Angel

Angel Episode 5 :2 Just Rewards Teleplay by David Fury and Ben Edlund ; story by David Fury. Directed by James A. Contner

The Horror of Helplessness Not that being dead is normally any treat—your body may be yanked from its coffin by the Interment Acquisitions (read : grave robbing) Department of an evil law firm, purchased as stock by a necromancer, posed in his showroom, and purchased for occupancy by a demon that may then run around doing all sorts of demony things right where your friends and neighbors can see you—but it doesn’t compare with the sheer awfulness of being a ghost.

There’s the lunging inadvertently into (and interpenetrating) the middle of desks. There’s the horrible, vivid memory of your demise (Spike, responding to Wesley’s question whether he remembers noticing any strange sensations while dying : "What, you mean my skin and muscle burning away from the bone, organs exploding in my chest, eyeballs melting in their sockets ? No, no memory at all. Thanks for asking.") There’s the not knowing what you are or worse, why you are. There’s the disconcerting disappearance without warning, over which you have no control.

As Magnus Hainsley, the necromancer, sympathetically puts it, "You’re a ghost—close enough, anyway. That’s just a horrible way to be ! You’re not here, you’re not there…just lost somewhere in the middle. And you can’t fight against it. You can’t fix it. And you can’t even lift a finger because you simply don’t have any !"

As Wesley similarly describes Spike’s plight, "Trapped between realms with no control over his fate. Not able to touch anything…affect anything. Unable to fight." Or as Spike himself wearily says, "I can’t live like this, Angel. Being useless…being nothing. I want it to end." Except, of course, that Spike is almost certainly lying—about his intentions, at least.

Basically, control is the problem : as a ghost, you don’t have any. And, as Spike’s revelation at the end of the episode reveals, the light you see ahead, you certainly don’t want to go into because it’s an oncoming train.

If last week’s episode, "Conviction," was about the power to do good, this second half of the fifth season opener, "Just Rewards," is about the lack of it. It’s about powerlessness ; helplessness ; frustration ; despair. And a good bit of it is howlingly funny.

The beginning of the episode recaps Spike’s fiery immolation in closing the Hellmouth under Sunnydale High School, nineteen days before. Without apparent transition from his own point of view, he’s suddenly among a group of strangers, not knowing how he’s come there. It’s enough to make even a vampire, who doesn’t need to breathe, hyperventilate and wrap his leather duster-ed arms tightly, protectively around himself for nearly the whole of the First Act. Materializing from the amulet, Spike is disoriented, frightened, and (given a suitable target) enraged. The first familiar thing is Angel’s voice. Ah ! Then Grandsire and old foe Angel must be to blame ! Spike vamps out, charges, and passes completely through Angel, ending up in the middle of Angel’s immense desk. When this is called to his attention, Spike looks down, completely deflated, and blurts, "Bugger."

Unusual as a vampire, Spike is apparently equally anomalous as a ghost. Fred’s "tricorder" scan reveals that although there are "electromagnetic readings consistent with spiritual entities," there’s no "ectoplasmic matrix"—if Spike’s a ghost, he should be invisible…and he’s not. Also, there’s measurable brain wave activity (Angel finds this surprising) and instead of absorbing heat in a proper ghostly manner, Spike is generating heat (Spike to Fred : "Think I’m hot, do you ?" Fred : "Lukewarm—just a few degrees above room temperature), which even vampires can’t do.

But the brain wave activity is important. For all Spike’s frustration at not being able to hit anybody, his mind is working just fine, thank you. Bare minutes after bursting into a wholly unknown situation, except for Angel’s presence, Spike can tell Angel shrewdly, "You made some devil’s bargain to take over this company. Thought you’d use it to fight all the evil of the world from inside the belly of the beast. Trouble is, you’re too busy fighting to notice you and yours are getting digested." Yup, that’s the situation in a nutshell. Spike the Teller of Uncomfortable Truths is still undead and kicking, and it is Spike’s wits, his nearly infallible sense of what he can and can’t get away with, that provides the solution to this week’s problem.

By dissolving Wolfram & Hart’s Interment Acquisition Department, warns account exec Novak, Angel will mightily offend one of their oldest clients, Magnus Hainsley : sorcerer ; necromancer ; old money, older mojo. When dispatched to inform Hainsley of the severance of this working relationship, Novak returns as unwelcome news because he’s delivered in three buckets. Instead of sending a flunky to do a vampire CEO’s job and accompanied by Spike, of whom Angel is powerless to rid himself, Angel confronts Hainsley and informs him that the necromancer has been evicted from his material assets-bank accounts frozen, house seized, and an IRS investigation proceeding. Hainsley, who has power over the dead and makes a very nice living translating the essences of demons, through the medium of his own body, into selected corpses for money, proposes to do more or less the same to Angel, with Spike’s traitorous help—evict him from his body, leaving Spike in residence to undo the measures taken against Hainsley.

Because of the double-cross, the relationship between Angel and Spike is crucial to how it all plays out.

