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In which I whinge about Angel 5x15, A Hole in the World.
It's never a good idea to reference Shakspeare in a sub-standard episode of a TV show, you just end up looking bad by comparison. All the negative things I’ve been thinking about AtS – temporarily allayed by Damage and Smile Time - were neatly wrapped up in one little package here. It was so male, it was so clunky, it was so badly lit. Three different levels of analysis, the social, the narratological and the formal, and it was crap on all three.
Being clunky was the worst sin. I can forgive a lot for a good story. As I wrote in my exhilaration at finally getting to see Smile Time, the hallmark of a good episode is that everything that happens fulfils several functions. A Hole in the World was the opposite of that. You could practically see the cogs grinding as the plot laboriously shoved the characters from A to B. Worse still, far too many things happened just to try to increase the emotional impact, and if there’s one thing I hate more than an obvious plot device, it’s an emotion-manipulating device (henceforth EMD), especially when no groundwork has been laid for it. Take the little opening scene with Fred’s parents. Did that serve any function at all except to make us feel worse that she died? Poor Fred’s parents, boo hoo! As for the bunny, that was an even cheaper device, introduced out of the blue just so we can have a touching moment later on when she can’t remember its name. Feigenbaum was no Mr Gordo, with an existence independent of his function as EMD, he was only there to add to the pathos of Fred’s dying. Yeuch. Contrast this with Gunn’s terrible discovery that it was his deal with the doctor that got the sarcophagus released. Now that was an emotional gut-punch, one for which the groundwork had been carefully laid and which didn’t feel cheap or unearned at all. I’d been hoping that his deal with the doctor would have a comeback that would be explicitly addressed (S7 Buffy has left me very wary of dangling plot points), but even so I never saw this coming. Knox waving the invoice around was a bit superfluous, though. I’m sure we all got the point when he mentioned the sarcophagus had been held up in customs. Not only did this scene provide a fantastic pay-off for the careful development of Gunn’s story so far, it also took it further (multifunctionality, yay!) in that wonderful moment when he glanced round the lab to make sure no-one was watching before beating Knox’s head in. Wow, he really is crossing boundaries. Suddenly Gunn has become the most interesting character on the show.
What’s in a name? Illyria seems to me a really stupid name for a male demon (distinctly girly, for a start), but perhaps All Will Be Revealed and it will turn out to have some thematic significance. Fred’s insistence that Mr Feigenbaum’s full title is ‘Master of Chaos’ suggests the bunny’s name is also significant. I’ll reserve judgment for the next few episodes (noble of me, eh?) but whilst I’m griping I will point out that however much Fred/Illyria may be a re-run of Cordelia/Jasmine, this is no butterfly effect we’re dealing with here. It isn’t one tiny change that’s altered everything, it’s a bloody enormous change, a fricking huge hole in the world, so if this is what the bunny’s name is supposed to reference, it doesn’t work.
And speaking of holes in the world, was there any reason why all those demon gods were stored in a hole that ran all the way through the earth, as opposed to, say, a cave, beyond allowing Spike to look into it and mutter significantly about there being a hole in the world? I found the whole ‘deeper well’ part of the plot exceptionally irritating. If the other end of the hole is in NZ, I would have thought it would be quicker to fly there from LA than to the Cotswolds, but I assume the point of having it in England was to allow the use of those medieval knights prancing about with their swords, and the rather ineffectual watcher figure (‘I didn’t realise he’d been freed’ – maybe he should run more frequent stock checks), who spoke the sort of cod fantasy English that makes me want to go and spit on Tolkien’s grave. It’s not that I’ve got anything against medieval knights per se. I love the fight in Spiral between the Knights of Byzantium and the Winnebago, but that’s because it’s a wonderfully surreal parody of Stagecoach (right down to Buffy telling Giles to aim for the horses*), and however silly their plotline was, they had a reason for being there. But these knights – do what? Attack Angel with swords? But we’ve already seen that swords don’t kill vampires, Angel was walking around like shish kebab earlier on. Spike and Angel holding hands was groanworthily clunking as well (though I concede that the garrotting was nicely shot). I’m not a slasher, but I imagine that if I was, much of the pleasure would lie in providing ‘resistant readings’ of the text, not in being bashed over the head by shout-outs to the HoYayers. Once the sub-text becomes text, where’s the fun?
