Cityscape & blipvert. It's dark outside, and it may not be the same day anymore. Finally. Angel has changed clothes, at least. I don't think it's fair that he doesn't get to wear a leather jacket anymore. In his office, Angel is staring out at the city, and as Wesley passes by the doorway, Angel asks, "You don't think he's really gone, do you?" He goes on to note that he was the one who was supposed to get all glowy and then burn up and close the Hellmouth. Wesley asks whether Angel feels guilty. Even Angel -- who feels guilty about most everything -- doesn't feel guilty about Spicule. No, Angel's just wondering what the heck Wolfram & Hart were planning when they gave him the company and an amulet that would turn him into a ghost. Wesley suggests, "Maybe there's dissent in their ranks, or maybe there's another player in the game." He adds, "Then again, maybe they got exactly what they were after." Just then, Angel spots Spicule lurking in the doorway, and asks why he's there. Spicule says that every time he got near the city limits, he got yanked back to Wolfram & Hart. Okay, but couldn't he find somewhere interesting to go within the city limits? ["In L.A.?" -- Wing Chun] Wesley figures that the amulet is bound to Wolfram & Hart somehow, and that Spicule is connected to the amulet.

Harmony pokes her head in, and...okay, she's still wearing the same clothes as before. So is it still the same day after all? She says that Novac is back from his visit to Hainsley. Angel tells her to send Novac in. Harmony skeptically says, "Okay...." She turns her head, and some flunkies enter the office carrying three buckets, which they place on Angel's desk. There are some bloody rags hanging out of one. Angel and Wesley peer into the buckets. Spicule sniffs that they're doing a "bang-up job." It seems odd that he didn't say they were doing a "bloody great job." All those years of set-up, and they missed the punchline.

Commercials. I bring up Spiracle's habit of hugging his coat to himself. Johanna thinks he's scared someone will make him get naked again. She wonders if Marsters has a phobia about socks now: "And if he does, David Boreanaz must terrify him!" Then, apropos of nothing, Johanna tells me, "Usually when I think about how they made Xander sleep outside at Christmas, I'm just thinking about how they're being so mean to him at Christmas. But I just realized that he's sleeping outside at night in Sunnydale. With all the vampires. And they don't care. They actually want him to get killed. He's all, 'Merry Christmas,' and they're like, 'You know what would make my Christmas merry? If you were dead!'"