The old man comes out on the hill
and looks down to recall earlier days
in the valley. He sees the stream shine,
the church stand, hears the litter of
children's voices. A chill in the flesh
tells him that death is not far off
now: it is the shadow under the great boughs
of life. His garden has herbs growing.
The kestrel goes by with fresh prey
in its claws. The wind scatters the scent
of wild beans. The tractor operates
on the earth's body. His grandson is there
ploughing; his young wife fetches him
cakes and tea and a dark smile. It is well.
RS Thomas
"Who you gonna call? God, that phrase is never gonna be usable again."
-Spike in 'The Killer in Me'. And, in light of this week's happenings, very true.
Hello everyone.
That poem above is one of my very favourites. I love the way it deals with the idea of acceptance of death. It's an utterly beautiful vision. It shows how, even in the nidst of life continuing, death can be a fulfilment of that life. I'm transported by his wife's 'dark smile'. Are we merely supposed to know that she has dark hair, or is it dark in the sense of being complex- a happiness, a rightness tinged by loss? And those three final words: 'It is well', say so much more about humanity than much more complicated, knowingly poetic words might do. Acceptance of the beauty of death, the shadow of the monument. His legacy, his nameless legacy, is painted all over the scene. His garden has herbs growing the abundance, the flavour of life.His grandson is there, ploughing. This isn't some Marlovian country idyll- work continues, and is hard, but somewhat gratifying, and continues through generations.
Hold that thought
5.2- 'Just Rewards'
I didn't much mind Just Rewards. It was pretty good for a Fury episode, and was laced through with a certain solidity which we've come to expect from him. He does what is needed, he just doesn't pirouette as much as the others.
The centrepiece was not Spike, but Spike-Angel, (and just occasionally, Spike/Angel). From Angel's foreboding 'Spike' to Spike's own plaintive 'Help me' at the end of the episode, there was a parallel being drawn rather than an anti-parallel. The line that sent shivers up my spine was actually the one time that Angel got, supposed righteously, angry with Spike:
SPIKE: You are, ya ponce! You're my problem. You got it too good. You're king of a 30-floor castle, with all the cars, comfort, power, and glory you could ever want, and here I save the world, throw myself on the proverbial hand grenade for love, honor, and all the right reasons, and what do I get? Bloody well toasted and ghosted is what I get, isn't it? It's just not fair.
ANGEL: Fair?! You asked for a soul! I didn't. It almost killed me. I spent a hundred years trying to come to terms with infinite remorse. You spent 3 weeks moaning in a basement, and then you were fine! What's fair about that?!
As well as a playful riff on the use of Spike in Season Seven, and possibly again with some of Fury's slightly renegade opinions on Spike hidden under the surface, Angel shows that he has a lot of problems with Spike's story as contrasted to his own. We are of course going to see Spike as the doubter, the person who sees Angel's corporate business as dangerously morally ambiguous, who worries about the purities of Angel's motives. What is more interesting to a long-time viewer, is not how Spike instils doubts in Angel's mind, but how Angel instils doubts in Spike. The way I see it, Spike's snarkiness, his arguments that the supposedly pure Champion his his Journey tinged with darkness, is not all that different a narrative trick from Buffy in Season Six.
Spike's Uncomfortable Teller of Truth mantle melts, thaws and resolves itself into a man who creates stories. Stories of himself, and stories of others. The posh poet dressed as the working class rebel. The Slayer Killer as the noble lover. The murderer saving the world. And correspondingly, we have the Slayers with Death Wishes, the mother who never cared about her son, the Gang who don't tell Spike about resurrecting Buffy because they thought he wouldn't want to kill her again. Not all these stories are the right ones- they are elaborate narratives constructed from Spike's perspective. 'Fool For Love' the instigator of this genius of overlapping stories, was told by Spike with one of the prime ideas being a genuine falsehood. It turns out neither Nikki nor Buffy want to die.
Here on Angel, Spike can and will do this again. But it is how the dynamism of his grand-sire, lover and adversary affects him which is the new story. Spike will go on making up beautifully tangled false meta-narrations on what's going on, and sometimes they will contain a shard of truth that will be useful. But how does the World-Saving Hero adjust to the world of moral ambiguity and Wolfram and Hart.
First of all, it is crucially important to implement some reason whereby Spike will be affected by others' actions. As the trickster, the Chaos element who was more incredibly dangerous than he had ever been redemptive of others, there needed to be a plot element both tying him down to Wolfram and Hart, and making him play to Angel's rules. We get the section where Spike claims [admittedly acting] that he will be head of Wolfram and Hart, and things will happen his way, with his cars. A dig at people worried about Spike's role in Season Five, certainly. But also the acknowledgement that Spike has never been the person in charge. His (faux) vision sounds faintly ludicrous. We must remember that Spike has never been the main player, and has always been hampered by other people's rules.
For Spike's ghostly incorporeality is certainly not a new idea. Running throughout the narrative of Buffy is the interaction in Spike's character between the dynamic, physical warrior and the verbal, creative artist. And this element is always prepetuated by the writers. Spike is, in one way or another, crippled from normal vampire staus almost throughout the series. After his initial forays as an admittedly charismatic Monster of the Week, he is put in a wheelchair to let the physical incapacity play against Angelus and his own lust for violence. Then in Season Three, he is incapacitated by his state, having been left by Drusilla. In Season Four, he is immediately chipped, starting the longest running era, that where his violence is restricted to demons, and thus allowing him to develop a flimsy corruptible understanding of a moral compass, of what it is to be human. By the time this is removed, we have him both struggling under other personas, (the William of 'Beneath You', the warrior of 'Get it Done'), and finally trying to understand what it is to have a soul.