Angel asking Spike to leave LA was yet another unearned piece of emotional manipulation. Last time we saw them, the boys seemed to have reached an agreement they could both live with. Suddenly Angel can’t stand having Spike around, but when it comes to rescuing Fred they put their differences aside and stand shoulder to shoulder. Aw, that’s sweet! And speaking of rescuing Fred, was it really convincing that Spike is the one who holds back from sacrificing thousands to save her? It made for a neat little departure from what the viewer expected, but it felt like a cheat, because the groundwork for it hadn’t been laid. I know we saw some moral development in Damage, but this is a huge leap. Spike, the big picture guy (pace the argument with Angel at the beginning), head ruling heart? That’s a major development. I want to know how he got there.
The clunkingest EMD of all was Wesley and Fred falling in love. I’m really not a shipper of any kind, so I had no objection to Fred and Wes getting together, but there doesn’t seem to have been any point to their burgeoning romance than to turn the emotional screws a little tighter in this episode. Yes, Wes has been in love with Fred for ages, but she only figured out she fancied him two eps ago, and got off with him last week. And I’m not a medic, but I bet people whose internal organs are liquefying can’t talk right up to the moment of their death. Not that I’m convinced Fred’s dead, though I shall be severely disappointed if after having to sit through endless scenes of her dying (can you tell I wasn’t moved?), it all turns out to be a con and they get her back again. I suppose with AtS having been cancelled, there’s a better chance for an unhappy ending that would justify all that weeping and wailing.
I didn’t hate everything about the episode. The caveman argument was a little clunking, because it really didn’t serve much of a purpose beyond setting us up for the ‘who sees the bigger picture’ twist at the end, but I did like the way Wesley’s schoolteacher sarcasm (‘Is this something we should all be discussing?’) was followed by the revelation that yes, the whole of W&H has become involved in the debate (personally my money’s on the astronauts – better diet, peak physical fitness, and if they’re TV astronauts then they doubtless know some fancy martial arts moves that would kick those untrained cavemen into kingdom come). Fred singing a couple of bars and Lorne whizzing round in horror and so being in place to catch her was absolutely perfect. And I’m glad that Knox’s sub-plot finally worked up a full head of steam, even if it was obvious that he was a minion of evil when he said there wasn’t an invoice. But how lame was the line ‘I don’t just care about Fred, I practically worship it.’ No-one could get those two concepts tangled up unless they were a plot device. And there, in a nutshell, is the problem with this entire episode.
* One of the criticisms of Stagecoach when it was first released was that the Indians should have shot the horses, to which John Ford replied that in that case the film wouldn’t have lasted half an hour.
It's never a good idea to reference Shakspeare in a sub-standard episode of a TV show, you just end up looking bad by comparison. All the negative things I’ve been thinking about AtS – temporarily allayed by Damage and Smile Time - were neatly wrapped up in one little package here. It was so male, it was so clunky, it was so badly lit. Three different levels of analysis, the social, the narratological and the formal, and it was crap on all three.
Being clunky was the worst sin. I can forgive a lot for a good story. As I wrote in my exhilaration at finally getting to see Smile Time, the hallmark of a good episode is that everything that happens fulfils several functions. A Hole in the World was the opposite of that. You could practically see the cogs grinding as the plot laboriously shoved the characters from A to B. Worse still, far too many things happened just to try to increase the emotional impact, and if there’s one thing I hate more than an obvious plot device, it’s an emotion-manipulating device (henceforth EMD), especially when no groundwork has been laid for it. Take the little opening scene with Fred’s parents. Did that serve any function at all except to make us feel worse that she died? Poor Fred’s parents, boo hoo! As for the bunny, that was an even cheaper device, introduced out of the blue just so we can have a touching moment later on when she can’t remember its name. Feigenbaum was no Mr Gordo, with an existence independent of his function as EMD, he was only there to add to the pathos of Fred’s dying. Yeuch. Contrast this with Gunn’s terrible discovery that it was his deal with the doctor that got the sarcophagus released. Now that was an emotional gut-punch, one for which the groundwork had been carefully laid and which didn’t feel cheap or unearned at all. I’d been hoping that his deal with the doctor would have a comeback that would be explicitly addressed (S7 Buffy has left me very wary of dangling plot points), but even so I never saw this coming. Knox waving the invoice around was a bit superfluous, though. I’m sure we all got the point when he mentioned the sarcophagus had been held up in customs. Not only did this scene provide a fantastic pay-off for the careful development of Gunn’s story so far, it also took it further (multifunctionality, yay!) in that wonderful moment when he glanced round the lab to make sure no-one was watching before beating Knox’s head in. Wow, he really is crossing boundaries. Suddenly Gunn has become the most interesting character on the show.
