Bummer.

Manilow lovers.

And the nightmare begins anew.

Major bummer.

Angel 5.4: Hellbound

Previously on Angel: It sucked.
This week on Angel: More of the suck.

Oh, put your martyr away, Mahatma.

The suckage begins this week when Fred and Spike are talking in her laboratory about recorporealizing Spike. So right from the beginning. Spike falls through her worktable, through the floor he was just incorporeally standing on, through many more floors of W&H and lands, hard, on the basement floor. Right. Hard. His not-corporeal ass slammed to the floor. It is good to see that continuity continues to not be a strong suit.

While down there and seemingly as confused in this basement as he was in Sunnydale High’s basement, minus the crazy talk and bad hair, he runs into someone sitting at a desk. This person can’t help him find his way out of the basement as he is busy cutting off his own fingers. I’m not sure why Spike can’t just levitate his see through ass back up to the lab, but I didn’t really understand a whole lot of this episode, so this is the least of my worries.

Basically, spooky shit happens and Spike sees dead people. These attention seeking ghoulish ghosts do things like pull glass shards out of their eye sockets and slash Spike with said shards, ask him to hold him when they have no arms and just sort of generally taunt him about hell. Only Spike can see the ghosties, and he starts to get a bit bent about the whole hell angle, so he goes to Angel for comfort. Solace of the manly kind, not solace of the being bent over the couch kind. Either way, Angel’s not very solaceful, but it is a rather nice scene where they bitch to each other about the past and then Angel gets all bleak and informs Spike that it doesn’t matter, everything they did and everything they do to make up for it? Doesn’t matter. They’re going to hell. Which was a nice moment, and I’m not being snarky there. I feel I should be genuinely nice about this scene, and pretty much the only one worth watching. Sadly it didn’t last long enough. Right after Angel confesses to liking Spike’s craptastic poems, Spike starts to go nuts because he sees a ghost doing things he doesn’t like, but Angel can’t see it and the gang thinks that Spike’s gone nutters because their handy-dandy seers can’t find anything. They say there are no ghosties. But Spike says there are. And then he disappears.

Nothing's written in stone or fated to happen, Spike. You save the world, you end up running an evil law firm.

Aw, but he doesn’t! He’s still there, they just can’t see him! And neither can the seers! Why? No really reason. At least not a well-explained one. Seems there’s a ghost there called the Reaper who made some pact or other with hell to, I don’t know, torture the people who sluff off this mortal coil while at W&H. Which is meant to explain why there are no ghosts around the place, not that I ever wondered, and why the Reaper has the power he does. Not that it does, but it’s supposed to.

As far as I could tell, and feel free to correct me, the Reaper made the ghosts disappear from the radar and made them hang about, torturing themselves. Or maybe he was keeping them from peace? Or maybe he only brought out his best ghouls, like the young lady without the arms, to taunt the newbies? Maybe. Or maybe it just wasn’t very well explained. Or, you know, I spaced out again.

Anyway, the gang scrambles to find out what’s the what while Spike gets haunted. The gang holds a séance with a really sassy psychic that unfortunately gets killed by the Reaper, so that doesn’t work out too well. Fred does whatever it is she does in her lab and eventually pieces together a big recorporealizing thing. That will, of course, only work once. Natch.

The Reaper spends some quality time torturing and stripping Spike in the basement, until Spike decides he’s bored and uses his massive mental powers to put his clothes back on. Fred flips the on switch and draws the two ghosts to the machine. The Reaper, a plucky lad who used some black magic mojo to keep his ass out of hell, beats Spike there and decides to kill Fred. I voice no objections. Unfortunately, Spike gets there just in time to stop the Reaper from choking and killing Fred, damn the luck, and tosses the Reaper into the recorporealizer so he can’t haunt the people haunting W&H anymore. Angel straps him to a wall and locks him in a room in the basement, with a tiny hole so he can see the stunning view of the hallway. It’s not really explained why they feel he will live forever like this and I can only assume that recorporealizing something does not mean bringing it back to life so he’s just a solid ghost, but then if that’s so why would you worry about killing him if he’s already dead and then I find myself wondering if they’re going to feed him with a long spoon through the hole, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that the Reaper taught Spike a valuable lesson—if he wants it enough, he can move a coffee cup. That’s some inspirational shit.

Welcome to hell.

Look ma! I did it! I did it!

previous episode | next episode