5.19 Time Bomb--By their fruits ye shall know them.
Writer: Ben Edlund Director: Vern Gillum


In this episode, the principal characters define who they are by what they do.

Angel is metaphorically a king, trying to protect his whole kingdom--the earth and all good creatures that live in it, alive and undead. As a whole but also individually. Faced with surrendering an unborn child to the Fell Brethren who intend eventually to subject it to ritual sacrifice at the age of thirteen, he swallows his principles and approves the pact…in favor of doing “what we’re supposed to: serving our clients.” But which clients? And why? What does this decision portend for Angel’s role in the Thousand Year War of Good versus Evil?

Illyria, trying to hold onto and use the ancient power that defines her as a demon god, once ruler of all there was, is being destroyed by that same power. It’s too great for her human frame to support. She’s in danger of self-destructing on a scale Spike refers to as her going “Chernobyl on us.” Wesley is of the opinion that maps would have to be redrawn and considers there are grave implications for the continental shelf. She’s a walking time bomb…and she’s coming unhitched in time.

Wesley, who’s been Fred’s lover mourning her death and trying to recover her, is in terrible shape. He finally gives up the attempt to recover Fred and instead concentrates on saving Illyria--who’s “all that’s left.” He lies to Angel in pursuit of that choice, telling Angel that the Mutari generator will kill Illyria, not merely drain her excess power into a closed pocket universe where she can’t access it and it can do no harm. As before, Wes makes the hard and unpopular choice alone and ruthlessly does whatever is necessary to enable and effect the desired result. In doing what he does, he again defines himself as who he’s always been.

Gunn, back in his street-fighter clothes and appearance, feels everything’s been turned upside-down (like the Poseidon) and is in search of a compass. He tries to protect the unborn child of prophecy by all the legal means at his command, making full (and moral) use of the brain-boost for which he (and Fred) paid so high a price. He’s following the old mandate--to help the helpless/hopeless and protect the innocent against the wicked. But in this, he’s overruled by Angel. He doesn’t understand. Where is the compass pointing now? It seems that neither Gunn’s old role nor his new one is sufficient to the challenge of the perilous times. How should he define himself now, not merely to survive but to prevail?

In actively joining Team Angel, Spike is becoming more Spike. He’s learning how to fight Illyria and assists Wes in producing the Mutari generator (When Angel asks when Wes was going to tell him about this, Wes says, “I wasn’t. Spike and I were dealing with it.”). He silently supports Angel against Hamilton even though he recognizes that in terms of the coming apocalypse, they’re affiliated with the wrong side. He has no least trouble distinguishing between Fred and Illyria--all his senses tell him of Illyria’s differences--and unlike Wes, he has no sentimental reluctance to bash her any way he can. He’s conspicuously Angel’s right-hand man and alone among them, has some chance against Illyria in a stand-up fight (though she still “cheats” by manipulating time and slowing him down). That’s perhaps why Illyria considers him the greatest threat and dusts him first; and also perhaps why Angel’s shoving him aside and taking the stake Illyria meant for Spike, in a replay of that wholesale slaughter, buys the time to deflect the initial result of wholesale, indiscriminate destruction as Illyria’s power explodes beyond her ability to keep it checked and inside. In that scene, at least, Spike’s survival is the key to everything.

Lorne’s gifts of empathy and willingness are now completely useless. He’s relegated to following Illyria, something he’s ridiculously unsuited for, his reports and warnings completely ignored. What he does shows who he is: he follows his orders, even though that gets him smacked by the one who gave them to him. He helps however he can, however anyone will let him. Because that’s what the green guy does.


The Time Loop

Hamilton makes clear that the Senior Partners knew Illyria in her ancient incarnation…and want her gone. He provides Wesley with the clue about monitoring the low-level emanations, on W&H’s scanners, that apparently leads Wes to conceive of the Mutari generator…that’s capable of preventing Illyria’s self-destruction but not capable of killing her. One assumes that this outcome wasn’t what the Senior Partners intended.