What’s in a name? Illyria seems to me a really stupid name for a male demon (distinctly girly, for a start), but perhaps All Will Be Revealed and it will turn out to have some thematic significance. Fred’s insistence that Mr Feigenbaum’s full title is ‘Master of Chaos’ suggests the bunny’s name is also significant. I’ll reserve judgment for the next few episodes (noble of me, eh?) but whilst I’m griping I will point out that however much Fred/Illyria may be a re-run of Cordelia/Jasmine, this is no butterfly effect we’re dealing with here. It isn’t one tiny change that’s altered everything, it’s a bloody enormous change, a fricking huge hole in the world, so if this is what the bunny’s name is supposed to reference, it doesn’t work.
And speaking of holes in the world, was there any reason why all those demon gods were stored in a hole that ran all the way through the earth, as opposed to, say, a cave, beyond allowing Spike to look into it and mutter significantly about there being a hole in the world? I found the whole ‘deeper well’ part of the plot exceptionally irritating. If the other end of the hole is in NZ, I would have thought it would be quicker to fly there from LA than to the Cotswolds, but I assume the point of having it in England was to allow the use of those medieval knights prancing about with their swords, and the rather ineffectual watcher figure (‘I didn’t realise he’d been freed’ – maybe he should run more frequent stock checks), who spoke the sort of cod fantasy English that makes me want to go and spit on Tolkien’s grave. It’s not that I’ve got anything against medieval knights per se. I love the fight in Spiral between the Knights of Byzantium and the Winnebago, but that’s because it’s a wonderfully surreal parody of Stagecoach (right down to Buffy telling Giles to aim for the horses*), and however silly their plotline was, they had a reason for being there. But these knights – do what? Attack Angel with swords? But we’ve already seen that swords don’t kill vampires, Angel was walking around like shish kebab earlier on. Spike and Angel holding hands was groanworthily clunking as well (though I concede that the garrotting was nicely shot). I’m not a slasher, but I imagine that if I was, much of the pleasure would lie in providing ‘resistant readings’ of the text, not in being bashed over the head by shout-outs to the HoYayers. Once the sub-text becomes text, where’s the fun?
Angel asking Spike to leave LA was yet another unearned piece of emotional manipulation. Last time we saw them, the boys seemed to have reached an agreement they could both live with. Suddenly Angel can’t stand having Spike around, but when it comes to rescuing Fred they put their differences aside and stand shoulder to shoulder. Aw, that’s sweet! And speaking of rescuing Fred, was it really convincing that Spike is the one who holds back from sacrificing thousands to save her? It made for a neat little departure from what the viewer expected, but it felt like a cheat, because the groundwork for it hadn’t been laid. I know we saw some moral development in Damage, but this is a huge leap. Spike, the big picture guy (pace the argument with Angel at the beginning), head ruling heart? That’s a major development. I want to know how he got there.
The clunkingest EMD of all was Wesley and Fred falling in love. I’m really not a shipper of any kind, so I had no objection to Fred and Wes getting together, but there doesn’t seem to have been any point to their burgeoning romance than to turn the emotional screws a little tighter in this episode. Yes, Wes has been in love with Fred for ages, but she only figured out she fancied him two eps ago, and got off with him last week. And I’m not a medic, but I bet people whose internal organs are liquefying can’t talk right up to the moment of their death. Not that I’m convinced Fred’s dead, though I shall be severely disappointed if after having to sit through endless scenes of her dying (can you tell I wasn’t moved?), it all turns out to be a con and they get her back again. I suppose with AtS having been cancelled, there’s a better chance for an unhappy ending that would justify all that weeping and wailing.
I didn’t hate everything about the episode. The caveman argument was a little clunking, because it really didn’t serve much of a purpose beyond setting us up for the ‘who sees the bigger picture’ twist at the end, but I did like the way Wesley’s schoolteacher sarcasm (‘Is this something we should all be discussing?’) was followed by the revelation that yes, the whole of W&H has become involved in the debate (personally my money’s on the astronauts – better diet, peak physical fitness, and if they’re TV astronauts then they doubtless know some fancy martial arts moves that would kick those untrained cavemen into kingdom come). Fred singing a couple of bars and Lorne whizzing round in horror and so being in place to catch her was absolutely perfect. And I’m glad that Knox’s sub-plot finally worked up a full head of steam, even if it was obvious that he was a minion of evil when he said there wasn’t an invoice. But how lame was the line ‘I don’t just care about Fred, I practically worship it.’ No-one could get those two concepts tangled up unless they were a plot device. And there, in a nutshell, is the problem with this entire episode.
* One of the criticisms of Stagecoach when it was first released was that the Indians should have shot the horses, to which John Ford replied that in that case the film wouldn’t have lasted half an hour.