Angel Season 5 - episode 15 - A hole in the World (part 2)
Angel has sent for Spike, pulled him out of a promising poker game in accounts receivable specifically. Spike is obviously hanging out at Wolfram and Hart with some regularity. And why wouldn’t he? It’s a good place to be, what with the necro-tempered glass, friendly faces who accept his kind, there’s the odd job that allows him to dip his foot in the game now and again and there’s Angel, his brother/father with whom he longs for a connection beyond their shared history. But the summons isn’t exactly what he bargained on:
Angel: Look, I can’t do this anymore
Spike: Admitting defeat are you?
Angel: You and me. This isn’t working out.
Spike: Are you saying we should start annoying other people?
Angel: I’m saying you should go.
Spike accuses him of not being able to stomach the competition but Angel refutes this and says that’s not the reason and then says a lot of stuff about Spike being attached to the place but never really explains exactly why he’s decided that it’s time for Spike to go. So what is the reason? Why send Spike away now? Is it the competition? Is it that Spike has just gotten too irritating to cope with? Or is it that Spike is too close, so close that he threatens the isolated caveman that resides at the core of Angel? . . . Or . . . or . . . is it the danger? Is it that Angel knows that this branch of Wolfram and Hart is an inherently dangerous place to be, more dangerous than a crippled submarine on the bottom on the ocean. And Angel knows, or must at least be beginning to suspect, that the worst is yet to come thanks to Cordelia’s kiss. Could this attempt to get rid of Spike be the equivalent of an eight mile swim before sunrise specifically designed to get his ‘offspring’ out of harm’s way? Because it’s not a dismissal, it’s not Angel saying ‘fuck off, I’ve had enough of you’, no; it’s done with an admission and care:
Angel: …I’ll give you the resources you need to go anywhere; cars, gadgets, expense accounts. You fight the good fight, but…in style. And, if possible in outer Mongolia.
Spike: Roving agent. Sort of a 007 without the poncy tux. Go anywhere I want?
Angel: Anywhere, everywhere
Spike: Anywhere but here.
This time Angel doesn’t send him off with nothing but his ‘life’, this time he offers him the world.
The astronaut V caveman debate has gripped the office. Fred and Lorne discuss the inequity in weapon allocation, what with the caveman having fire and all, when they run into Wesley who was looking for an excuse to come and see Fred. She has just been to medical to have a cautionary examination after breathing in the mummy dust but she’s been sent back to work, everything seems fine. Lorne begins to sing “You are my Sunshine” as he leaves the new couple to their sweet-talk. Fred finishes the line singing to Wesley ‘You make me happy…’
The instant she sings the words Lorne stops and swings around to look at Fred, horror etched across his green face. A mere second later Fred coughs, blood bubbles from her mouth and splatters across Wesley’s face. Fred falls backwards into Lorne’s ready arms and begins convulsing as Wesley calls frantically for medical assistance.
Fred wakes in the medical room at Wolfram and Hart. She’s surrounded by ‘her boys’, Wesley, Charles, Angel, Lorne, Spike and Knox. They are reassuring and down-playing the severity of her situation. She’s not deceived; she’s smarter than the lot of them put together. She knows it bad. Still, her knights in shining armour all promise to work it, shouldn’t take long:
Fred: Handsome man saves me.
Angel: That’s how it works. Let’s get cracking
Wesley stays behind, reassures her that even though he must go and be ‘book man’ he’ll be with her in a heartbeat should she need him for anything. He kisses her tenderly on the forehead. The exchange is witnessed by Angel and Spike:
Angel: Wes and Fred?
Spike: You didn’t know?
Angel: I didn’t know
Connections, disconnectedness… Angel, for all the love and loyalty of his team for him fails to observe their lives and the events that shape them. He’s simply not attuned to human emotions.
Once out of Fred’s hearing the kid gloves come off:
Angel: some parasitic agent is working its way through. I mean, as near as they can tell…
Wesley: Get to the point
Angel: Her organs are cooking. In a day’s time, they’ll liquefy
It’s as bad as it could be. They need answers where there are few to be found. They start with the sarcophagus.
Wesley: Where did it come from?
Knox: It just showed up. No return address. Didn’t recognise the guy who bought it in - come to think of it, in the middle of the night.
Angel: This was deliberate
Lorne: Senior partners?
Gunn: Doesn’t add up, but I’ll hit the white room. Talk to the conduit
Angel: Now look, if the Senior partners didn’t do this, you gotta get them to help us.