So Spike's incorporeality is not much different from his earlier neutering or incapacity as a plot device to keep the creative, loquacious artist in Spike in conflict with the physical anarchist rebel. Here again, he is tied to Angel by the amulet, and he is unable to do anything much about Wolfram and Hart's modus operandi because of his lack of substance. This will continue to be useful for the writers. But what Spike, a symbol of chaos, wants, is the ability to inflict chaos again. And so, he takes Hainsley's offer...
Except that he doesn't. In a twist vaguely reminiscent of 'Enemies', but blurred and therefore significantly less elegant, we actually have Spike apparently working against Angel for his own selfish purposes, but in reality working to get rid of Hainsley. And then, in an excellent description of the tension in their working relationship, Spike can't refuse a few more blows for Angel. So the audience is left to wonder- just what is Spike's motive, and why doesn't he either re-gain a body in dastardly fashion with Hainsley, or, as he claims to Angel, die altogether?
For me, the most moving section of the episode is a line that didn't even turn out to be real. When Spike comes to Angel, and, in a moment of calm reflection, they talk about what Spike's role is. He can't escape, but he can't do anything, as he doesn't have a body. And so, finished, allowed the rest he called out for to Buffy in 'Beneath You', he is suddenly yanked back. And Spike's 'Eternal Rest' is utterly compromised. His return, the bleakness of it, is an interesting parallel to Buffy in 'Bargaining'. Now he understands a little of how it is to be resurrected after saving the world. There's even the haging on, largely unwanted love interest- Harmony, who inadvertently sums up Spike's character: 'A leopard doesn't change its stripes'. Spike, despite the multitude of apparent changes, has only changed his coat once, when he received his soul. Now, as two of a kind with Angel, he is one thing that has properties of another, as vampire with a soul, a leopard with stripes. But now with this extra layer, this ghostliness, he appears, perhaps, ready for rest. He saves the world, he gets his Just Reward. Sleep. But apparently not so. He is ready for death.
In the moment we are title-carded at the beginning of the episode, that scene back in Sunnydale in 'Chosen', where Spike wants to see how it ends we see a Spike surveying the landscape. The dying uber-vamps. The monster-man, not man-monster, that Buffy has made him. Something better. There's time for survival for a family he has just begun to admire apart from Buffy, but also there's the soulful shaft of sunlight, burning him up. There's Buffy to carry on the work; hard as it will be, and the grandfather ploughing the field in Los Angeles. But for him- 'It is well'. Then torn back, he inhabits what he believes slightly less literally than Buffy might just be hell. Angel in charge of a conglomerate. And he's ready to face death again. Death as escape? Death as accepting life's continuation. We shall never know.
We'll never know because it wasn't genuinely part of the plan. The plan was tricksy, and slightly devalued the earlier moments. And then, at the end of the episode, we return to something much more Old Testament.
The Biblical themes in Angel have always been more Old Testament than new, and when we're told at one point 'We should probably avoid "An eye for an eye" escalation', we chuckle knowingly about how the New Testament absolves the Old, and Spike takes a look at Angel's blood and thunder and has words to say. But at the end, it seems like Spike is not so much redeemed after all. The place he would go to is not the place heroes go. He feels himself slipping towards Hell, and he is doomed for a certain time to walk the earth. But rather than telling fearsomely of his untimely death, he is instead begging for more chance to survive, to try to live a good life. He is edging towards Angel's Epiphany. Those three weeks aren't what Angel's 100 years was about, and Spike still yearns at least for redemption, if not for atonement. And so, as Fred looks on, confused and largely mute, Spike pleads desperately, not to die, but to live, to stay here. Then is the time that he might mumble 'It is well'.
Miscellaneousness:
-Wesley is interrupted by Angel after the line. "Maybe Wolfram and Hart want him here. He may be the one that...". As far as I'm concerned, that's ME's first ever hint that the shanshu may not be solely [soul-ly?] Angel's preserve. Perhaps Wesley wasn't going to say that, but it seemed damn likely as an ever so quick foreshadowing.
-Issues of control are raised by Hainsley. 'Control: that's all that anyone really wants.' Of course, Hainsley, the necromancer believes he has control over the dead, but actually is completely played by Spike, so his control is less full than he expects it. Both Angel and Spike's control are crucial in this episode. Spike's control is all about corporeality, the choice of when to die, the choice of redemption, the necessity of kinship, and everything else I've outlined above. Angel's control is something mentioned by Masq earlier, that of his control over Connor. Yes, it's still there folks. Angel is repeatedly told off for withholding information in this episode. He doesn't tell Wesley Spike saved the world. He deosn't tell Wesley about Spike's soul. He tells them only a convenient patchwork of lies. And then, with a gloriously philosophical expression on his face, he is in control as he prepares to kill Spike's ghost. What's the piece of control, the unilateral decision, that he still keeps hidden? That decision in 'Home'. Unless I'm in 'Reading-too-much-into-Irrelevancies' mode, Joss has a theme he's building up, and 'Home' will indeed be dealt with again.
-Angel seems very flippant about the whole Mercy thing in this episode. Just sayin'.
-And what about that marvellous cut to the moon? The pale, ghostly reflection of the sun's light? Not really radiant, but just a Chinese whisper of light? Look for Spike=moon imagery this Season.
-And so we're back to Harmony, 'preaching to the horse's mouth.' You know, weird things are happening, and her kind of half-understood proverbs are really hitting base this Season. There may be more significance in some of Harmony's comments than she could ever realise.
Interesting, but I wait with more expectation for Bell DeKnight's first episodes later this month. Until then, my friends...
TCH