5.14--A Hole in the World--Cavemen & Astronauts
Writer/Director: Joss Whedon

This episode has two ruling concepts or themes, both originally voiced by Spike but proliferating in other voices, other circumstances. Like snowballs, they gather layers, more and more complex associations and meanings, as they move from character to character, situation to situation.
1. If cavemen fought astronauts, who would win?
2. There's a hole in the world. Feels like we ought to have known.


The Cavemen and the Astronauts

It starts out as a nonsensical argument, apparently started by Spike and occupying him and Angel for forty minutes of rants and shouting loud enough to unsettle the whole surrounding complex of offices: If cavemen fought astronauts, who’d win? By apparent prior agreement, the astronauts have no weapons. So by definition, they’re fighting on the caveman’s terms: barehanded. It’s the nature and innate superiority of the human beast that’s at issue. Because what are now astronauts once were cavemen. Was that a gain or a loss?

According to Spike, the caveman side of the argument is characterized by “something primal! Right? Like savagery. Brutal, animal instinct.” And the astronauts are characterized by being “a bunch of namby-pamby, self-analyzing wankers who could never hope to--”

Angel counters with the fact that humanity has evolved since the caveman days. Modern men, astronauts, are bigger and smarter, "plus there's a thing called teamwork, not to mention the superstitious terror of your 'pure aggressors'!"

In this “theoretical” discussion, the caveman position is being held by sleek Spike, later sprawled in unabashed Alpha male pose all over Angel’s guest chair: uniquely at home and easily fitting into each of the ages of Western civilization he’s lived through. Fond of Manchester United and all the “Happy Meals with legs,” even though he’s given up feeding on them lately for moral reasons. And the astronaut position is held by Angel: he of the Neanderthal forehead, always slightly ill at ease in his rumpled clothes; whose increasingly frequent spur of the moment solution to any problem is to blurt, “Kill them all!” Who is increasingly lost in that modern construct, the corporate bureaucracy, bewildered, furious, and helpless within it. All that power, and barely any control. He can order up a jet but is just as terrified as Spike, sitting down in it; unlike Spike, Angel fastens his seat belt.

Yet Spike, having stuck Angel through with a sword, with the excuse of skewering a “bug” on Angel’s back, blithely states he much prefers to hit Angel with blunt instruments. A club, perhaps? Passion-driven, short of temper and impulsive. Caveman? For whom Advanced Astronaut Angel claims to “feel sorry?” And Angel, over a century the elder, fumes and rants and is the last to know Fred and Wes have become an item. Another Caveman? Yet he’s the one wielding the team that puts paid to the nest of insectile demons (like those from the Mayor’s Box of Gavrok? Or more like Suvolte eggs, that got Spike burned and bombed out of his crypt?). He’s the one that equipped Fred with a flame-thrower, and Wes with the shotgun. He’s the one with the facilities that will allow Fred to investigate the new specimen--the one Spike’s sword has nailed to Angel’s back. To satisfy her scientist’s curiosity about a new species.

An astronaut, Fred, definitely--until push comes to shove, and like the creatures she competently and happily incinerated that reproduce by “vomiting up crystals that attract and mutate the microbes around them to form eggs,” she touches and is touched by a different sort of crystal, opening an iris and blowing a gust of ancient air into her lungs…mutating within her to make her a suitable host for another sort of life--her body the shell of a new egg.

So it’s a continuum we’re talking here: a span from caveman to astronaut, with Fred beginning at the highest, most civilized and rational point. Blissfully in love with Wes, who in retrospect believes he’s loved her as long as he’s known her, initially as blissful to learn she loves him in return. At the high point of her existence in mind, spirit, and body. The fulfillment of everything she hoped for, setting out from her family home in Texas, from her loving parents, and no need to keep a child in a drawer. Then, through the episode, being deprived of everything civilized life has to offer, unknowingly betrayed and abandoned by her team, some of whom revert to unconsidered impulse and brute force in response to her situation…and thereby placing themselves on the continuum between savage and savant this episode demonstrates for us.