Gunn doesn’t want to think that his benefactors could be behind this, Angel doesn’t want them to be the culprits either - he wants their help and the strings they can pull. So they all play to their strengths; Gunn goes to the white room, Wes hits the books, Knox takes care of the science and Angel is looking to work the streets. Spike adds the suggestion of looking up Lindsey - after all, the man knew a bit about them all and liked to play games. Angel concurs and as there’s muscle work to do, why not make it twice as fast. Spontaneously Spike and Angel form a team, a partnership. They unite with a common purpose, fights, irritations and dismissals forgotten.
Wesley is busy with research, looking up anything and everything in his magical source books that may lead him to answers. He looks fairly calm, considering. Another employee comes to his office door to ask about another matter unrelated to Fred:
Wesley: It can wait
W&H employee: These guys are really important. I just need…I mean, the whole company can’t be working Miss Burkle’s case.
Wesley: Of course.
Wesley then calmly reaches into his desk draw and pulls out a gun and shoots the man in the knee. So much for the calm. It’s an irrational, passion fuelled, instinctual act. Wesley’s inner caveman makes an appearance. The shooting achieves nothing of course, except that it makes Wes feel momentarily control in a situation that he knows is beyond his control and it serves as a warning to other employees who would not give Fred’s situation due diligence.
The white room seems deserted, like nothing has changed. But it has. There is a new conduit in residence and it’s exactly like looking in a mirror. When Angel and the gang were first given the tour of Wolfram and Hart (in A4.22, Home) Charles was surprised to learn that the firm had plans for him, big plans. He got taken to the white room, he was bemused. He said they had the wrong guy, that this place was for the big cats. Before the words were out of his mouth a big black panther arrived ready to communicate. The form of the conduit is determined by the viewer. The belief that the white room was the domain of the ‘big cats’ resulted in a big cat as conduit. Now Gunn is a big cat, now he has power and influence and he doesn’t need to conger images of giant felines. Now he sees himself. He’s part of Wolfram and Hart body and soul and he wants that power working for him to get Fred out of trouble. But the conduit version of Gunn is not warm or fuzzy or cooperative:
Conduit: This is the part where I need to be clear. I am not your friend. I am not your flunky. I am your conduit to the senior partners, and they are tired of your insolence. Oh yeah. They are not here for your convenience.
Gunn doesn’t want to ask a favour, he’s prepared to make a deal. The conduit isn’t interested. Deals are for the devil it tells Charles cuttingly.
Gunn: You want someone else? A life for hers, you’ll get it. You can have mine!
Conduit: I already do.
So the Senior Partners are not coming to the party. Not so surprising when you remember that Gunn’s initial upgrade was designed specifically to be temporary. That it was expected that he would have to make some kind of deal to get the permanent fix. This suggests that either, A) the senior partners have engineered the intricate series of events that have led to Fred’s infection or B) the manoeuvring of the sarcophagus into Wolfram and Hart was coincidental and they are actively choosing not to assist Fred. In both cases the Senior Partners are willing to see Winifred Burkle sacrificed to achieve their own objective which would be to remove the Fred-shaped Jenga piece from the Team Angel tower. It’s a load bearing piece, a unifying force that, once removed, will make the tower very precarious indeed. Spike they would assist (in Hell Bound) because his very presence assisted them in their aim. He was an unforseen bonus who chipped away at Angel’s already fractured foundations, his self-belief and certainty of purpose. Unlucky for her, Fred’s value lies in her removal. By taking her away they make a devistating assault on hope, they demoralise and destabilise the team by destroying unity and functionality, making it more likely that they will work within the system rather than against it and thus nullifying their influence in the world completely. Objective achieved.
Of course, an alternative reading is that the Doctor who performed Charles’ brain upgrade was playing his own deep game all along and that the senior partners were ignorant of his movements. Perhaps the Doctor used the Senior Partner sanctioned brain upgrade for his own purposes, deliberately making it temporary, deliberately manoeuvring Charles Gunn into having to make a deal to get permanence. Perhaps the Senior Partner’s conduit is just mightily pissed off that they got played by one of their own. But still, it doesn’t negate the notion that Fred’s demise works in the firm’s favour.
Angel, Spike and Lorne search Lindsey’s apartment for any indication that he is behind the delivery of the tomb. Instead they find Eve. She is a wreck, hiding behind the protective symbols that still decorate the walls, wearing nothing but her lover’s shirt. Angel’s not that interested in her and cuts right to the chase:
Angel: Fred’s dying; some mystical parasite. Ring a bell?
