Angel

5.6 The Cautionary Tale of Numero Cinco: A Meditation upon Heroes Written/directed: Jeffrey Bell

Well, so much for the network-dictated “Monster of the Week” format. Magician Joss Whedon has managed to have his cake and eat it, too. This is a perfectly respectable stand-alone episode but also one that slots into and advances the developing arc centered around Angel: his increasing disconnection from the Fang Gang and disillusionment about his role as their effective moral center—the Champion of the Powers that Be.

This brisk, multi-layered episode is about heroes and hearts. Old masked mail guy, appearing in three of the previous five episodes, is revealed as the former Numero Cinco of the greatest ever team of luchadores (Mexican wrestlers), Los Hermanos Numeros—the Number Brothers. Not only unbeaten and idolized in the wrestling ring, they were Warriors of the People who battled whatever gangsters or demons sought to prey on Los Angeles’ Mexican/American community, including the Devil’s Robot and the current menace, the Aztec demon Tezcatcatl, which visits East L.A. at 50 year intervals, harvesting the hearts of heroes to sustain himself in searching for the talisman he once created that empowers its bearer with the power of the Aztec sun god. Four of the brothers, custodians of the talisman, died in defeating Tezcatcatl when he last appeared. Only Cinco, Five, remains: embittered, cynical, and willing to toss Angel through a window-wall rather than be drawn into that battle again.

Despite Gunn’s vivid pride in what, by Angel’s signature (in blood), Angel and Gunn have accomplished for their day’s pay, Angel can take no satisfaction in it. Gunn loves his work even though it’s not as conspicuously heroic “as rescuing young honeys from tumescent trolls” (or lissome young werewolves from supper clubs, for instance, a la 5.3)—one-on-one interactions that allow Angel to see an undoubted evil or attacking monster he can defeat in a direct, hands-on fashion. Like Spike, Angel has a more active concept of what it means to be heroic; also like Spike, he’s frustrated and discouraged that his role at W&H presents few opportunities for such decisive action and sees no likelihood of any personal reward for doing the right thing. He’s in much the same boat as now-aged Cinco, who wears his luchador numbered mask to remind himself that “only a fool would want to be a champion.” Metaphorically, their hearts are no longer in enacting that role.

Cinco has given up the fight because the memory of his brothers’ lives and deeds is now enacted only as a mockery: five midget luchadores wearing masks similar to those of the heroic Hermanos Numeros are pitted against a single normal-sized adversary for the amusement of the crowd. In other words, their image has been inherited by lesser men and held up to ridicule. That was their reward. Since Tezcatcatl is now back and killing again, Cinco wonders, “Why did we bother? What difference did we make?” Although Angel responds in true altruistic hero fashion—“You made a difference in the lives you saved and you did it because it was the right thing to do. Nobody asks us to go out and fight, put our lives on the line. We do it because we can. Because we know how. We do it whether people remember us or not. In spite of the fact that there’s no shiny reward at the end of the day, other than the work itself.”—that philosophy is one that’s left him feeling that his own good actions mean nothing and his evil ones will damn him to an unforgiving hell in the end, as he revealed to Spike in Hellbound.

Cinco has “retired” from (read: given up) the hero role altogether in favor of being a functionary at Wolfram & Hart; and it’s clear that Angel is well along on the path of doing the same. Cinco is Angel’s mirror, playing Marley to Angel’s Scrooge—showing what his current course will lead to unless Angel has a change of heart. However, unlike the two Dickens characters, one alive, one dead, Cinco can still change his own path and in so doing, offer the prospect of hope to Angel as well.

As Gunn realizes that Tezcatcatl is harvesting the hearts of heroes, the demon attacks Angel…and rejects him. At first, that leads Angel to conclude that Gunn and Wesley’s theory is wrong. After all, he’s a hero and his heart wasn’t devoured. Wes and Gunn point out that it’s the meat, not the metaphor, being used by the demon for sustenance, and in Gunn’s phrase, “As meat goes, your heart’s a hunk of gnarly-ass beef jerky.” Angel protests that if his heart were to be staked, he’d still die, so the heart has to matter somehow. This conversation makes it clear that Angel still considers himself a hero even though he has little enthusiasm for the role anymore, and he’s unwilling to believe that his disaffection is enough to disqualify him for the name. Wesley shrewdly spells it out: the problem isn’t the work—it’s that “your heart’s not in the work. You blame your melancholy on your new position but I don’t think it’s about the type of work, I think it’s because you’ve lost hope that the work has meaning.”

