With a little bit of luck
We can make it through the night
-DJ Luck and MC Neat

OK, I just quoted something written this millennium. Set Quote Machine to Purge...

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die; to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause; there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
That undiscover'd country from whose bourne
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.--Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember'd

Much, much better.

Hello everyone. Wow, I have 'Underneath' already. Having had my pleasures of the last week obliterated by revising for various exams, I hadn't read anything about the episode, so went in entirely without pre-conceptions, which is always the best way. This episode is an anomaly; it breaks boundaries of television serial storytelling, it tells whole sections of tales upside down (like the crazy alternate dimension), and it's fitted together so well thematically that, despite the fact it has no clear A-plot, B-plot, C-plot structure, it fits together in your subconscious memorably. That anyone could cancel this show after this Season, which will have to do something horrific not to finish as its best to date, is sadly no longer surprising. It's horrible, but it also makes me invest in the last six in a way I could never do with the final episodes of Buffy, which had departed so far from its usual style to some kind of self-indulgent 24-esque mystery show, and one with no third act (though as ever, Joss was alert to the criticism). Meanwhile, Angel Season Five revs up towards what could be the greatest departure of a television show since the field turned to poppies.

5.17- 'Underneath'

People, and indeed organisations, spend large chunks of their time in this episode hiding their underneaths. And they do so in ways that may seem initially dissimilar, but end up all tying together. The hint is in the teaser, as Angel remembers the line 'Handsome man, save me from the monsters'. And so, throughout the episode, we are confronted by people who have slipped back into Pylea-caves, hiding their underneaths away from the outside world, prone-feeling and so not interacting as they could do- in that impossible, healing way where you share your wounds.

We start with Angel, sitting, bereft at the long table. It's a strange image, one that might at first seem to suggest that his loneliness is arrived at through his obsession with being at the head of the table, of being the Champion. And so the cogs start to whirr. Where have all these people gone to? They've been lacerated by the pain of losing Fred, a consequence of Angel's own decision to come to Wolfram and Hart. At the company, Angel has had to hide away his vulnerable, human side, and become some kind of omniscient CEO, offay with details and eschewing uncalled for sentiment. In doing so, he has started to shut down. Nobody remembers the good bits claims Numero Cinco, and Angel, who has had his own hand in such a truism, is left without any heart in his work, given the same calling card that the wrestler was fifty years before. Holland Manners is mentioned again in this episode, and his spectre hangs long over Angel's fate.

If Angel is hiding the human underneath side in his work, the decision to do is finely symbolic of this choice. He chooses to rid himself of the wonderful mess of fatherhood, and instead become a professional, ensuited and ensuite-ed, ready for anything thrown at him as long as it's not personal. And so Angel becomes a tough nut to crack, but with a walnut for a heart.

The other members of the company share and reflect Angel's nursing of his wounded underneath, and in this epoisode, post-teaser, the idea is set up in three triangular segments, so that when we return to the idea of Champion, of Angel and Spike, we consider it through the kaleidoscopic variations on the central theme. How's that for an episode structure? I'd call it innovative...

CASE 1: Lorne.
Lorne has always been the empath, the empathy itself, so often. He's the one who can read the characters' journey, the writer's substitute and the mirror which reflects back Picassos which aren't photo-realistic, but make more sense of someone, (rather like Angel as opposed to, say, Big Brother, I sippose). But something's going wrong with Angel's capacity for self-reflection when Lorne is lying to people about their fortune. Now he just tells them what they want to hear, rather than what might help them, the very sharp-edged truth. Back in the olden days of Caritas, it was Lorne's perception, the bohemian spirit, ear to the ground, who helped Angel through his bitterest moments. At Wolfram and Hart, he's something quite different. The dislocation of corporations is suggested by his big office. He can schmooze with the starts, but has forgotten the spirit of the music down on the streets. His capacity to judge has been obliterated by a prolonged assault on the centre of his identity- his music. He's now drowned his wonderful vulnerable underneath, his empathy, in a little more sea, and a little less breeze, and is like Angel locked at the bottom of the ocean, or indeed locked in his CEO office.

CASE 2: Wesley.
Wesley is as ever the most self-aware to his circumstance, and provides the hint that unravels the whole meaning of the episode. The joke, inherently Joss sounding, is about questioning just how many people there are in that bar. By the end of it, we go into reverse gear and wonder whether there wasn't in fact only one person in the bar after all- the outer surface visage of the man getting drunk. In the situation where the person hides away, Angel in his office, Wesley with Illyria, Lorne in the bar and Gunn in his hospital bed, the surface gets so far away from the inner core of the person, the mantle so distended, if you will, that 'they were never that close.' Of course, the joke is also a baroque commentary on Angel and Wesley, and he of the double barrel is clearly well-considered enough to have seen both angles. For he is the one who reels the deepest with loss, left with just the Shell, the outer surface of Fred, the inside of which has been filled up like water into a bottle, by someone else entirely.