She denies all knowledge saying the scheme has nothing to do with either her or Lindsey. The very mention of his name has her salivating. Have they heard from him, know anything about him? The all-knowing, smugly powerful liaison to the senior partners has been reduced to a pathetic, abandoned girlfriend. The boys start to lose patience with her lack of cooperation but Eve argues:
Eve: Why would we do anything to Fred? Why would we even care about her?
And it is too much. Peace-loving, caritas-driven Lorne punches her with instinctual savagery. The caveman within bought out by anger at the suggestion that their beloved Fred is too insignificant to be of any concern or importance. He requests a song, so he can read her emotions but threatens:
Lorne: …if I hear one note, one quarter note, that tells me you had any involvement, these two won’t even have time to kill you.
Eve sings. It’s the first line of Lindsey’s ‘L.A. Song’ which he performed to great effect at Caritas when his disillusionment with Wolfram and Hart was really beginning to set in (see Dead End). She reads clean. She’s got nothing to do with the sarcophagus. Spike intimates that they should trade her for some practical assistance from the senior partners; she’d be a hell of a bargaining chip. The threat brings forth some information:
Eve: No. They can’t help you. I mean it. If you’re talking about a sarcophagus that doesn’t match anything in our records, there’s nothing that’s not in our records except what came before. The Old Ones.
Angel: The original demons, before human kind. They were all driven out of this dimension.
Eve: The ones that were still alive. But long before that they were killing each other all the time and they don’t die the way we do. Wesley may not know it but his source books can conjure up anything, not just our own stock. Tell him to look for the texts that are forgotten, the oldest scrolls. You need to find the Deeper Well.
Eve’s tip pays off. Wesley is able to discover that the thing that has infected Fred is called ‘Illyria’. It was a great monarch and warrior of the demon age murdered by rivals and left adrift in the Deeper Well, a burial ground for the remnants of the old ones, and now its engineering its rebirth using Fred as its cocoon. It is written that if something gets out of the Well then it can be drawn back there from the source. The Well is in England and the Wolfram and Hart jet can get Angel there in just four hours (they have really good jets). Wesley remains working, close to Fred while Lorne decides to pray, thus adopting the ‘superstitious’ behaviour of the primitives so abhorred and denigrated by sophisticated scientists. Time is not on their side. Nobody is on their side. The have an institution, a conglomerate, the forces of evil working against them. They seem so tiny an insignificant but there’s work to be done and the obstacles don’t deter. They’re champions; that’s what they do.
Angel: Come on. Let’s save the day.
Part 3 (of 3) here
Angel: Look, I can’t do this anymore
Spike: Admitting defeat are you?
Angel: You and me. This isn’t working out.
Spike: Are you saying we should start annoying other people?
Angel: I’m saying you should go.
Spike accuses him of not being able to stomach the competition but Angel refutes this and says that’s not the reason and then says a lot of stuff about Spike being attached to the place but never really explains exactly why he’s decided that it’s time for Spike to go. So what is the reason? Why send Spike away now? Is it the competition? Is it that Spike has just gotten too irritating to cope with? Or is it that Spike is too close, so close that he threatens the isolated caveman that resides at the core of Angel? . . . Or . . . or . . . is it the danger? Is it that Angel knows that this branch of Wolfram and Hart is an inherently dangerous place to be, more dangerous than a crippled submarine on the bottom on the ocean. And Angel knows, or must at least be beginning to suspect, that the worst is yet to come thanks to Cordelia’s kiss. Could this attempt to get rid of Spike be the equivalent of an eight mile swim before sunrise specifically designed to get his ‘offspring’ out of harm’s way? Because it’s not a dismissal, it’s not Angel saying ‘fuck off, I’ve had enough of you’, no; it’s done with an admission and care:
Angel: …I’ll give you the resources you need to go anywhere; cars, gadgets, expense accounts. You fight the good fight, but…in style. And, if possible in outer Mongolia.
Spike: Roving agent. Sort of a 007 without the poncy tux. Go anywhere I want?
Angel: Anywhere, everywhere
Spike: Anywhere but here.
This time Angel doesn’t send him off with nothing but his ‘life’, this time he offers him the world.
The astronaut V caveman debate has gripped the office. Fred and Lorne discuss the inequity in weapon allocation, what with the caveman having fire and all, when they run into Wesley who was looking for an excuse to come and see Fred. She has just been to medical to have a cautionary examination after breathing in the mummy dust but she’s been sent back to work, everything seems fine. Lorne begins to sing “You are my Sunshine” as he leaves the new couple to their sweet-talk. Fred finishes the line singing to Wesley ‘You make me happy…’
The instant she sings the words Lorne stops and swings around to look at Fred, horror etched across his green face. A mere second later Fred coughs, blood bubbles from her mouth and splatters across Wesley’s face. Fred falls backwards into Lorne’s ready arms and begins convulsing as Wesley calls frantically for medical assistance.
