‘Untouched’ was written by Mere Smith and is the second episode of ‘Angel’ directed
by Joss Whedon.
For a Whedon directed episode it has...a curious lack of flourish.
There are no rocket launchers or floating fantasy nightmares or giant snakes.
No fancy oners or arc-changing events.
And I think that, for the story it is trying to tell, that is absolutely as it should be.
If anything, ‘Untouched’ reminds me a bit of ‘Lie to Me,’ in the Whedon directorial
catalog.
These are both stories about characters whose suffering is tragic and unfair.
And what they choose to do after.
The episode opens with Lillah snooping through Lindsey’s office and being startled by Darla.
Lillah’s fear is oddly humanizing, a reminder that W&H is a company of human beings mostly
ignoring their consciences.
Darla shows Lillah the source of her mojo over Angel.
“Calynthia Powder?
Is that how you’re able to keep Angel asleep when he’s with you.”
Wesley and Cordy are debating whether they should pay Gunn and Angel gets the grumps.
A: “How about we pretend that you work for me?”
C: “You are really unpleasant when you…”
A: “Then why don't we pretend that you don't.”
C: .”you can't fire me.
I'm vision girl.”
Cordy is such an icon and I love Angel’s uncontrollable smirk here.
A: “Just a little disoriented.”
“I’ve been sleeping weird.
W: Weird how?
As with Nabbit in the previous episode, I treasure reminders of Wesley's competence.
Here he’s the first one to take a concerned interest in Angel's dream state.
Not the first time he was on top of the issue of Angel's subconscious.
But before they can get into it, the PTB send a vision of a young woman being attacked in
an alley.
The timing of the episode’s vision in the opening seem...curious.
Just as Wesley is taking an interest in Angel’s troubling sleep patterns Cordy is struck.
If we didn’t know any better it would almost seem like the Powers...want the apocalypse?
Angel heads off to do the hero thing.
“Oh God, he’s going to be too late.”
This neat little bait and switch makes us believe that we’re about to watch this woman
be raped and murdered by these two men.
As a result, we as the viewers are FORCED to experience a small measure of the terror,
futility, and cosmic unfairness of the crime against this woman.
But the woman in question Carrie-s out the trash.
When the cops arrive, Angel sneaky sneakies his way onto the crime scene.
A: I'm out of vice three weeks, I've seen enough amateur night crapto fill a mini-series.
This kind of shtick used to feel out of character but I think, at this point, him improvising
and acting out characters has been properly built up as he’s accumulated experience
in this job, including the painting in ‘She’, the desperate husband in the doctor's office
in ‘I Fall to Pieces, and Herb Saunders in ‘Sense & Sensitivity’.
Not to mention Angelus in the ‘Buffy’ episode ‘Enemies’.
Angel finds the woman in a back room and she’s freaked.
This is Bethany.
After he is able to withstand a skewering, Angel offers her a place to stay but Bethany
says she’s staying with a friend who turns out to be...Lilah.
(10:19) (10:36) L: “I’m sorry I couldn't make
it.”
“But work just got insane, and our new clients are monsters.”
With Lillah absolutely any of those statements could be literally true.
Cute.
Gunn stops by Angel Investigations and shows off his new axe he’s endearingly happy with.
All great warriors have an iconic weapon.
Buffy has Mr. Pointy.
Angel’s he never needs to draw.
Wesley is pretty damn sharp with a pistol and Gunn has his hubcap axe and I love it.
“The fair Cordelia.”
“You still saving my life?”
C: “Every minute.”
G: “How's that working out?”
C: “You're alive, aren't you?
...I never realized how much I wanted THIS ship more than ANY OF THE OTHERS that happen.
The two coolest, most charismatic members of Angel Investigations.
Also...some growth.
Gunn acknowledged her without defensiveness.
Called her by her name (not chick, girl, queen, whatever.)
I like it.
2 Angel puts Gunn on the hunt for Bethany who
is having nightmares about a man coming and taking young her from a hiding spot in the
attic.
Lillah is amused until she takes a lamp to the face.
Fearing she’ll hurt anyone but Angel, Bethany flees to the hotel.
Darla is in Angel’s bedroom again filling his head with hunty killy sexy things until
Bethany shows up.
But she’s still buying Lillah’s deception and alerts Lillah as to her whereabouts.
Wesley has a theory and tests it by deliberately antagonizing Bethany.
“Or maybe we should send you home to your father.”