What do the Senior Partners intend? What is their role in what happens in this episode?

The fragmentation of time that pains Illyria and jumps her into scenes past and future, from the perspective of her progress along the timeline, she initially believes to be an attack directed by Angel. But she gradually realizes and has to admit that Angel lacks the means, magical or technological, to perpetrate such an attack. At no point does she suggest that it’s merely a side-effect of her inability to contain her own power, which includes power (however limited) over time. At all times, she considers it an attack by an outside force. Though it’s not specified as such in the episode, the most likely opposition who conceivably do have the means to mount such an attack is the Senior Partners. They can alter time (altering reality, as well as memory, to give Connor a different life shows that they have this power). If this be true, what did the Senior Partners intend to achieve by this tactic?

The most likely explanation is that they intend to imprison Illyria in a recursive time loop from which she’d be unable to escape. In the series Dr. Who, time looping was a frequent method used by the all-but-omnipotent Timelords to defeat an enemy too dangerous to fight directly. The result was to force them to relive the same segment of time over and over, unable to break out to affect further events. It may be that the Senior Partners thought Illyria would be similarly imprisoned, unable to affect the moving present by being safely immured in the past. However, if they meant to hold Illyria harmless, that didn’t work: her explosion happened in real time despite her jumps into different scenes. So if their intent was to destroy Illyria by any means necessary, even at the price of the destruction of Angel, Los Angeles, and much of the West Coast, why fiddle around with time unless the time-fiddling was what brought matters to a crisis? Although Illyria’s destruction is presented as inevitable unless matters are somehow defused (as they were via Wes’ Mutari generator), until she started “bleeding” energy in a conspicuous fashion that even showed up on W&H’s monitors, no one expected or knew of the danger, including Illyria herself. If all they had to do was wait, why would the Senior Partners intervene in any fashion, much less one so conspicuously beyond human means? I have to conclude that Illyria could have continued on her plan of conquest, which would have meant opposition to the Senior Partners (“destroy everything that is not utterly yours”) for quite some time before the mismatch between her power and her human frame effected her destruction. The Senior Partners wanted it to be sooner rather than later, and the fragmentation of time, and Illyria’s attempts to resist it, were a crucial factor in precipitating her explosion and only accidentally the means which allowed Angel and Wes to find a way of defusing it.

The other possibility is that the Senior Partners played no role except offering advice and were prepared to sit back and watch the outcome, whatever it might be. That the fragmentation of the timeline was a precursor of Illyria’s self-destruction and produced by that immanent destruction without Illyria’s knowledge or consent. Not an attack at all, no matter what Illyria thinks. Some credence is given to that notion by the Senior Partners’ insistence, through Hamilton, that Angel concentrate, not on Illyria, but on the legal arrangement between Amanda and the Fell Brethren. Had he done so, Illyria’s explosion would have rendered that matter moot, since nobody in the building would have survived it. For the Senior Partners to force this issue on Angel at such a time suggests that they were attempting to distract him from a powerful threat they themselves wanted removed, not merely solved. They wanted it all to go bang.

So the causation of the timeline jumps remains suspicious but unproven, with valid arguments possible on both sides of the issue. It’s axiomatic that the Senior Partners are up to no good and can cheerfully chalk up huge losses as the cost of doing their Evil business, but whether meddling with the timeline can be attributed to them is unclear.


Angel along the timeline

Angel, who’s recently shown tendencies to act as Mr. Kill ‘em All, wants the threat Illyria poses ended. Since he has no expectation of being able to control her, he wants her dead, even though at that point she’s taken no direct action against them. (Her “murder” of Fred was a side-effect of her recovering physical form, not its purpose. As Wesley says, “Illyria infected Fred with no more malice than a viral phage.”) Given Illyria’s powers, by the time she moves against them, it would be too late. So Angel wants a pre-emptive strike; and nobody makes any overt objection to this. It’s pragmatism, not morality, running things here: Illyria is guilty, at this point, of nothing except existing. In fact, she’s unilaterally rescued Gunn from the Senior Partners’ holding dimension--something Angel wanted to do but had been unable, so far, to attempt, much less accomplish.