Fred wakes in the medical room at Wolfram and Hart. She’s surrounded by ‘her boys’, Wesley, Charles, Angel, Lorne, Spike and Knox. They are reassuring and down-playing the severity of her situation. She’s not deceived; she’s smarter than the lot of them put together. She knows it bad. Still, her knights in shining armour all promise to work it, shouldn’t take long:
Fred: Handsome man saves me.
Angel: That’s how it works. Let’s get cracking
Wesley stays behind, reassures her that even though he must go and be ‘book man’ he’ll be with her in a heartbeat should she need him for anything. He kisses her tenderly on the forehead. The exchange is witnessed by Angel and Spike:
Angel: Wes and Fred?
Spike: You didn’t know?
Angel: I didn’t know
Connections, disconnectedness… Angel, for all the love and loyalty of his team for him fails to observe their lives and the events that shape them. He’s simply not attuned to human emotions.
Once out of Fred’s hearing the kid gloves come off:
Angel: some parasitic agent is working its way through. I mean, as near as they can tell…
Wesley: Get to the point
Angel: Her organs are cooking. In a day’s time, they’ll liquefy
It’s as bad as it could be. They need answers where there are few to be found. They start with the sarcophagus.
Wesley: Where did it come from?
Knox: It just showed up. No return address. Didn’t recognise the guy who bought it in - come to think of it, in the middle of the night.
Angel: This was deliberate
Lorne: Senior partners?
Gunn: Doesn’t add up, but I’ll hit the white room. Talk to the conduit
Angel: Now look, if the Senior partners didn’t do this, you gotta get them to help us.
Gunn doesn’t want to think that his benefactors could be behind this, Angel doesn’t want them to be the culprits either - he wants their help and the strings they can pull. So they all play to their strengths; Gunn goes to the white room, Wes hits the books, Knox takes care of the science and Angel is looking to work the streets. Spike adds the suggestion of looking up Lindsey - after all, the man knew a bit about them all and liked to play games. Angel concurs and as there’s muscle work to do, why not make it twice as fast. Spontaneously Spike and Angel form a team, a partnership. They unite with a common purpose, fights, irritations and dismissals forgotten.
Wesley is busy with research, looking up anything and everything in his magical source books that may lead him to answers. He looks fairly calm, considering. Another employee comes to his office door to ask about another matter unrelated to Fred:
Wesley: It can wait
W&H employee: These guys are really important. I just need…I mean, the whole company can’t be working Miss Burkle’s case.
Wesley: Of course.
Wesley then calmly reaches into his desk draw and pulls out a gun and shoots the man in the knee. So much for the calm. It’s an irrational, passion fuelled, instinctual act. Wesley’s inner caveman makes an appearance. The shooting achieves nothing of course, except that it makes Wes feel momentarily control in a situation that he knows is beyond his control and it serves as a warning to other employees who would not give Fred’s situation due diligence.
The white room seems deserted, like nothing has changed. But it has. There is a new conduit in residence and it’s exactly like looking in a mirror. When Angel and the gang were first given the tour of Wolfram and Hart (in A4.22, Home) Charles was surprised to learn that the firm had plans for him, big plans. He got taken to the white room, he was bemused. He said they had the wrong guy, that this place was for the big cats. Before the words were out of his mouth a big black panther arrived ready to communicate. The form of the conduit is determined by the viewer. The belief that the white room was the domain of the ‘big cats’ resulted in a big cat as conduit. Now Gunn is a big cat, now he has power and influence and he doesn’t need to conger images of giant felines. Now he sees himself. He’s part of Wolfram and Hart body and soul and he wants that power working for him to get Fred out of trouble. But the conduit version of Gunn is not warm or fuzzy or cooperative:
Conduit: This is the part where I need to be clear. I am not your friend. I am not your flunky. I am your conduit to the senior partners, and they are tired of your insolence. Oh yeah. They are not here for your convenience.
Gunn doesn’t want to ask a favour, he’s prepared to make a deal. The conduit isn’t interested. Deals are for the devil it tells Charles cuttingly.
Gunn: You want someone else? A life for hers, you’ll get it. You can have mine!
Conduit: I already do.