As much as this episode demonstrates Wesley’s competency, it’s worth noting he may still
have some things to work through as he came up with a plan and didn’t bother running
it past any of the team.
As with his attempted capture of Faith in ‘Buffy Season 3.
“The social trauma that could produce this level of psychic power usually involves abuse
of some kind.”
I wonder if Wes might’ve been uniquely qualified to recognize something like this.
“A father doesn’t have to be possessed to terrorize his children.””He just has
to…”
In the midst of another orgy dream of sex and violence, Bethany wakes Angel aaaaaaand…
“I figured we’d have fun.”
“You could do stuff to me and...you know...we’ll have fun.”
Hmm...Let's come back to this scene in a moment.
Turns out the men that attacked Bethany were hired to trigger her.
Gee, I wonder who would hav--...it was Lillah.
Cordelia takes Bethany on a walk and they have a tough conversation.
(34:48) ”Yeah.”
Don’t bone my boss.”
At the end of the first season, when the Phantom of the Law Firm opened the vision floodgates
to ALL suffering, we saw that the visions could force Cordelia to literally experience
the emotions of the people she saw, a kind of magical empathy.
Her scene with Bethany is another step in her arc showing that the visions and her work
with Angel Investigations is growing and maturing her.
Bethany gets drugged and captured.
Angel does his Dark Knight thing.
And then Lilah sends in an explosive charge.
“Hello, rabbit.”
[boom] The first few times I watched this episode
I always thought the Dad was Kyle Chandler from ‘Friday Night Lights’...which made
his role that much more disturbing.
Buuut the actor who plays Bethany’s father is actually named Gareth Williams.
In either case, the performance just has this air of off-kilter creepy nice-ness that feels
unsettling and yet uncomfortably realistic.
“You’re coming back with me, we’re gonna be a family again.”
[...] “I promise it’ll be just like it was before.”
“Can you pick out the one word there you probably shouldn’t have said.
And, at Angel’s behest…
“You got the power.
Use it.
Finish it.”
Bethany sends Dad packing but catches him before he hits pavement.
And after Angel helps Bethany get her stuff, Lilah ends the episode with a taunt for him.
“Sweet dreams…”
Untouched’ is an episode that deals with powerfully difficult subject matter.
This isn’t the first time the Buffyverse has grappled with abuse, though I don’t
think it’s ever felt quite this...raw?
In ‘Beauty and the Beasts’ there was Debbie, who kept coming back to Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Pete.
Unlike Bethany, Debbie felt to me more like a trope than a living character.
There were passing hints to abuse in Faith’s past…
(3x03) “My dead mother hits harder than THAT.”
(3x16) “Thanks, sugar daddy.”
But mostly we were just witness to its consequences, as Faith dealt with her anxiety and identity
issues in a spiral of violence.
But with ‘Untouched’, the ugly is front and center.
Bethany’s abuse AND its consequences are shown to us directly, and her desperately
attempting to cope with it in BOTH healthy and unhealthy ways feels painfully human and
real.
So much so that, the first couple times I watched the episode I wasn’t sure how I
felt about it all.
Sexual abuse is such a triggering and heavy issue that I kept asking myself the questions
I brought up in the revie for ‘First Impressions’: Does the use of this subject matter find something
new and innovative to say?
Does it turn the prism of our perspective and reveal something interesting?
Does it do its victim justice?
The more I’ve watched the episode, the more I think it does.
Bethany bears obvious references to ‘Carrie’, which was also a story about a girl with telekinesis
dealing with abuse.
But her red hair and past seem like nods to Beverly in ‘IT’.
Daisy McCrackin does a WONDERFUL job playing her with TOUGH material.
Bethany is never just a damsel.
And the script is surprisingly willing to let her be, at times, unlikable.
But what a disservice to Bethany and her story it would’ve been to have her be anything
other than the full embodiment of herself.
And, this time through, I was struck by how painfully true one of her coping mechanisms
was.
The Mayo Clinic defines a dissociative disorder as:
... [one] that involve[s] experiencing a disconnection and lack of continuity between thoughts, memories,
surroundings, actions and identity.
People with dissociative disorders escape reality in ways that are involuntary and unhealthy
and cause problems with functioning in everyday life.
Bouts of dissociation are common to victims with post traumatic stress disorder.