There’s yet another permutation. By the same anthropomorphism by which mountains are viewed as male, caves are archetypically female. It’s in Plato’s allegorical cave that the shadows of True Being can be glimpsed. Caves suggest the primal and the female; emotion as opposed to logic; bare-handed fighting as opposed to tools or sophisticated weaponry. So Fred the sometime cave-dweller, new lover, objective scientist, and determined fighter, represents the entire spectrum of this idea in her own person. In some senses, Fred is the cave…just as her absence represents a very real hole in the Fang Gang’s emotional world. Fred is the heart, the center, the unfailing fidelity to the ideal. She’s written on the walls of Plato’s cave.


The Hole in the World

Fred’s dad knows: in leaving Texas for “Hell-A,” she’s going to her doom. If she meets so much as a single angel there, says Roger Burkle, he’ll eat the dogs. One wonders how they tasted. And whether it’s merely a strange coincidence that Fred’s and Wesley’s father have the same given name.

We know Pa Burkle is right--LA is hell and, as Fred later calls it, “a place of death.” And the deepest circle of that hell apparent on the mortal plane is Wolfram & Hart, where Fred has relocated, courtesy of the deal her loved and admired boss, Angel, made with the demonic Senior Partners. In one sense, W&H is the hole in the world, in a truer sense than Sunnydale now is. It’s a sucking sinkhole. The only ways possible to go are down, or out.

It’s already eaten Gunn. In buying his permanent brain-boost by smoothing the way through customs for a meaningless relic of some sort, he only now realizes that relic was the be-jeweled sarcophagus that imprisoned Illyria--the cause of Fred’s “illness.” The ancient captive demon, released by Fred’s poking at what she should have left alone (Pandora? Spike’s box of flash?), is liquefying Fred’s internal organs in preparation for a transformation into a different sort of life: not unlike being vamped. Fred has given her substance to the sarcophagus by touching it; it in turn is imposing its substance on her, to make its indwelling demon her dweller, in a way a human cannot survive. Emptying Fred of herself to become host for a ravenously eager life form to be reborn in her. As Wesley states, "I think she's being hollowed out so this thing can use her to gestate, to claw its way back into the world." Fred is empty. Fred is a hole.

And through that hole, all that remains of good in the Fang Gang may drain away. Beginning with Gunn.

Realizing he’s been duped by both Knox and the Senior Partners, each with a separate agenda, Gunn attacks Knox in a rage and well might have killed him; we won’t know for sure until next week.

Wesley, single-mindedly focused on finding an antidote or cure for Fred’s condition, offhandedly shoots a lawyer in the kneecap…basically for interrupting him with a merely business matter. For adhering to the normal office priorities. For having any interest except saving Fred. Because nothing is now normal. There’s a hole in the world…and a time limit.

In the face of this crisis, Spike and Angel set aside their endless fraternal bickering to do the frightening unusual--fly in a superfast jet plane; dredge up old tricks, also known as the St. Petersburg clothesline maneuver; and even the impossible, if that’s what it takes. Nothing now matters more than Fred. Faced with the Guardian, Drogyn, in a sequence freakily reminiscent of a similar one in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a man who instead of posing riddles (a la Monty Python) forbids questions, Spike even manages to curb his mouth for several minutes before losing his patience and his temper and blurting, “Why do you think we're here? What's your favorite color? What's your favorite song? Who's the goalkeeper for Manchester United and how many fingers am I holding up? [displaying the reversed two fingers of the British “bird”] You wanna kill me? Try. I don't have time for your quirks."