It’s hypothesized that for some unknown reason, Angel is dragged in Illyria’s wake through the time changes. He experiences events he wasn’t initially present at, including Illyria’s rescue of Gunn, as well as those he knew first-hand, like his confrontation with Illyria in the corridor. He doesn’t remember any of them, although Illyria does. He knows only what she tells him happened. Thus, in the final battle in the training room, he knows she killed Spike first, and Angel last. By preventing Spike from being dusted, Angel changes events in terms of how they happened the first time. Illyria is, by then, in final crisis--she’s at the point of exploding and taking all of L.A. with her. However, Wesley offers a different alternative to universal death: he can drain her powers and allow her to live, although diminished. At first, she resists this alternative, stating that she is her power and she’d rather die messily than become less than she conceives herself to be (“Adaptation is compromise.”). And it’s not entirely clear, so far, that she actually consents to being drained--she’s in the process of exploding and doesn’t (or can’t) resist Wes’ aiming the Mutari generator at her and pulling the trigger. But presumably she could have prevented it by killing Wesley and everyone present before they could act, as she did before…and she doesn’t do that. So that’s perhaps acceptance of a sort. Choice rather than victimization.

The point of this scene, however, is a restating of a longtime theme of the series--the tension between predestination and free will. It’s predestined that Illyria will explode: it’s already happened, though we haven’t come that far along the recurring timeline yet for it to have occurred a second time. It’s in what seems a fixed future. Predestined. However, Angel makes the point that, even with that known result before them, there’s still a choice. Illyria can choose life rather than death, change rather than inflexible adherence to her own preconceived notion of herself. She can choose to be, and who to be.

It appears that in this episode, Angel takes his own advice to heart. He begins by being what we’ve seen him to be throughout the season. That man would have moved heaven and earth to prevent an unborn child being raised like a calf, by an order of fanatic demons, for eventual slaughter. He and Gunn would have thought alike about that. But it seems that what Illyria says about the amorality of power and what’s necessary to preserve one’s rule strikes a chord within him, clarifying issues for him that had remained murky until this point. Like Illyria, Angel comes to a decision about who to be, and it’s shown by what he does: he lets the hellish “adoption” go forward, unopposed; he serves the interests of his clients who, in this case, are the Fell Brethren, not the mother or the child.

Lindsey warned him that the cases with which Angel occupied himself, trying to do good, were merely a distraction presented by the Senior Partners to keep Angel busy while the real war continued, out of his sight and even unguessed-at. This present case is clearly just that--a deliberate distraction, quite apart from the merits of surrendering the child to the custody of the Fell Brethren. By episode’s end, Angel has plainly chosen not to be distracted. He’s no longer fighting each individual battle and, in the process, losing the war. But can tolerating evil in the small things lead to anything but evil results where the big issues are concerned? What is a war, if not a series of individual battles? Is Angel’s choice the correct one?

It’s clear that Gunn doesn’t think so. In Angel’s acquiescence, Gunn hasn’t found the compass he was looking for; he’s as bewildered as Lorne was at Angel’s leaving Gunn behind, to be tortured, to secure Lindsey.

It’s possible that Angel thinks there’s time to deal with the child at some later date: after all, it won’t be sacrificed for thirteen years. If they survive the apocalypse, time enough to rescue the child then, assuming it survives its diet of berries, panda meat, and sanctified urine. The Fell Brotherhood obviously have a stake in seeing that the child enjoys a childhood of robust good health. So first things first. It’s possible…but the episode doesn’t say so. Angel gives no justification for his choice that would make it more palatable to us or to his associates.

However, in this, it seems Angel is no longer playing the Senior Partners’ game: he’s refusing the distractions. That was Lindsey’s advice, back in Season One: Don’t play their game. Make them play yours. What is Angel’s game here? For what greater good is he throwing aside the mandate to help the helpless?