And its symptoms include Memory loss (amnesia) of certain time periods,
events, people and personal information A sense of being detached from yourself and
your emotions Inability to cope well with emotional or professional
stress Mental health problems, such as depression,
anxiety, and suicidal thoughts and behaviors The pivotal scene in the episode comes when
Bethany tries to sleep with Angel in his bedroom and she expresses:
“I figured we’d have fun.”
“You could do stuff to me and...you know...we’ll have fun.”
At first glance, this might seem vaguely reminiscent of Tina offering Angel his “reward” in
‘City of…’ but when Angel turns Bethany down, there is an extra layer revealed
“Are you shocked I’m a great big slut?”
Bethany’s conclusion about the evil done to her is that she must be a horrible thing
herself.
And I was reminded of...
“I’M EVIL!”
“I’M BAD!”
In that scene, Faith desperately wanted to disappear at Angel’s hand:
“Angel please, just do it.
Just do it.
Just kill me.
Just kill me.…”
And, by way of her dissociative disorder, Bethany uses physical intimacy with men to
do exactly the same thing.
Do I love it?
Who cares.
I’m-I'm like the chambermaid.
I just leave.
When a guy’s on me I made up the room.
I showed him in.
I leave till he's gone.
And I have to admit, when it dawned on me what she was doing...Bethany, a victim of
sexual abuse USING dissociation on purpose as a means of escaping her suffering...to
metaphorically destroy herself, I broke down.
This scene...is gut-wrenching.
In her interview on The Debatable Podcast, Mere Smith said that other than the Lillah
scenes, Joss Whedon rewrote most of her script “It’s a very good episode.”
“It should be because most of it was written by Joss.”
According to Mere, Joss took Bethany from a mostly passive victim to one that was grappling
with her trauma aggressively.
The idea being that there is no one textbook reaction to abuse.
Certain people shut down.
Certain people turn outward.
Again, to limit Bethany to only one or the other would’ve been to do her a disservice.
It sometimes feels miraculous the way Mutant Enemy can grapple with these themes and somehow
also intertwine them with the ongoing arc and plights of the main characters.
While some of the connections with Angel have yet to play out, there are notable parallels
already.
Angel loses himself when he becomes Angelus.
He’s “just not there anymore.”
Though I don’t believe the curse kicking his soul out happened because of physical
intimacy but from the moments of post coital bliss after the fact.
But, either way, when Angel comes back, the memories are all his.
She and Angel are similarly closed off.
“I don't want to talk about me and share, or whatever.”
“--I don’t want to share my feelings.
I don’t want to open up.”
Bethany sees herself as a freak.
Her powers are not a gift but a curse, just like Angel’s vampirism.
BOTH powers emerged from something dark, regardless of what they choose to do with them.
And remember his expressed self-hatred when Buffy tried to tend his wound in What’s
My Line’: “You shouldn’t have to touch me when I’m
like this.”
But Buffy...just saw him..
Grappling with and accepting the power and darkness that comes with his vampirism and
working out how to integrate it as a part of his complete identity is one of Angel’s
ongoing struggles in the series.
I think it’s especially important to note that Bethany’s suffered abuse is CLEARLY
posed as a mirror of what Darla did to Angel, and what she is currently doing to him now.
Let's be clear: Darla’s violations ARE sexual assault.
Bethany comments that the dreams Angel was having sounded pretty enjoyable.
And, when speaking to Lillah earlier in the episode, Darla attempts to justify her actions
as revealing Angel’s true nature.
(1:20)“There’s nothing so lovely...as dreams.
Everything is in them, everything hidden...Open those chambers and you can truly understand
someone-and control them.
“And what’s hidden in Angel’s secret chambers?”
“Horrors.”
This is a fear that Angel has expressed over and over again [Amends] and it is also UNEQUIVOCALLY
false.
We as individuals are not defined as human beings by our fears or ugly impulses but by
our choices.
And whatever Angel’s seeming pleasure expressed while completely disarmed in his dream state,
the fact remains that he was unable to give consent to what was and is happening to him
which makes Darla’s actions absolutely abuse.
All of this adds up to makes the climactic scene with Bethany’s father even more stunning.
In the end, Bethany does what Liam was unable to do in The Prodigal’, and claims her power.
Not by ending the life of her tormentor but by realizing that she didn’t have to let
him control her or her future.
BUT...did Angel know she was going to do that?
His command stated to Bethany as she holds her father aloft in the final scene is...curiously
ambiguous.
Notice what he doesn’t say.
“Bethany...you’ve got the power...use it…”
*flashback montage.
He didn’t tell her, not to hurt him.