Tomorrow, the finale of Angel Season 3, ends with a stark pair of images, Cordelia rising to heaven borne upwards upon a narrow corridor of light, Angel descending Deep Down into the sea locked into a narrow box.  Cordelia is bathed in light, Angel soaked in darkness.  A vertical mirror world, utterly symmetrical.   

Three months later, after months of hallucinations that sent him spinning back to consciousness locked inside his box, Angel rises from the depths of the sea and ironically glosses his experience for us.  He tells us it provided him with perspective, an M. C. Escher perspective to be exact.

Portentous at the time, it is only after the full season 4 has been lived and experienced, and spiraled back on itself for re-view, like a dragon biting his own fictional tale, that we begin to note just how Escherian Angel’s world has become during this cycle.  The vampire sunk to the bottom of the sea rises, invokes his vampire soulless self and saves the world.  Cordelia, elevated to the heavenly hosts, descends the earth in a plot to destroy it.  Black in white, white in black.  Good from evil, evil from good

Thus, ironically again, as reward for saving the world, or is it for the magical sacrifice of his son, Angel is now borne upward to dwell at the lofty pinnacle of Wolfram and Hart, breathing the rarefied air.  Ineffective and powerless at the beginning of Season 4, Angel and his Investigators save the world.  By Conviction, at the beginning of Season 5, they have now reversed themselves completely.  Granted spectacular power, will they, in Season 5, be able to effect anything at all?  And for the good? 

Notable is the circularity of the succeeding mirror worlds.  There is no end and no beginning, only perspectives that succeed each other, mirroring what has gone before.  And now the physical architecture of W&H mirrors the labyrinthine nature of the Escherian perspective.  Slogging down long halls that lead nowhere, turning corners that only lead back around, falling through floors, only to return, always to the same spot.  We know that Spike is tied to W&H metaphysically by the circular chain that rendered him his most effective in Chosen and his least effective in Conviction.  The question is, just how bound to the Escherian labyrinth is everyone else?  Can any of them now break free?       

Starting from Tomorrow, in Season 4 and most strongly in Season 5, the architecture of the physical presentation of Angel’s world has been built to invoke M.C. Escher’s spiraling, mirroring, symmetrical vision of the world.  In my talk, I plan to demonstrate this perspectivism with screenshots from Angel that mirror the spatial vocabulary of M.C. Escher.  

Aymes, C. A. Wertheim. The Pictorial Language of Hieronymous Bosch. New Knowledge Books, New York (1988).

Escher, M. C. Escher on Escher. Harry N Abrams, New York (1989).

Ernst, Bruno. Magic Mirror of M.C. Escher. TASCHEN America Llc, New York (1995).

Hofstadter, Douglas. Gödel, Escher, Bach.  HarperCollins, New York (1999).

Himmelfarb, Martha. Ascent to Heaven in Jewish and Christian Apocalypses. Oxford University Press, New York (1999). 

___. Tours of Hell. Fortress Press, Philadelphia (1985).  

Schattschneider, Doris. Visions of Symmetry: Notebooks, Periodic Drawings, and Related Work of M.C. Escher. W H Freeman & Co., New York (October 1992).