CASE 3: Gunn.
And so to one of the best written scenes of the episode, which only gathers pace and intelligence by the subversion in the ending. Angel and Gunn together. Angel sees Gunn's surface, reading a gossip magazine, and realises that he to is nursing that hidden underneath, this time the eternal anger at himself for signing that flimsy, irrelevant piece of paper. And for a second, we wonder whether we're going to see Angel, not Angelus, use his barely controlled rage in the same way as he did to Wesley in 'Forgiving'. The fact that he doesn't is a relief to those, (myself included) worrying about the posthumous Canonisation of Fred's character (in reality, Fred and Angel were never that close), but is also a genuinely brilliant piece of writing, where Angel explains that Gunn's gnawing guilt is the signature of the fac that he is a good man, but that he must not let it control him. The Pylea-caves of Lorne, Gunn and Wesley are understandable, but they need to put down their optics and start seeing life again. Gunn needs to use his tragically-won enhancements for the Good; Wesley needs to get out of his completely immobile philosophising with Illyria; and Lorne needs to find his 'smile and a quip': because eventually, that's what the green guy does.

And so we have these three aspects of Angel's journey. Aside from Spike, who is doing a different job paralleling Angel's journey, these are the three main male reflections of himself since, hmm, well Season Two and Lindsey. And so we end up the first act in The Truman Show, or what could probably equally be referred to as Generic Toothless 50's Filmland. The music does a genuinely lovely job of confering this reality onto the scene in which a hundred identical people retrieve a hundred identical papers. The irony is, that in this densest of all first acts, Lindsey is the only person who has not chosen to coddle his Underneath. He's had it coddled for him.

Lindsey has been trying to find truth out about the Senior Partners, continuing on his mission begun in Dead End to not let them make you play their game, and to understand them from the outside. So when we come to the end of the episode and here Lindsey repeat Angel's Hero Speech from 'Deep Down', the amazing thing is how much both of them are just an echo of Lindsey in 'Dead End'. And while we know what's been happening all Season, it is still instructive to see how far Angel has come, how much he has changed, from the cynical fighter of the lawyers he was less than a year ago.

Meanwhile, after the first act draws many of the conclusions of the episode, the second and third acts give us the major action moments, before the fourth act tells us what we knew already, which, once combined with the earlier revelations, gives us the moral of the story. Seriously, watch it again: this is not the structure of an episode you're likely to see again any time soon.

Lindsey escapes from Suburban Hell, an apt and literal realisation of the oft-posited metaphor. In surburbia, it's the repetition and the blandness that will grind you down. Hiding not so very far under the surface, American Beauty style, is your spouse and child with uzis. Suburbia's pain is creeping, just like Wolfram and Hart's evil; invidious yet insidious. And eventually, you must abandon your real hopes and desires to keep living in this vaccinated, sterilised vision. In the basement of your sub-conscious, underneath the carefuly balanced lipstick smiles, is your heart, torn out over and over again.

Lindsey, put there without his consent, languishing in the blandness, and, on a surface level, quite enjoying it, is rescued, and Gunn steps into the breach. This is one of our major twists and conclusions. Gunn's sacrifice may, to the viewer who's tuned in for Merceds McNab's hotness, look like an altruistic, amazing act of humanity. It certainly gets the job done. But it's not good enough, for two reasons. The first is that Angel loses another part of the gang, and another aspect of himself. Lorne still telling people what they want to hear, chokes back his momentary disbelief that they left Gunn behind. They didn't used to make these sacrifices so easily. More importantly, Gunn has just done the exact opposite of what Angel needs to learn, and even what he claims he's going to do. There's no point, and indeed no way, of atoning without knowing what you did. The word 'atone' is a back-formation from 'at-one-ment'. To become 'at-one' with yourself, you need to reconcile yourself and all your memories to the grain of sand that is your present, and the vast desert vista of the future. Gunn, in walking into a sub-reality where he knows nothing of his previous life, is walking straight back into his Pylea cave, grossly unaware of his back-story.

The fourth act tells us a lot of what we already know. Angel is being distracted by Wolfram and Hart by the imminent apocalypse. He has gone two men down due to the change being CEO has inflicted upon him. Lindsey allows him to see, in his own reflection, just how played he has been. And that in turn makes him call into question just what he took the bargain for.

For it was a bargain- a bargain for the life (or death?) of Connor. In Lindsey's world, involuntarily put into paradise, there are ripped-out hearts and machine guns. What is Connor's world like? He like Gunn cannot manufacture atonement from a life he doesn't understand. Like Gunn's decision, Angel's for Connor was the wrong one, since it sliced away what lay beneath, instead of introducing those two men in the bar to a deeper friendship. On Connor's fate hangs the denouement of the entire series.

A few oddments from the end section:
-We repeatedly see Illyria in the mirror this week. OK, inner outer woman, surface and underneath, but I can't help thinking that separately, the twin suggestion in her name is still being played with

-'I fell in love', says Eve, who has become mortal as a result. She is the one dismissed in this episode, and yet she doesn't appear to end up so unhappy: she has Lindsey back. She is the one most reconciled to an underneath she didn't even realise she had.

-'I reek of humanity' says Illyria. Does even she want to hide her vulnerabilities?

I'd love to know how much of Joss Whedon's own work lay underneath Craft and Fain's credit, but overall that's just trivia. Another wonderful episode, in a quite superlative Season.

TCH