Angel openly relies on Spike’s support: the clothesline maneuver that slices off the heads of the first of the attacking guardians, incidentally providing Angel and Spike with weapons, doesn’t work very well with no space to stretch it across. It take two. Angel unquestioningly expects Spike to help “save the day” (an echo of the Mighty Mouse theme: “Here he comes to save the day! Mighty Mouse is on his way!”) Angel freely acknowledges Spike, to Drogyn, as a fellow Champion: “You’ve got two of those, right here.” Yet it’s Spike who remarkably acts as Angel’s cooler-headed anchor: when Angel blurts, “Hell with the world,” and starts following Drogyn to get the spell that will force Illyria back to her prison despite the uncountable numbers of people she’ll “infect” in transit, trying to grab onto the mortal world, Angel notices Spike isn’t following. He’s held his place, staring past the railing into the abyss, having described the spell as “madness.” Angel says, “Spike?”--at once a question, a plea, and a summons. Spike stays where he is, facing the vast tomb of his ancient predecessors, the pure demons. Not looking around, he says, inconsequentially, yet most significantly, “There's a hole in the world. Feels like we ought to have known.” And Angel is anchored there, waiting with Spike for Fred’s inevitable death because the price of her life is too high. It would be madness. Even Spike, who willingly sacrificed himself for the many in Sunnydale’s last minutes, knows that. Therefore Angel cannot ignore it or act on his impulse to sacrifice the unknown many for the beloved one.

In their rational stillness, setting aside passion for speculations about New Zealand (rather than the laden weight of African swallows), the two centuries-old vampires face the bleak unknown. And in so doing, they come down on the side of the astronauts.


Fred’s Journey

As this episode shows us, Fred’s life started out in suburban Texas, with a loving family she left in pursuit of the fulfillment of her innate capabilities at the physics program at U.C.L.A. in Los Angeles, consciously setting aside (for the moment) the idea of a husband and a child, all living in her one restricted little room, with the child popped cozily in a drawer--a normal life for a woman, according to her father’s experience and opinions. LA is a hellhole of corruption, he believes, and indeed, Fred finds it so. In graduate school, an envious professor consigned her to Pylea, a demon realm where humans were regarded as both cattle (“cows”) and chattel, and she spent most of her years there hiding out in a cave and only marginally sane, but still shrewd enough to keep herself from recapture until her human sympathy caused her to reveal herself to Cordelia. She was good at being a cavewoman. She survived, by her wits, with her remarkable intelligence intact, if not her emotional strength. Rescued by the Fang Gang, she suffered from acute agoraphobia, having to steel herself to leave her room at the Hyperion, with its much-written-upon walls.

Finally freed of her fears--by taking revenge on her betrayer (which had the unexpected side-effect of ending her relationship with Gunn, who did the actual execution [A 4.5, “Supersymmetry,”])--Fred emerges as fully her own woman: adept at both science and magic and the blends between; well fitted to run the Practical Science Division at Wolfram & Hart; compassionate toward helpless Spike; unshakeable in her commitment to the AI mission statement of “Helping the hopeless” because it’s right, even when others waver or lose their way. She’s not an icy science nerd: she’s had a crush on Angel and a relationship with Gunn, she’s dated cute “Knoxie,” and enjoys a warm, trusting friendship with Wesley, even though for a long time she remained unaware that Wesley harbored somewhat stronger feelings for her than friendship. Maybe it’s hard to warm up romantically to somebody who’s chased you around a big ol’ hotel with an axe, spouting woman-hating rants (A 3.6, “Billy”) when you’re the sort of woman who flaunts a Dixie Chicks poster on your office wall.

Fred takes great exception to being protected, treated as anything other than a full member of the team (her resentment of Wesley’s protectiveness is stated quite plainly in “Legacy.”) Instead of the “boring” life she happily envisioned when she left home, we now find her in a cave, calmly incinerating a nest (mother image) of hatching buglike monsters with a flame-thrower. Her discussion of their interesting reproductive methods, Wesley contrives to interpret as flirting (“Are you trying to turn me on?”), and they kiss against a background of crackling flames. If there were a poster girl for “You’ve come a long way, Baby,” Fred certainly would be it.

In this episode, faced with her deteriorating physical condition, she fights back with everything she has, leaving her hospital bed to return to the lab, declaring she should be the one figuring this out. She protests and resists solicitous Wesley’s suggestions that she rest because she’s not a “case” or a “damsel in distress”: she needs to work. She needs to be who she is. The spirit is frightened but determined, but the flesh collapses. At her despairing request, Wes takes her home, to her own bedroom, and is with her until the end.

