4x01 – DEEP DOWN

“Deep Down” is a true barnstormer: an unrelenting freight train fueled by shocking images, intriguing developments and intelligent examinations of the show’s core cast. It fails no character. For all the flaws of S3’s finale Tomorrow, the situation it promised our protagonists was both interesting and precarious. This episode is testament to AtS being the kind of show that keeps its promises. When last we left the Fang Gang, Connor’s son Angel had sunk him to the bottom of the ocean in a metal crate, Cordelia had ascended to a higher spiritual plane, and Fred and Gunn were left alone wondering “what the hell?” Meanwhile, the disgraced Wesley Wyndam-Pryce continued his moral downslide into bitterness and egotism. When we return to them at the start of this episode, we see the landscape has changed to something even more distressing.

The group is scattered and desperate. Angel Investigations hardly exists; Fred and Gunn are searching for Angel and Cordelia without a clue or a helping hand. While they do that, they’re also coddling and nurturing the person responsible for Angel’s disappearance: Connor, Angel’s teenage son, whose black and white moral view of the world allows him to simultaneously justify his betrayal of Angel while soaking in the affection of Angel’s friends. As for Wesley: he is all but done with any of them. He’s running his own private operation hunting demons, but continues to move in a more selfish direction: he has nightly sexual liaisons with the reprehensible Lilah, speaking with utter conviction when he dismisses everything about his old life.

Like all of AtS’ season premieres, the main character conflicts foreshadow what’s to come in the season ahead. “Deep Down” is about morality, what constitutes that morality, and how it is shaped by the choices we make in desperate situations. The moral compass that guides Angel’s life has slowly morphed into something different since 2x16: Epiphany. After that episode’s revelations, victory became irrelevant, ‘the end’ became meaningless; all that was left was the unending fight against evil itself, and what made someone good was taking the time to do kindness to others.

S3 saw this idea explored alongside its main theme of responsibility: most of the characters suffered horribly because of forces beyond their control, forces moved by both friends and enemies, and the show began tilting our sympathies for them based solely on intentions. Even when Wesley betrayed Angel, we felt sympathy for him because his motives were essentially altruistic. What justified some degree of anger against him though was the fact that that altruism was underlined by an egotistical need to play the role of altruistic hero. On the other side of the conflict was Holtz, who suffered the horrible loss of his family, and under the guise of ridding the world of evil, sought vengeance at the expense of his followers and his ‘adopted’ son Connor, whom he raised only as part of his plan to cause Angel even more pain.

Angel himself experienced the loss of infant Connor when Holtz stole him, and became so consumed by his grief that he gave completely into his vengeful desires. Our sympathy for him was tested to its breaking point at times because while we understood his pain, we saw that what he was doing was wrong by virtue of its selfishness. Combined with the nihilistic conclusion about his mission he came to in 3x09: Lullaby (he realized that redemption was unattainable, even through selflessness), he was left in a very dark place, even when he returned to his mission and friends.

The lessening of his pain (when Connor returned) just about brought him out of that, but then Holtz’s suicide, made to look like a murder by Angel’s hand, turned Connor against Angel and reset the game. Throughout this episode Angel experiences hallucinations caused by food deprivation. These experiences provide some of the most memorable and shocking images of the series. His first hallucination of the dinner party is a metaphor for what’s become of his life: a chance at happiness shattered by his son. His conflict, then, is figuring out how he really feels about everything.

Does he love his son? Does he want redemption anymore? Has he forgotten what seeking it means? In his first hallucination, he bites Cordelia after admitting his love to her, and in the second, he snaps Connor’s neck after staking a group of vampires alongside him. He still sees the darker urges in his personality as a threat to those around him. The scary question is whether or not he really wants to act on those urges given all the pain he’s experienced. He sees his ideal world in these hallucinations: beautiful, peaceful, filled with loved ones. And then the ideal world is torn in two by his very real capacity for brutal violence.

When Wesley pulls him up out of the ocean and opens the crate, Angel’s first act is to grab Wes by the throat. A vision of Lorne tries to sing a lullaby to him as he comes into a conscious stage, but the world is not like a lullaby for him; it’s been harsh and cruel, and in a moment that’s disturbing in its frankness, Angel stares at a vision of Connor and says to him: “I should’ve killed you.” He says it with no malice, but with cold, calculating matter-of-factness. Really, the truth is that killing him would’ve spared everyone a lot of hurt despite how horrible the act would’ve been, and that would’ve been enough to justify the act (for most people), because that’s just how harsh the world is.

The rational thing to do, by all accounts, would’ve been to kill him. Connor was raised in a hell dimension, after all. Holtz instilled a violent black and white morality in him. It left no room for mercy and even less for justice. With people like Connor there is no due process of justice, there is no jury. There is only the executioner and his axe. Connor ‘saw’ that Angel had killed Holtz, and decided Angel deserved to suffer. To him, that was just. So by all accounts, Connor is not the kind of person you want running around. Fred posed that very point to Connor when she asked him: “How long until we deserved it?”

So when Angel finally confronts him, the mercy he shows is benign. Angel is just. Angel’s choice is to give Connor a second chance, because he’s experienced the same kind of loss Connor has first-hand. In an unforgettable speech, Angel pours out the revelation he’s come to: that the good and just are as they are because they can choose the right thing in spite of their wants. More importantly, despite the impossibility of ever attaining a beautiful world, striving to create it is the only way to live. The message is that accepting the cruelty and horror in the world does nothing but contribute to it. You accept it. You allow it. Eventually, you come to justify it because of the purpose it serves.