To find out who Angel now is, we’ll have to watch what he does. Because you are what you do and the choices you make; and choice is always possible, right up to the end. That’s this episode’s twist on the tension between fate and free will that’s haunted the whole season, with its images of puppets, empty shells, and foregone conclusions. It ain’t over till it’s over. And it ain’t over yet.


Nan Dibble
5/2/04
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

• Illyria ingeniously gets around the proviso that unless the amulet gains a new wearer, the present wearer can’t escape, by putting the amulet on the torturer. He then proceeds to cut out his own heart--a rather tricky piece of surgery, one imagines. However, the impression created earlier was that a new victim had to be introduced to an otherwise unchanging setup, of which the torturer was a part. By Illyria’s logic, the amulet could have been replanted on anybody there--the fraudulent wife or child, for instance--to achieve the same result. Shall we conclude that Gunn just didn’t think of that wrinkle, feeling obliged to stay and be tortured to free Lindsey, or that the rules changed slightly between that episode and this? In any case, it worked, and seems a satisfactory turning of the tables under the circumstances.

• After his rescue, Gunn returns to W&H dressed not in the three piece suit of a lawyer but his former “street grubbies”--sweatshirt and dark workout pants. His head is again shaved clean. He’s chosen who he wants to be and represent himself as: his former self, not the supercharged, brain-boosted lawyer.

• Jaime Bergman, who plays Amanda, is Mrs. David Boreanaz. Her pregnant appearance is padding, not real.

• Unkempt Wesley, hopping hunched around his book-strewn office in his socks (sans shoes=shanshues?) is reminiscent of Fred obsessively writing on the walls of her cave (or her apartment at the Hyperion): trying to make sense of the unbearable by means of words/numbers. Like Lorne in “Life of the Party,” he seems to have given up sleep; like Lorne recently, he seems to be drinking heavily (in “Origin,” Spike can smell liquor on him plainly enough to name what he’s been drinking: “…Scotch. 12-year Lagavulin, if I'm not mistaken. Good choice.”). His contorted, birdlike poses are reminiscent of Illyria. It’s as though all the ambient craziness of the situation is concentrated and being demonstrated through Wes. Overall, with his sleeplessness, drinking, grief, fascination with alien Illyria, and focus on retrieving Fred from Illyria, Wes is in an altered state of consciousness and seems to be hanging onto sanity by his fingernails.

• Lorne is the worst undercover op ever, with his green skin, grape-colored suit, loud shirt, sunglasses and fedora. Illyria detects his shadowing her at once (“When did you catch on to me--in the elevator?”) and Angel completely ignores the reports and warnings Lorne tries to give him. Lorne, in other words, serves no useful purpose whatever in the building confrontation with Illyria…and he knows it. His frustration must nearly equal Wesley’s.

• During the meeting of Team Angel, Spike wanders around the room, throwing out pertinent remarks--clarifying precisely what Angel’s intentions are toward Illyria: retire her (“pasture”) or kill her (“slaughterhouse”)? When Hamilton enters, however, Spike falls silent and drifts into support position at Angel’s right hand, arms defensively folded (whereas before, his thumbs were set into his waistband/belt, arms akimbo). Although as he comments flippantly of the Thousand Year War of Good versus Evil, “Oh, by the way, we’re apparently on the wrong side. Or the right side, if you like winning,” his actions and positioning of himself show that despite everything, he considers himself to be on Angel’s side in the most literal way.

• When Illyria has a “flash-forward” to Wes leveling a weapon at her at Angel’s command and believes Wes will try to kill her “again,” she shoves the desk into him and jams him against the windows. She could just as easily have shoved him AND the desk out the window altogether; since Wes is not a vampire, such a fall would certainly kill him. Yet she doesn’t. Although she later kills Wes, it appears that Illyria restrains her strength when he’s concerned until/unless she perceives she’s being overtly attacked. Interesting. Or perhaps she’s distinguishing between the now, when the attack is only a future possibility, and the later now, when the attack is underway. Contrast this with Angel’s attitude of wanting to have Illyria killed because, in the future, she might represent a dangerous threat, even though her recent actions have been supportive of the Fang Gang’s purposes (rescuing Gunn, for example). Angel wants a preemptive strike; Illyria waits until an actual attack to defend herself with deadly force.

