was:

All I am is what I am. I lived seven lives at once. I was power and the ecstasy of death. I was god to a god.

Then she describes what she is now:

I…I'm trapped... on a roof. Just one roof... in this time and this place, with an unstable human who drinks too much whiskey and called me a Smurf.

Here above all we get the sense of her frustration and anguish at the limitations she now faces:

Illyria:  “It's too small. It's too small. I can't breathe. I can't live with these walls. I can't breathe. There's no room for anything real.

Wesley: “It's all right. “

Illyria: “I should gut you where you stand. You challenged me. There's not enough space to open my jaws. My face is not my face. I don't know what it will say. “

Once she was free to wander in whatever dimension she wanted:

"I traveled all of them as I pleased. I walked worlds of smoke and half-truths, intangible.  Worlds of torment and of unnamable beauty.   Opaline towers as high as small moons. Glaciers that rippled with insensate lust. And one world with nothing but shrimp. I tired of that quickly."

But now she will not leave this world.  Just like Wesley, she had a choice about continuing her state of isolation or ending it.  And she chose to continue it.  The explanation she gives is simple:

“I fear in any other dimension in this form I'd be but prey to those I knew.”

 And it is in this context that we see her try to come to terms with the human condition.  She asks

“Your world is so small. And yet you box yourselves in rooms even smaller. You shut yourselves inside... in rooms, in routines.”

The question and the answer are directly relevant to the self-imposed isolation that both she and Wesley have chosen:

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.”

Illyria: “We are so weak.”

Wesley: “Yes we are.”

Illyria cannot bear the truth about her present weakness.  So she separates herself from those who would demonstrate that weakness with greatest force.  Wesley cannot bear the truth about his loss.  So he separates himself from all human contact that would remind him most strongly of what he had lost.  The frailty of the human condition is not to be found in physical weakness but rather in our inability to face up to the truth about ourselves.  Of course in exploring this idea the writers have not quite been able to sustain the metaphor of layers or the idea of a surface illusion hiding an underlying truth.  Instead they refer to space and enclosed areas in dealing with the way in which humans isolate themselves from the truth.  So they switch between Wesley and Illyria discussing boxing themselves in rooms and Fred referring to the depths of Wesley’s memories about her (at the same time implying how deep the pain goes too):

“ This is only the first layer. Don't you wanna see how deep I go?”

The Truth Will Set You Free

But what both metaphors do is to emphasize the harm caused when we do not face up to the truth.  And the reason for this emphasis is to be found in a comparison between Wesley and Illyria (as well as Lorne) on the one hand and Gunn on the other.  Like Wesley and Illyria Lorne has tried to hide from the truth.  His parting words to the bartender are

Lorne: “What I know is I started drinking the moment that I found out that a girl I loved was gonna die. Every time I get to the bottom of the glass, I hope that that last drop is gonna take me the distance.”

Bartender: “Ok”.

Lorne: “A simple plan that failed utterly, which is why I'm gonna heave my tuchis off this stool, strap the bells on, and with a smile and a quip, go back into the belly of a very ugly beast and pretend like I can help. Hmm. 'Cause that's what the green guy does.”

In its own way this is a picture every bit as bleak and hopeless as the encounters between Wesley and Illyria.  The contrast to Gunn is striking.  In his hospital bed, he isn’t in that much better a situation.  But, as I observed in my review of “Shells”, he has at least faced up to the truth about himself.  He knew when he signed the piece of paper for Dr Sparrow that there would be consequences for someone.  But that is only the start.  He must now face up to the rest of the truth about himself.  He is suffering because he deserves to:

“Gunn... I know you feel bad about your part in what happened to Fred. And you should. For the rest of your life, it should wake you up in the middle of the night.”

But that in itself means nothing.  It is only by doing something to atone for his sin that good will come out of it.  Otherwise the high price he paid for his brain upgrade really will be for nothing and only Wolfram and Hart wins from that bargain.  And Gunn listens to the truth of those words and faces up to them.  In doing so he makes a huge sacrifice, facing an indeterminate sentence of pain and suffering.  But it is not purposeless pain and suffering.  It is to help Angel and the others fight Wolfram and Hart’s plans.  So, notwithstanding what it now costs him can anyone doubt but that Gunn’s choice – of facing up to a hard truth – is better than either Wesley’s or Lorne’s?

But, however nice this idea, you cannot help feeling it is a little irrelevant to the arc at this stage.  Lorne is a minor character and always has been.  Wesley’s illusions, however important to him, are really irrelevant to the development of the fifth season arc.  They are personal in nature, almost accidental from Wolfram and Hart’s point of view.  Indeed all the scenes between these two seem entirely cut-off from the main thrust of the action, almost as if we were watching a separate plot unfold rather than something intended to be integral to the arc.  Now as always the series is centered in the person of Angel and, as we have already seen, he has broken free of his own illusions and is in fact challenging others to do the same.  So not only is Wesley’s character arc here (with its emphasis on his unwillingess to face up to reality) separated from the main development of the arc, it actually seems to be looking backwards.