Angel chooses to stand as an example of what the world can be instead, and that he can do so after everything is inspiring, which is the what his speech is meant to point out to us and to Connor. I particularly liked that the episode refused to paint Connor as a villain but instead painted him as a troubled teenager who is still figuring out what the world means to him. He was even starting to like parts of his life with Fred and Gunn, but the harshness of the world he grew up in – Quor’toth – conditioned him to be violent, unyielding and reactionary. Good and evil merely meant ‘man’ and ‘demon’ to him.

He had to be prepared to do any number of terrible things just to survive, and given his situation it wasn’t hard to see why he could think Angel was evil. The great tragedy of his situation is that he was just a grieving boy who made a big mistake. He chose poorly in response to his pain, still incapable of understanding the beauty the world could’ve offered him. What made him dangerous was that he may have eventually justified some terrible action against Fred and Gunn the way he did with Angel, which is why Angel made him leave. But he let him leave alive.

Weaving in and out of this main plot in the episode is Wesley, whose development continues to be the most interesting of any character on the show. Happily, it stays that way right until the end of the series. He’s subject to the same moral examination that Angel and Connor are. The difference between him and them is that the source of his suffering is himself. His ego was shattered by his failed attempt at heroism, which consequently resulted in a great amount of pain for Angel. He’s since reverted to the selfish side of the moral coin I earlier described: while he still hunts demons (we see this in 4x02: Ground State), he has no problem sleeping with Lilah.

He’s chosen to let his pain transform him into someone almost completely self-centered. When he says he’s doesn’t care about his old life anymore, we believe him. Even when he goes out onto the ocean to rescue Angel this remains true. It’s not as though he’s a completely selfish bastard, only that he’s realized the follies of playing the hero, since he’s not one. He’s accepted that. And he’s justified sleeping with the morally disgusting Lilah and keeping Justine imprisoned in his apartment for his own purposes. Sure, he wants to rescue Angel and that is overall a good thing, but he’s doing it because he wants to. He offers Angel Investigations no help once the job is done.

All he does is his job: fight the good fight. Nothing more. His pride is far too bruised to do any more, and he doesn’t want to face the people he failed. While he’s still a decent human being, he’s sliding every day by accepting terrible, necessary actions and equating them in his mind to good actions. Rather than face the people he betrayed and refuse to allow the mistakes he made to warp him, he allows his downslide to continue because he’s been too battered to fight it. Unlike Angel, he’s no longer a champion, and the progression is fascinating to watch. The only thing he can really do now is live his life, and in a moment of twisted kinship, offers Justine the same chance.

Fred and Gunn undergo a similar if less interesting struggle, dealing with their losses admirably by taking care of Connor in Angel’s stead, and refusing to give up searching for their lost friends while the bills get harder to pay. The dramatic high-point of their story is when they discover the guise Connor has been hiding behind. It’s quite disturbing to see Fred lose it, and totally satisfying too. Gunn starts showing shades of who he becomes this season: forced by Angel’s absence and Wesley’s desertion to take on more responsibility, he starts thinking forward and reflecting on his actions more. There’s not much of them to appreciate in this particular episode, at least compared to Angel and Wes, but watching him and Fred deal with the immediacy of this new, uncomfortable situation is enough.

One last thing I have to note is Lilah, who continues to be as entertaining as ever. Linwood Murrow does the most awesome thing he’s ever done on the show by getting his head sliced off at the click of her pen. He’s been boring and a poor replacement for Holland Manners, so good riddance. Let me say of Lilah that while at this point she begs no human sympathy, she still has some interesting stuff going. She’s indeed fearless, and the poster-girl for the unapologetic modus operandi of self-serving that makes Wolfram and Hart what it is. Later this season she actually does earn some sympathy through her relationship with Wesley.

If there’s one thing that diminishes my enjoyment of “Deep Down” it’s that the episodes to follow pale in comparison. The season is too quick to re-establish the old dynamic of the Fang Gang and try to restore some semblance of normalcy. Maybe Angel’s return should’ve been delayed. It isn’t until halfway through the season that the story really picks up. As I’ve written before, S4, for its plot flaws, has complex moral and social themes in abundance and that is its saving grace. The story of this episode plays itself out throughout S4 as the characters face immeasurable terror and are forced to re-define themselves in the fight against it.

The conflicted emotions of the characters, the unpredictable atmosphere created by the hallucination narrative, and the sheer-head crushing depth of the situation results in one of S4’s best and brightest, and a series standout. The moral labyrinth the writers constructed to plunge their characters into was effective and completely organic, arising as a result of their actions rather than some contrivance. But what was really best about this season opener, which is the series’ second best, is that it promised more of the same to come. I only say my enjoyment is somewhat diminished here because I had to wait awhile after this episode to get the most out of that promise.

• The relationship between Connor and Angel is characterized by a complete lack of understanding and a lot of adversity, in spite of Angel’s love for his son. All throughout S4 they are in constant conflict over Angel Investigations’ mission, Angel’s best interests for Connor, Connor’s interests for himself, and just about everything else (Cordelia).
  
  
• Choice being one of S4’s main themes, the difficulty of making the right (meaning selfless) choices plagues the characters throughout the season.
  
  
• Lilah calls Wesley ‘a snack,’ but they still have an understanding of each other. As the season goes on, their relationship morphs from two people taking advantage of one another to two people who need each other despite their hatred.