Those who have followed Angel, the Series and Buffy, the Vampire Slayer from the beginning will need no recap of all the past issues and bloody conflicts between the two, including but not confined to rivalry in love, betrayal, and assorted torture. The present sins of omission and commission are enough for smoldering resentment on both sides. Angel knows that Spike, like himself, is a Champion and also like Angel, possesses a soul. Buffy’s other vampire lover, Spike sacrificed himself heroically to close Sunnydale’s Hellmouth and thwart the First Evil’s apocalyptic plan to dominate the earth. And that wasn’t even the first apocalypse Spike participated in on the side of the White Hats. How much of Spike’s unique nature and heroic sacrifice and achievement has Angel recounted to the Fang Gang ? Zip. Bupkis. For the first time abandoning his wrapped-arms self-protective posture, Spike suspects jealousy : "Or maybe Captain Forehead was feeling a little less special. Didn’t like me crashin’ his exclusive club. Another vampire with a soul in the world." To which Angel retorts, "You’re not in the world, Casper."

Ah, but he is. He’s just not sticking very well.

Besides their rivalry over Buffy and their Champion status, there’s also the issue of rewards. Spike complains bitterly, "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, I 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, innit ? Not fair." Angel retorts with his own sense of injustice : "Fair ? You ask for 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 three weeks moaning in a basement and then you were fine ! What’s fair about that ?" Has either of them been rewarded justly ?

Although there’s over a century’s difference in their ages and Angel is Spike’s grandsire (Angel sired Drusilla, who sired Spike—the long overdue canonization of an issue until now heatedly moot in the Jossverse), what we’re seeing is sibling rivalry writ large in this pair of vampires. Each grudges anything good the other has. But they have too much history not to know one another very, very well, and jealousy, anger, and dislike are only part of the complex emotional dynamic between them.

Presented, by Wesley’s report that Spike is tied to the amulet, which is magically invulnerable except on consecrated ground (shades of Highlander !), with a way of getting rid of Spike permanently, Angel determines to sleep before making a decision, even though he refers to Spike’s presence sourly as "my spiritual crisis" and seems a bit overeager to agree that dispatching Spike would be the merciful thing to do. Only Fred seems wholly sympathetic to Spike’s plight and views the "exorcism" as tantamount to killing him. All this, of course, Spike overhears.

When offered by Hainsley everything Angel has—including his body—Spike seemingly can’t wait to get it done. But he appears subdued in Angel’s bedroom : pensive, sad, and apparently despairing. He reveals Hainsley’s attempt to suborn him (although without any details) and states that he doesn’t "play for that side anymore." His present position is untenable : he wants it to end. The two set out for a cemetery together to destroy the amulet.

This is apparently how the betrayal was set up between Spike and Hainsley, because Hainsley is waiting there to take control of Angel’s body—as a vampire, Angel is technically dead. Hainsley, as a necromancer, has near-complete power over the dead. Gloating over Angel’s immobilized body in Hainsley’s workroom, Spike says that "Everything—everyone—I deserve will be mine," and threatens to seduce Fred, into the bargain. But the word "deserve" and the implied phrase "what I deserve" harks back to the "what she deserves :" it was to get that, be that, for Buffy that Spike endured the trials to win his soul. It’s not a word Spike would take or use lightly. It’s a word for sacrifice. For reaching for something better one does not even comprehend, except to know that it’s lacking. It’s a word for aspiration and choice.

Because Spike still does have a choice : to betray his bargain with Hainsley, or to betray his long and complex relationship with Angel. It’s left ambiguous whether Spike ever truly bought into Hainsley’s plan. Perhaps so, perhaps not. But the moment the word "deserve" is in Spike’s mouth, we know that the fix is in. And it’s pretty clear that Angel does not : Spike has revealed nothing of any planned trap of Hainsley to Angel. (Later, Angel tells Wesley Spike told him of the plan… "more or less." Less, I think.) Perhaps Spike improvised the trap on the spur of the moment : Spike is nothing if not an opportunist. And Angel is quick enough, physically and mentally, to immediately seize on any opportunity and come out fighting.

In any case, Spike balks in the middle of the transfer of his essence—in Hainsley’s body, sufficiently disrupting his control long enough for Angel to attack and kill him. That the body then springs up and gets in a few good licks before Angel beheads it and reveals Spike as the animating force, well, that was just another opportunity and Spike couldn’t resist.