Although the light hurts her eyes, she insists it be left on. Though she’s drifting in and out of consciousness and rationality (“Feigenbaum!… I have to have Feigenbaum here.” [her glasses-wearing pink toy rabbit, the “Master of Chaos” apparently named for Mitchell J. Feigenbaum, a noted chaos theorist and expert on a particular kind of fractal…which she’s forgotten] "Oh God, I've sinned. I've sinned and I'm being punished. I don't know what's wrong. I never got a B minus before.") she instructs Wesley to tell her parents that she wasn't scared. That it was quick. Comforting lies. But she never stops fighting, never stops trusting in her companions on the journey: "My boys. I walk with heroes. Think about that." Wracked Wesley replies that she herself is a hero.

With the final, poignant and unanswerable question, “Why can’t I stay?” Fred’s eyes go fixed and still and her breathing stops. Then she falls on the floor in convulsions. What rises from the floor and declares coolly , evaluating herself, “This will do,” is no longer Fred.

There’s a hole in the world. However, the Deeper Well is really a hole through the world: it comes out the other side…perhaps somewhere in New Zealand. We have yet to learn whether Fred will do likewise.


Nan Dibble
2/27/04
Acknowledgement: As always, I am indebted for the gladly shared insights, wit, and general snarkiness of my fellow S’cubies: the members of the Soulful Spike Society.

MISCELLANEOUS

• “Whinging,” which Spike complains of Angel doing, is just a Britishism for whining, complaining.

• In Angel’s “I want a divorce” speech to Spike, what precisely about Spike is he objecting to? The fact that Spike reminds him (at every opportunity) of things Angel would rather not remember--their shared past? The fact that Spike can get under his skin and make him feel in a way nobody else can? And in their further discussion of the blank check Angel is willing to write Spike to get rid of him, neither of them mentions either of two magic words: Rome, or Buffy. Angel knows by this time that if Spike were going to contact Buffy, he already would have done it. And Spike knows that for whatever reason of his own, he’s not going there or doing that. So Angel is prepared to offer him anything else his occasionally larcenous, occasionally greedy heart desires: the main issue has already been tacitly settled. Spike’s not going to Rome, and Angel knows it. And notice: the minute there’s a threat to Fred, Spike and Angel function in perfect unanimity. They move and fight as a team with (almost) no bickering. And it’s immovable Spike who draws Angel back from the brink…of saving the one at the expense of the all. So their differences are deep, but vanish when something they both value, someone they both (platonically) love, is imperiled.

• We’ll pass on extensive commentary on the very unsub gay subtext, except to list: the whole quasi-“This is not working out, I want a divorce” scene, with Spike’s rejoinder, “Are you saying we should start annoying other people?” including Spike’s almost gymnastically extreme spread-legged Alpha male sprawl in Angel’s presence; their easy partnership, setting aside surface hostilities; the hand-holding. There it is, folks. Take it or leave it.

• In the White Room, Gunn confronts the ghostly image of what looks like a bridge…and himself. The conduit manifests according to who’s seeing it…and now it’s become Gunn’s image. Spooky! And persuasive: Gunn, like most of the rest of humanity (and vamps) is his own worst enemy. And his outer appearance, the fluent, perfectly tailored lawyer, now belongs entirely to Wolfram & Hart…and the Senior Partners. And Gunn finally knows it.

• The song Eve timorously sings a few bars of, so Lorne can “read” her, is the L.A. song Lindsey sang at Caritas in "Dead End".

• The singularly apt passage Wes reads to Fred, "She was such a little girl that one did not expect to see such a look on her small face. It would have been an old look for a child of twelve, and Sara Crewe was only seven. The fact was, however, that she was always dreaming and thinking odd things and could not herself remember any time when she had not been thinking things about grown-up people and the world they belonged to. She felt as if she had lived a long, long time," is from A Little Princess (original title Sarah Crewe, 1888), by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Among Burnett’s other well-known children’s books are Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886) and The Secret Garden (1911). NB: we were told in “Lineage” that the “master books” were keyed to Wolfram & Hart’s library and could call up, like a screen, anything in their holdings. Per Eve, now, the master books can call up anything--not just what’s in W&H’s vast (but limited) library. So the same book can successively display The Dread Host's Compendium of Immortal Leeches and The Little Princess.