Taking a different perspective from Fred’s discussion of heroism with Spike, in which she finds more significance in his Hellmouth closing than he does because in doing it, he saved her life, Wesley points out to Angel that regardless of the benefits to those helped, heroic deeds become meaningless to their doer if there is no appropriate reward. Then Wesley confronts Angel with what Spike has disclosed to him: that Angel no longer believes in the Shanshu prophecy—the prediction that some souled vampire will play a crucial part in an apocalypse and be rewarded by becoming human (italics mine because both Angel and Spike now qualify, except that Spike is a ghost…as Wesley rather densely and heartlessly points out to him when he seeks to know more). Angel retorts that they both know prophecies are nonsense—to wit, the prophecy that “The father will kill the son”: a prophecy that governed almost all the actions of the past two seasons…and which, of the two of them, only Angel now remembers because of his “un-Dawning” of son Connor: removing all knowledge and memories concerning Connor from everyone including Connor himself. And the effects of that prophecy still continue into the present because it was as payment to Wolfram & Hart for performing this magical reinvention of Connor and the mass memory-wipe that Angel accepted appointment as its CEO. Essentially, he has potentially sold (but not yet lost) his soul for it. Angel knows that; Wesley no longer does. But though that prophecy was revealed as a fabrication, it was enacted: Angel did kill Connor, though he saw to it that Connor received a new and better life in a different home, with different parents. In other words, despite being debunked by its author, the prophecy did come to pass, although it seems Angel doesn’t fully appreciate that yet. However it’s clear that the bitter taste of the prophecy and its aftermath is in large part what’s fueling Angel’s current negativity and despair.

Angel says that as long as he’s still doing the work, his own viewpoint about it doesn’t matter. Wesley contends that’s dead wrong because it denies hope, and “Hope is the only thing that will sustain you or keep you from ending up like Number Five.” The metaphor is not enough: Angel needs the meat. Contrary to a derisive old Depression-era song, promises of “Pie in the sky, by and by, when you die” must be real, must be believed in, or the tragedies of present life become overwhelming and achievements lose all meaning.

Fred, in her lab analysis of Tezcatcatl’s blood from Gunn’s axe, has discovered that it’s not the hearts, specifically, but the blood in those hearts that provides the Aztec demon with sustenance and acts “like a kind of supercharged rocket fuel and makes it [nearly] invulnerable.” So this demon, like a vampire, is sustained by blood; and the more powerful blood of heroes’ hearts, in particular, has an appropriately more powerful effect. Therefore the question arises of how to kill such a creature. Perhaps not surprisingly, it’s Spike who has the answer: in this case, go with the metaphor, with the poetry, not with the science. If it’s heroes hearts’ blood that powers it, then its own heart is the vulnerable point. Gunn reveals that Tezcatcatl was originally executed for creating an amulet that grants the powers of the Aztec sun god and, per W&H contract records, had himself cursed to return every 50 years to slaughter heroes and devour their bloody hearts…but also to search for and retrieve the talisman that would grant him world-ending power. That talisman has been protected by successive heroes ever since. From the scant details available about this talisman, Angel recognizes it as one of the objects on Cinco’s Day of the Dead shrine to his four fallen brothers and goes at once to retrieve it. However, when he reaches Cinco’s drab little apartment, the shrine and its votive objects are gone, and so is Cinco.

Cinco is at his brothers’ gravesite. By heating the amulet with a candle flame, he summons Tezcatcatl to battle, apparently intending suicide by monster since he, now alone and aged, has no hope of defeating it. Arriving, Angel believes Cinco’s hope of joining his brothers in death is futile because Tezcatcatl won’t kill either of them—each of them lacks what the demon wants, a hero’s heart. Cinco counters that he’s made himself worthy of such a death by swallowing the amulet: Tezcatcatl will have to cut him open to get it. Angel is a bit contemptuous of Cinco’s suicidal despair. It seems Angel’s only interest is keeping the amulet away from Tezcatcatl. But when battle is joined, he can’t resist getting involved. The strength of the Aztec demon is again too much for him. But Angel’s jeopardy again draws Cinco into the battle, fighting fiercely now…to protect Angel, not merely die himself. Mortally wounded, he places a hand coated with (presumably, his heart’s) blood on his brothers’ tombstone. That is apparently the trigger that summons his four dead brothers out of their one grave (they do absolutely everything together!). Paying no attention to dying Cinco, they summon/invite Angel with a shout of “¡Andale!” (Come on!) to participate in their tumbling, acrobatic luchador attack and pin the demon so Angel can stab it through the chest with an iron fence paling. Tezcatcatl disintegrates and is presumably permanently killed, since Angel staked its heart rather than destroying its body by any other means.

The important thing here is that in a magically reanimated group of dead heroes, Angel is accepted and welcomed among them. Despite the fact that Tezcatcatl is uninterested in either Angel’s heart or Cinco’s, Los Luchadores validate his hero status, just as they validate that of Cinco, whose body they bear away as they vanish.

Dying, Cinco revealed that the amulet was actually concealed in his thermos of coffee (“I may not be a hero but I am not a fool!”). Having retrieved it, Angel gives Wesley custody of the talisman. And later, having dismissed everyone else, Angel goes alone to Wesley’s office, directs the Prophecy subject area book to become an English translation of the Shanshu prophecy, and sits down quietly to study it.