• When Angel smacks Lorne, knocking his fedora off, that’s the first time in recent memory that Angel has struck one of his own team for doing what he’s told them to. Frustration much?

• Spike knows how to use a computer! Or at least look at the display and understand what he’s seeing. Vampires--at least Spike--adapt! We’re back to the cavemen/astronauts dispute from “A Hole in the World.” By Illyria’s standards, all creatures alive today are cavemen, and she’s the astronaut--an ancient god present before humanity arose, arguably influencing their development: like the theories of Ancient Astronauts put forward by such books as Chariots of the Gods by Erich Von Daniken. However, in her inflexibility and determination to be who and what she was, unchanged despite the change of “vessel,” it’s Illyria who’s the cavedweller (like Fred?) and the adaptable present-day humans and vampires who are the advanced ones--the astronauts. She cannot adapt to them; they can adapt to her, even with difficulty, as shown by Spike’s ever more successful sessions of sparring with her and Wesley’s ability to understand her viewpoint whereas she finds his mystifying and incomprehensible.

• The name of the “Mutari generator,” Wesley’s weapon, hearkens back to the Latin mutare: to change (the root of mutant, mutate, mutability, etc.); it also echoes the distorted area of space hypothesized in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, in which the Enterprise hides from Khan’s pursuit in the Mutari Nebula in their duel with a genetically superior life form bent on their destruction.

• Angel rescues Spike! A loud cry of “Squee!” was heard across the land. There were good, pragmatic reasons for his doing it like that, not just assumed affection of any sort, but all the same: squee!

• Illyria’s self-destruction resembles Spike’s in the Hellmouth. Gaps open in her flesh and light spews forth. That’s how it was with Spike--different cause, similar effect. The power involved is too great for mortal (or even immortal) flesh to endure.

Memorable lines:

Epithets for Illyria: Little Shiva, Our Lady of the Blue Bummer, Babe the Blue Ox, Blue Bird.

Gunn: Listen--please! What did I do? No…. No! Wait! (Illyria enters, rips off amulet) Gunn. Charles Gunn. You’re…Fred. You look terrible! (Illyria drags him to his feet) Illyria.

Wesley: I doubt this poses a risk to her: she has the power of a god.
Angel: She has the ego of a god!
Wesley: She was the ruler of the world, after all. That sort of thing goes to one’s head.

Wesley: First day back?
Gunn: Yeah.
Wesley: I stabbed you. I should apologize for that but I’m honestly not sure how. I think it’ll just be awkward.
Gunn: Good call.
Wesley: OK.

Wesley: So, ah, what are you looking for?
Gunn (sighs): I don’t know--a compass, maybe? The thing that killed my friend just saved my life. No one knows why. This place just went Poseidon on my ass: I don’t know which way is up. (Reference is to The Poseidon Adventure, in which an ocean liner turns upside down and its passengers have to escape it before it sinks.)

Wesley (of Illyria): She’s monumentally self-possessed. (checking his watch, listening to it.) She still thinks she’s the god-king of the universe.
Gunn: So she’s like a TV star.
Wesley: No, nothing that bad. Bit more violent, though.

Illyria: You are adapting.
Spike (smirking): We do that.
Illyria: Adaptation is compromise.
Spike: It’s called learning. But then, I guess you know everything there is to know.
Illyria: When the world met me, it shuddered. Groaned. It knelt at my feet.
Spike: Dear Penthouse: I don’t normally write letters like this-- (Illyria slugs him.)