• Spike’s line to Angel, about the non-door in the tree, which Angel thinks is the entrance to the Deeper Well, “Either that or Christmasland,” is a reference to The Nightmare Before Christmas, a skewed and excellent stop-motion animated movie by Tim Burton, in which Jack Skellington, who presides over Halloweenland, plots to kidnap Santa in trying to understand and absorb Christmasland, which he believes is much more interesting than his own holiday realm. Naturally, Angel doesn’t get it.

• What is Drogyn so determined that Spike not ask him, even threatening to kill him if he questions further? Since Drogyn’s characteristic is that he can’t lie, what answer does he so fear to give that he’ll threaten a Champion intent only on saving the innocent? Why, when Spike blurts a string of deliberately insolent questions, doesn’t Drogyn retaliate as threatened?

• Thinking Lindsey may be behind Fred’s affliction, Angel tries to locate him and he, Spike, and Lorne instead find Eve, disheveled and in bed, protesting ignorance in the matter. She claims, apparently truthfully (per Lorne’s reading), to know nothing of the sarcophagus and nothing of Lindsey’s whereabouts or circumstances. The latter, she seems very eager to know. She’s also very anxious that the Senior Partners not be told her hiding place (still shielded, apparently, by Lindsey’s runes). Presumably there will be more developments on this front.

• Lorne reads Fred’s fate when she happily sings on the stairs, flirting with Wesley, just before her initial collapse. Lorne looks suitably appalled…though it’s hard to tell, when one is green.

• Remorse-stricken Gunn attacks Knox. Is Knox dead? We’ll have to wait to find out. We also might get some insight into whether Gunn attacked Knox, in part, to shut him up, since Knox is one of the two W&H employees who know of Gunn’s involvement in the delivery of the sarcophagus. How’s Dr. Sparrow feeling these days?

• Gunn has gone seriously dark. His “joke” to Wes, announcing that he and Fred have gotten back together, is cruel and unfeeling. His warbling of a song from The Mikado (Gilbert & Sullivan), an opera dealing with an unwilling executioner, one of whose ditties goes, “My object all sublime, I shall achieve in time, to let the punishment fit the crime, the punishment fit the crime,” reveals how happy he is with the brain boost…until he knows its consequences. He thinks he’s gotten away with it, and nobody the wiser. He’s wrong. And he shifts to badly-done, unrhythmic rap when Wesley approaches. All a matter of image. He’s the worst of both his selves: a bullying lawyer and a brutal attacker. What punishment will fit his crime?

• Wes casually shooting the interrupting lawyer in the kneecap suggests he’s again drawing on his darker side, too, in his absolute focus on finding a way to save Fred. He’s done awful things before, in the service of what he believed was right…but seldom so casually. One thinks of his stabbing the human girl in the drug den to force information from her, in A S4.15, “Release,” but that was for a purpose; Wes shoots the lawyer simply to shut him up, stop him interrupting, and serve as an object lesson on what he’s willing to do to anybody not concentrating solely on Fred. Slight difference here.

Memorable lines:

Fred: Daddy, I love you like pancakes, but I’m getting the hell out of here.

Roger Burkle (responding to Fred’s reminding him that LA is the “City of Angels”): And if you meet one angel there, I’ll eat the dogs.

Roger Burkle: I slept in a drawer till I was three. Didn’t stunt me none.

