#and it feels like conning your frend out of concert tickets isn’t quite as bad as lying about who you are and getting adopted as your buddy

[agentbluefox]

Thinking about Face in ‘Beneath the Surface.’

The whole episode, everyone keeps talking basically about what a handful he was growing up, scamming the other kids in the orphanage, basically being the same old Face we know. But frankly, the things he did are pretty mild? it’s not like he was some holy terror, he was just a little boy who was good at selling a lie.

At first he’s defending himself, saying it was his ‘training ground’ or whatever, but as the episode progresses, we see that he really does seem to feel bad about being such a handful as a kid. Which... he was a little boy. He wasn’t in the best situation. And I’m not saying that lying and cheating is the right way to deal with things, but it’s understandable. He was a little kid in a world that had already proved itself to be unfair. And the worst thing he did it seems, was to sell his friend a fake treasure map.

Then towards the end, we get this scene here:

Face is once again apologizing (in his own way) for how he acted when they were younger. And then Barry drops this bomb.

So while Face scammed his friend out of a concert ticket, Barry scammed Face out of a family. Seemingly with no remorse. Sure, he tells Face about it here, but he says it like it’s no big deal. Even seems to think it’s funny.

Now if Face had been there, who knows if he would have been adopted in Barry’s place. Maybe, maybe not. But the point is that they believed Barry was Templeton Peck (or Alvin Brenner - depending what his name was at this point), and they adopted him believing that. (What I really want to know how the orphanage didn’t catch that but that requires more brain power than I’m putting into this post lol)

Face is the one consistently shown to want or even need that sense of belonging and of family (and also the first one to balk when he finally gets something close). To suddenly have it dropped on him so casually that he could have had it, that he almost did have it, maybe when he needed it most, seems especially cruel.

It’s in the past - a long time in the past by now - but no doubt it got him thinking about how different things could have been.