Throughout this episode, the snarking and sulking and bickering between "the boys" is just delightful. It’s a lively episode, full of action and revelation in about equal measure, unlike last week’s sometimes heavy admixture of exposition. The homosexual cracks are confined to Spike’s saying, in Angel’s bedroom, "Relax, beefcake : I didn’t come for a fight" and the priceless Spike line, "I’m his date." There’s humor in the fact that Hainsley doesn’t merely make Angel drop the urn ( ?) with which he was about to smash the amulet : he makes Angel hit himself in the forehead with it. Repeatedly. Spike’s terse warning, "Grokslar beast" leads Angel to battle and kill the three-piece-suited many-horned monster he finds exiting the elevator behind him…only to discover the baby-head-eating monster was his three o’clock meeting. Again, he’s disconcerted to find he’s killed a minion of a (potential ?) client, in line with last week’s dusting of a vamp that was a client’s staffmember, but again the situation is salvageable because, per law-savvy Gunn, Grokslars appreciate one who opens from strength. Presumably they’d also therefore appreciate Hainsley, who sends Novak back in three buckets—using deliberately the same tactic that Angel uses inadvertently. Wesley, Gunn, and Lorne are conspicuously underused (where’s Eve ?), though Harmony has a few characteristic moments, finding the notion of Spike intimate with the Slayer as major ugggh and attempting friendliness but ignored by the rudely indifferent Spike. (As she tells him earlier, "You can’t talk to me like that : we’re not dating anymore.")

However, it’s the ending that’s the kicker. Spike reveals to Fred, with whom he’s been mildly flirting since she began scanning him, that he’s "slipping" : "I don’ t want to go, but it’s like…it’s like the ground underneath me is splitting and my legs are straddling both sides of this bloody big chasm. It’s getting wider. Pulling me in…. I know what’s down there. Where it’s trying to take me. And it’s not the place heroes go—not by a bloody long shot. It’s the other one : full of fire. And torment. And it’s happening. And I’m terrified." Why Fred, the science gal, rather than Wesley, the expert on the occult ? Simple : she’s a woman. And Spike has always dealt with women much more comfortably than with men. He knows how to appeal to them, how to cajole and placate them, and has much less difficulty admitting that he’s terrified than he would to Angel or Wes. Looking into Fred’s appalled, sympathetic eyes, he can ask simply, "Help me ?"

Nan Dibble 10/09/03

MISCELLANEOUS

In the clip of Spike’s immolation, he and Buffy clasp hands…but their hands don’t burn. The "I love you," "No you don’t. But thanks for sayin’ it" dialogue is also omitted. We are moving Spike along, away from his passionate, intense involvement with Buffy, the better to snark and be (in the words of a recent WB video interview with actor James Marsters, who portrays Spike) "a real…insensitive jerk." Unless Spike’s condition is unique, as his situation is, we can deduce than vampires breathe—heavily—in severe emotional distress…and conceivably in other situations of extreme emotional intensity. Buffymatters : Angel tells Spike that Buffy is fine and in Europe, the last he heard. When Spike wants to contact her, Angel gives no info. Spike : "You can’t keep her from me !" Angel : She’s not mine to keep. Or yours." However, flaming Romantic Lorne finds the situation exquisite : "Honey of a story : the Slayer both men loved, both men lost." Ummm-men ? Angel’s resourceful use of assorted tableware in this episode is notable : killing the butler with a hurled spoon that buries itself in the butler’s forehead, after he’s made a show of expert cleaver-age, is an Indiana Jones moment ; Angel also beheads Hainsley with a tossed tray. The scene in Angel’s bedroom has good news and bad news. The good news : bare-chested Angel. The bad news : the room is very dark ! In the lab exam scene, Spike says he’s heard of Wolfram & Hart that it represents the worst evil in the universe. To which Angel replies, "It did…among other things. But now I’m in charge." To which Spike responds skeptically and significantly, "Are you now ?" Well, that’s the bloody question, innit ?" File Fred’s speculation on why Spike is there : "Maybe he’s here for a reason—you know, for some higher purpose or something he’s destined for. Sent to us by the Powers that Be to help us, or—" and Spike’s following diatribe about who gave the Powers the right to do that to him. Probably will be significant later along the line. Spike can’t leave Los Angeles. Each time he tried, he could go only as far as the city limits and then was yanked back to W & H. Most of Spike’s dematerializations are involuntary. But he walks through walls and appears to change from car A to car B without covering (visibly) the intervening distance when he accompanies Angel to see Hainsley. So it would seem he has at least some control over his dematerializations. Hainsley doesn’t dare kill Angel outright because the Senior Partners have plans for him. A-huh. Ominous. Despite Spike’s claims of visions of hell, per Fred’s guess during his periods of dematerialization, Spike reappears on those occasions not visibly alarmed or shaken. Just bewildered. Hmmm. The amulet was given to Angel by Wolfram & Hart. He in turn gave it to Buffy, who gave it to Spike. And it ended Spike’s unlife. Angel is aware that W&H may have assumed he would be the one to use it. If so, why was he given "the keys to the kingdom ?" if they expected him to go all crispy critter ? Still unresolved. Memorable lines :

Spike : I must be in hell. Lorne : No, L.A. But a lot of people make that mistake.

Angel (to Hainsley’s butler) : I’m with Wolfram & Hart. Spike : I’m his date.

Angel to Spike : Out of my chair. Spike : Make me Gunn : What’s in the buckets ? Spike : Your man Novak. Guess he’s been—what you call it—downsized.

Spike at cemetery 1 : Wise-cracking ghost sidekick—no bloody thanks. Spike at cemetery 2 : I’m glad it’s you, though, finally doing me in. Feels right, you being my grandsire and all. Circle of Death, eh ?