Wes (re romancing Fred): So you know about--
Gunn: It’s on every Blackberry [a sophisticated handheld computer/planner, I’m told] in the building. No secrets in the House of Pain.
Wes: And is that all right with you? Fred and me?
Gunn: Last year, you wouldn’t have asked me that question. The man becomes civilized! It’s cool. Our thing’s long done, and I know how you feel about her.
Wes: Thank you.
Gunn: And to add the necessary boiler plate, you ever hurt her and I’m gonna kill you like a chicken.
Wes: Acceptable terms.
Gunn: Now, on to the real fun.
Wes: Yes, you seemed like something was up before you made that tasteless and horrible joke at my expense.

Fred (of the sarcophagus): Let’s not be hasty in opening it. It’s probably just a mummy.
Knox: Mummies can be a lot more trouble than you think.

Spike: Harmony just pulled me out of a very promising poker game down in Accounts Receivable, so this better be good. Oh, and by the way? All the guys down there agree that astronauts don’t stand a chance against cavemen, so don’t even start.
Angel: Look, I can’t do this any more.
Spike: Admitting defeat, are you?
Angel: You and me. It isn’t working out.
Spike (hand on heart): Are you saying we should start annoying other people?
….
Angel: He [Lindsey] only made you corporeal again once you’d gotten used to it [W&H]. Attached to it.
Spike: I’m not attached. I just don’t have anywhere else to go.
….
Angel: Wolfram & Hart has got offices in every major city in the world, and a lot more out of it. I’ll give you the resources you need to go anywhere: cars, gadgets, expense account…. You fight the good fight--but in style. And, if possible, in Outer Mongolia.

Fred (in hospital bed): It’s my boys. I haven’t had this many big strapping men at my bedside since that night with the varsity lacrosse team.

Angel: Her organs are cooking. In a day’s time, they’ll liquefy.
Spike: No. Not this girl. Not this day.

Conduit!Gunn in the White Room: This is the part where I need to be clear. (Shoves/boosts Gunn halfway across the bridgelike room) 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: You want someone else? A life for hers? You can have mine.
Conduit!Gunn (laughs softly): I already do. (Slugs Gunn repeatedly.)

Lorne (confronting Eve, whom he’s just slugged): Winifred Burkle once told me, after a sinful amount of Chinese food and in lieu of absolutely nothing, “I think a lot of people would choose to be green: your shade, if they had the choice.” If I hear one note, one quarter-note that tells me you had any involvement, these two [Angel and Spike] won't even have time to kill you.

Lorne (to Eve): If I was about to face your future, I’d make like Carmen Miranda and die.

Lorne: If nobody thinks it’s too ridiculous, I’m going to pray.

Fred: This is the House of Death.

Spike (hugging himself nervously, not fastening his seat belt; Angel’s is already fastened): I’ve never flown before.
Angel: I’ve been in a helicopter. But they don’t (looks out the window, quickly pulls away) go this high.
Spike: Back to the mother country. Hey! After we save Fred, we should go to the West End--take in a show.
Angel: I’ve never seen Le Miz (typical: he wants to see a play about miserable people!)
Spike (scornfully): Trust me: halfway through the first act, you’ll be drinking humans again.

Spike: When is a door not a door? When it’s not sodding well there!
Angel: Right there. (Indicating tree with a large gap in its trunk): You want to bet that’s the entrance to the Deeper Well?
Spike: Either that or Christmasland. (off Angel’s look of incomprehension) Do you ever have any fun?
Angel (as a pair of Guardian troops run out of the gap in the tree): I’m about to.
Spike: And they even brought us weapons. Strategy?
Angel: Just hold my hand.
Spike (taking Angel’s hand, finding a coil of wire in it; smiles): St. Peterburg.
Angel: Thought you’d forgotten.

Knox: And nothing would make me happier than to be the white knight in this situation…and have her look at me the way that…. I mean, I don’t just care about Fred--I practically worship it.
Gunn: You said…“it.”
Knox: What?
Gunn: Not “her”: you said “I worship it.”
Knox: Oops!

Knox: Angel’s not gonna save her.
Gunn: You don’t know Angel.
Knox: I’m not being clear. I don’t mean that Angel’s going to fail to save her--I mean he’s gonna let her die.

Illyria: This will do.

______________________________________________

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