The triumph is muted here. Angel is willing only to say that Cinco “died a hero” and they “got the job done, and that’s what matters.” However, what seems this season’s central problem has been brought fully into the open, and Angel is willing to at least consider attitudes other than despair. And by again returning the focus to the Shanshu prophecy, the series is picking up and bringing into prominence a major plot thread introduced at the end of Season One, continuing the longest arc of all—that of the possibility of hope even for a souled vampire with a very long lifetime of murders on his conscience. And the question, implicitly, now becomes: which souled vampire? I have the feeling that there will be further developments concerning this long-developing plot quite soon.

Nan Dibble 11/06/03 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

Gunn still refers to their time at Wolfram & Hart as a month. We now have two amulets: the one that manifested Spike and channeled light through his soul to destroy the Hellmouth; and a new one, in Wesley’s custody, that invests its bearer with the power of the Aztec sun god. Rather odd talismans to be associated with vampires, to whom sunlight is fatal…. Wesley has several “master texts,” each of which operates like a computer: “calling up” and displaying whatever reference, within a given discipline (like historical narratives), is specified by the one who holds it. We’ve seen this before, but it’s shown and explained more clearly in this episode in several scenes. The business card given Cinco when he’s recruited by Wolfram & Hart is that of Holland Manners, familiar to those who watched the previous seasons of Angel as W&H’s former CEO. Manners is identified as a “Legal Associate” and the card’s address correctly carries no zip code, given that Cinco was recruited nearly 50 years ago. However, the card incorrectly specifies the firm as “Attorney’s” at law. Obviously in those days the firm also practiced evil punctuation. In Spike’s intuitive and apparently accurate “go with the poetry” impulse in this episode, he’s applying a dictum Angelus formulated (and he rejected) long ago: Angelus maintained that it was the artistry, the “poetry” in killing that mattered, whereas at that time, all that young, brash vampire (and violently ex-bloody awful poet) William/Spike was interested in was “fists and fangs, back against the wall” fights. The “pre-show” of torture barely interested him at all whereas to Angelus, it was an art form in its own right. It would seem that Spike is willing to give poetry its due again, even if he no longer attempts to write it himself. His faith has been renewed and validated. For those wondering how Angel can enter Cinco’s apartment, searching for the amulet, without being invited in (since he’s a vampire), this explanation: on his initial visit, Cinco grabbed him by the labels and hauled him inside. Apparently that constitutes an invitation. Angel can thereafter enter at will. When Los Hermanos Numeros rise, they fortunately aren’t ghosts like Spike. They can grab material objects and take physical action, whereas attempting, earlier, to whack the Aztec demon with a length of 2x4, Spike can’t get a grip and spins away, disgusted at himself, exclaiming, “Useless.” His frustration, sense of uselessness, and doubt of his rightful hero status is in implicit counterpoint to Angel’s. Memorable lines:

Lorne (to Fred): You’re sort of like a woman.

Gunn (to Angel): I know legal weasels and business deals and business deals aren’t as heroic to you as rescuing young honeys from tumescent trolls, but I love what we do.

Gunn (to Angel): In-house attacks are down 30% this week and we’ve done more good here in a month than Angel Investigations did in a year.

Angel: I really hate this place!

Lorne: Word on the web has you sucker punching Grampa Moses. Don’t sweat it, sweetiepie, I have my flack-catchers spinning this into PR gold. Once the word spreads that you beat up an innocent old man, the truly terrible will think twice before going toe-to-toe with our avenging Angel.

Spike (on why he’s along for the ride with Angel, Gunn, and Wesley): Not much choice, really, is there? Can’t drink, smoke, diddle my willie—doesn’t leave much to do besides watch you blokes stumble around playing Agatha Christie.

Spike (of Angel): Always was a bit of a drama queen.

Spike: See? Drama queen!

Spike (of Angel): General Grumpy Pants

Spike (of Angel): Tall, dark, and dreary.

Fred (to Spike): You saved the world, sacrificed yourself, closed a Hellmouth— Spike: Didn’t do much, really. I just stood there, let the fire come. Nothing real heroic about that.

Wesley (describing Tezcatcatl): Think predatory bird meets demonic gladiator.

Spike (to Wesley): So you could look up that “sans shoes” thingamabob. You know, the prophecy: that says Angel gets to be a real boy again. (c.f. Spike, waking from nightmare, in BtVS “Chosen”: I’m drowning in footwear!)

Gunn (to Angel): As meat goes, your heart’s a hunk of gnarly-ass beef jerky.

Cinco: You are one strange man, Señor Angel. Angel: I’m not the one in a mask standing in a cemetery in the middle of the night. Cinco: No, but you will be.

Cinco: Mis hermanos: they came back! Angel: Because you were worthy. You proved it. Cinco: Maybe. But still, the demon did not want my heart. Angel: He didn’t want mine either. Cinco: Of course not, amigo: who would want that dried up walnut of a dead thing?