So the Senior Partners are not coming to the party. Not so surprising when you remember that Gunn’s initial upgrade was designed specifically to be temporary. That it was expected that he would have to make some kind of deal to get the permanent fix. This suggests that either, A) the senior partners have engineered the intricate series of events that have led to Fred’s infection or B) the manoeuvring of the sarcophagus into Wolfram and Hart was coincidental and they are actively choosing not to assist Fred. In both cases the Senior Partners are willing to see Winifred Burkle sacrificed to achieve their own objective which would be to remove the Fred-shaped Jenga piece from the Team Angel tower. It’s a load bearing piece, a unifying force that, once removed, will make the tower very precarious indeed. Spike they would assist (in Hell Bound) because his very presence assisted them in their aim. He was an unforseen bonus who chipped away at Angel’s already fractured foundations, his self-belief and certainty of purpose. Unlucky for her, Fred’s value lies in her removal. By taking her away they make a devistating assault on hope, they demoralise and destabilise the team by destroying unity and functionality, making it more likely that they will work within the system rather than against it and thus nullifying their influence in the world completely. Objective achieved.
Of course, an alternative reading is that the Doctor who performed Charles’ brain upgrade was playing his own deep game all along and that the senior partners were ignorant of his movements. Perhaps the Doctor used the Senior Partner sanctioned brain upgrade for his own purposes, deliberately making it temporary, deliberately manoeuvring Charles Gunn into having to make a deal to get permanence. Perhaps the Senior Partner’s conduit is just mightily pissed off that they got played by one of their own. But still, it doesn’t negate the notion that Fred’s demise works in the firm’s favour.
Angel, Spike and Lorne search Lindsey’s apartment for any indication that he is behind the delivery of the tomb. Instead they find Eve. She is a wreck, hiding behind the protective symbols that still decorate the walls, wearing nothing but her lover’s shirt. Angel’s not that interested in her and cuts right to the chase:
Angel: Fred’s dying; some mystical parasite. Ring a bell?
She denies all knowledge saying the scheme has nothing to do with either her or Lindsey. The very mention of his name has her salivating. Have they heard from him, know anything about him? The all-knowing, smugly powerful liaison to the senior partners has been reduced to a pathetic, abandoned girlfriend. The boys start to lose patience with her lack of cooperation but Eve argues:
Eve: Why would we do anything to Fred? Why would we even care about her?
And it is too much. Peace-loving, caritas-driven Lorne punches her with instinctual savagery. The caveman within bought out by anger at the suggestion that their beloved Fred is too insignificant to be of any concern or importance. He requests a song, so he can read her emotions but threatens:
Lorne: …if I hear one note, one quarter note, that tells me you had any involvement, these two won’t even have time to kill you.
Eve sings. It’s the first line of Lindsey’s ‘L.A. Song’ which he performed to great effect at Caritas when his disillusionment with Wolfram and Hart was really beginning to set in (see Dead End). She reads clean. She’s got nothing to do with the sarcophagus. Spike intimates that they should trade her for some practical assistance from the senior partners; she’d be a hell of a bargaining chip. The threat brings forth some information:
Eve: No. They can’t help you. I mean it. If you’re talking about a sarcophagus that doesn’t match anything in our records, there’s nothing that’s not in our records except what came before. The Old Ones.
Angel: The original demons, before human kind. They were all driven out of this dimension.
Eve: The ones that were still alive. But long before that they were killing each other all the time and they don’t die the way we do. Wesley may not know it but his source books can conjure up anything, not just our own stock. Tell him to look for the texts that are forgotten, the oldest scrolls. You need to find the Deeper Well.
Eve’s tip pays off. Wesley is able to discover that the thing that has infected Fred is called ‘Illyria’. It was a great monarch and warrior of the demon age murdered by rivals and left adrift in the Deeper Well, a burial ground for the remnants of the old ones, and now its engineering its rebirth using Fred as its cocoon. It is written that if something gets out of the Well then it can be drawn back there from the source. The Well is in England and the Wolfram and Hart jet can get Angel there in just four hours (they have really good jets). Wesley remains working, close to Fred while Lorne decides to pray, thus adopting the ‘superstitious’ behaviour of the primitives so abhorred and denigrated by sophisticated scientists. Time is not on their side. Nobody is on their side. The have an institution, a conglomerate, the forces of evil working against them. They seem so tiny an insignificant but there’s work to be done and the obstacles don’t deter. They’re champions; that’s what they do.
Angel: Come on. Let’s save the day.
Part 3 (of 3) here