Spike (to Illyria): That’s right, Little Shiva. Reckon you’ll think twice, next time. (Reference is twofold: to Come Back Little Sheba, a stage play and later a movie, and to Shiva--in Hindu myth and religion, the god-king of the universe, Creator and Destroyer, whose female counterpart, Kali, is multi-armed--the Mother/Reaper of all creation--as Illyria was in her original form [per the picture and statue shown in “Shells”]. Both Shiva and Kali are typically represented as dancing. And we know what Spike equates with dancing, don’t we? Both fighting and sex. [“You know you want to dance,” BtVS “Fool for Love.”] That sort of dance, destruction and generation, battle and sex, conjoined, is very appropriate to these deities. Ever-adaptable Spike is learning how to dance with Illyria; she’s learning how to dust/kill him.

Lorne (of Wesley): He’s still reeling since Our Lady of the Blue Bummer arrived. (Punning reference to “bummer,” hippie slang for badness, and to “bum,” the posterior, given that Illyria’s flesh is blue.)
Gunn: Yeah, I was just in his office, and he’s--
Lorne: Oh, God, don’t go in there! It’s where he keeps his full-strength crazy.
Gunn: Yeah, I caught a whiff of that.
Lorne: It's like he's two different people. One is almost catatonic. He's the guy you see doing the inpatient shuffle around the hallways and the other is just cooped up in there all day, jittering like a bug on a hot plate obsessing over every single tidbit he can find on Illyria.

Hamilton: It’s business, boys--not a bat cave. (Reference is to Batman, who has a bat cave, along with his bat-everything else.)

Lorne (as Hamilton exits): Well, I’ll tell you what: I still like him better than Eve.

Harmony (to Fell Brethren): Believe me, Angel will take care of everything. Because that’s what he does!
……
Harmony (re Amanda): Don’t you worry: he will snap her like a pregnant twig.
……
Fell Brethren: We’ll try an organic cola.

Gunn: I’m not feeling so good.
Angel: First day back from the vacation in hell, you know, I’m not surprised.
Gunn: You know what the worst thing about that place was? It wasn’t the basement: at least there, you knew where you stood. Demon was gonna cut your heart out and show it to you. No. It was the fake life they gave you upstairs. Wife, kids…all the icing on the family cake. But somewhere underneath it, there was the nagging certainty that it was all lies. That all the smiles and the birthday candles and the homework were just there to hide the horror. Is that all we're doing here? Just hiding the horror?

Hamilton: Curing cancer, Mr. Windham-Pryce?
Wesley: Wouldn’t be cost effective. I’m sure we make a lot from cancer.
Hamilton: Yes--the patent-holder is a client.

Illyria (to Angel): Do you know what you were when I was young? You were the muck at our feet. We called you “the ooze that eats itself.” You were pretty at night: you sparkled…and you stank. You still stink of it!

Angel (trying to figure out what’s happening): We attacked you.
Illyria: I didn’t give you the chance. That, you learn when you become a king. You learn to destroy everything that's not utterly yours. All that matters is victory. That's how your reign persists. You're a slave to an insane construct. You are moral. A true ruler is as moral as a hurricane: empty but for the force of his gale. But you, trapped in the web of the wolf, the ram, the hart: so much power here, and you quibble at its price. If you want to win a war, you must serve no master but your ambition. You have not lied. My undoing is beyond you, your people. Something is broken inside me. My power is too great. I know this now, as I know it every time I come to this moment.

Ilyria: Change is constant; yet things remain the same.

Illyria: You ask me to allow you to murder me.
Spike: It’s not murder if you say Yes.

Illyria: You want to take my power…to let me live. But I am my power! And I would rather be a titanic crater than to be like unto you!
……
Angel: Illyria, the future can change here. You can choose a different path.
Illyria: And be nothing.
Angel: And be what you are. Fighting to hold on to what you were…it’s destroying you.

Angel: Gunn. The baby belongs to the Fell.
Gunn: She hasn’t signed anything. There’s nothing on paper.
Angel (to the Fell Brethren): Gentlemen. (The Fell follow Angel toward the Conference Room.)
Gunn: Angel--what are you doing?
Angel: What we’re supposed to: serve our clients.

______________________________________________

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